Very well said.
Slight correction (sorry, I am just a pedant at heart):
While hospitals do produce more by weight and by activity, they generally use short lived isotopes, mostly Tc99, I131/125, Fl18, and a few others. Generally these can be dealt with by storing for a few months or years and then incineration to remove the biological hazard.
With uranium fission, however, the waste products contain an array of isotopes which eventually decay down to a handful of meta-stable isotopes with very long half-lives (hundreds or even thousands of years) and it is these products that cause the biggest issue. The current process for dealing with spent U-235/238 fuel rods is to store them under water while the shortest lived isotopes decay down then grind up the remaining nastiness and seal it in vitrium resin (a very hard material that doesn’t wear down) and seal this in steal drums.
The difficulty is where to put them for long term storage. We need to find a place where they cannot be accidentally opened over the next ten thousand years or so, and that is a tricky problem.
There is a new class of reactor based on Thorium fission which should avoid this problem as the fission products from Th232 decay down to much shorter lived isotopes which wont require that sort of long term storage solution. Th232 is also abundant and treated as a waste product in current mining techniques. This is likely to be a big part of energy production over the next century once the energy sector finally gets of its arse and starts certifying Th232 reactors.
Just my opinion.
Well, hardly a correction- I stated the exact same thing. I didn’t say a thing about the strength or half-life of the waste.
More of a specification.
Fair point
By the time nuclear waste becomes a serious threat to humanity, the threats from everything else will have already wiped us out.
Finally a good argument as to why we can say nuclear energy is 100% safe, while keeping a straight face.
It will be safe for long enough*.
(* a couple decades)
In other news, we haven’t had Don Hertzfeldt for a while. So here’s Don Hertzfeldt.
Sweet mother of Dog what did I just watch?! That was excellent.
Well someone was high on something. That’s a pretty bad trip there
As a Presiding Officer in the forthcoming election i will not comment, but my lips are turned up in a smile. @tempusmurphy
From Chris Bolton’s twitter feed:
US Naval tradition dictates that when a pilot mistakenly lands on the wrong aircraft carrier… fellow crew members do their absolute best to remain discreet so as not to embarrass the pilot. Or not!
F*** I spat my drink at that.
Bloody genius