[oclug] The Sinnister MS Connection Was : Rogers domain oddness.

[Greg Franks]

>>>>> "Jon" == Jon Earle <je_linux at kronos.honk.org> writes:
    Jon> The trouble with nuke waste is the longevity of it.  Sure, we
    Jon> can store a little of it on the reactor site for now, but
    Jon> what about when the reactor is closed for good, and there are
    Jon> _tons_ of the waste onsite that have accumulated over the
    Jon> years?  How are we going to contain that for the next few
    Jon> millenia, not to mention, _warn_ our long distant future
    Jon> children not to go play in the funny glowing hills?  Will
    Jon> they even speak English, or will they have to attempt
    Jon> decipher our language much like we attempt to decipher
    Jon> ancient Egyptian today?  Will they think instead that the
    Jon> waste disposal sarcophagi are merely tombs we used to bury
    Jon> our leaders and try to excavate them?

Yes _tons_.  A mere drop in the bucket in terms of waste disposal.  To
put it into perspective, the spent feul for a Candu station such as
pickering fits in an pool of water roughly the size of an olympic size
pool.  I dare say that we in Ottawa produce more waste than that in
one day.

As for the longevity -- As I said earlier -- recycle.  Reactor fuel
becomes "spent" when the neutron absorption exceeds neutron production
as a result of the fission process.  The stuff with the long half-life
(for example plutonium) can be used all over again.  So, remove the
neutron absorbers and run the fuel through the reactor again.  This
technique has been proposed for ridding the world of all of the Pu in
the nuclear warheads of the US and Russia.  Alas, this technique is
called "reprocessing" and has its own set of headaches.

By the way, the Pu and U in the spent fuel aren't the real headaches.
They have long half-lives, so they aren't terribly radioactive, though
people tend to get hot and bothered about these two metals in
particular.  It's the stuff with shorter half-lives which is the
problem -- that's what makes you glow in the dark.  Fortunately, they
tend to burn out in a few tens of thousands of years at most.
-- 
   __@               Greg Franks              <|       _~@ __O 
 _`\<,_         Ottawa, Ontario, Canada        |O\   -^\<;^\<, 
(*)/ (*)                                       (*)--(*)%---/(*)
          "Where do you want to go today?"   Outside.