Re: Tilting At Windmills

From: Eunometic (eunometic_at_yahoo.com.au)
Date: 12/02/04 

Date: 1 Dec 2004 16:15:49 -0800

fumblus <fumblus@nospamYahoo.com> wrote in message news:<41aab47e$0$31703$61c65585@un-2park-reader-01.sydney.pipenetworks.com.au>...
> Dez Akin wrote:
> > eunometic@yahoo.com.au (Eunometic) wrote in message news:<e935396a.0411232103.36559df7@posting.google.com>...
> >
> >>Yucca Mountains would not be required but for the absence of
> >>reprocessing and/or transmulation burn up of wastes in only slightly
> >>more advanced reactors. Both developments have been curtailed by
> >>political issues rather than serious economic or technical ones.
> >
> >
> > Quite right, but even without advanced reactors (molten salt) Yucca is
> > not required. All this waste can be stored on site for decades in
> > large concrete casks. Human civilization isn't going anywhere. Its not
> > as if the waste management problem has to be dealt with as if humanity
> > is leaving the earth sometime in the next twenty years and intends to
> > preserve it as a park.
>
> Imagine if ancient Egypt had generated a large amount of toxic and
> mutagenic waste product that had to be stored securely for a hundred
> millennia. What if ancient Rome did?

If handled properly waste recycling and transmutation 'burn up' of
wastes will lead to less total radioactivity than the original uranium
ore within 300 years.
Of course it is possible to focus on the tiny amount of residual
plutonium or actinides and quite correctly claim that a few of these
deadly atoms remain.

Even if not recycled the situation is not that serious either.

Imagine being the ancestor of
> people from a civilisation who left you a legacy of waste that is
> absolutely no use to you, and that you simply *must* continue to
> maintain, expensively, for a time frame that might as well be forever.
>
> Imagine trying to justify to people 100, 1000, 10000 years from now why
> *they* must continue to expend real resources to pay for *your*
> squanderous energy consumption.

They won't be having to pay.

>
> It's the pinnacle of arrogance to offload your short-term problem
> solving into the distant future. What's more, "human civilization" will
> be nothing like it is now in just 1000 years. How do you convey the
> message "don't touch this crap, and if you know what's good for you make
> sure noone else does either" to people who won't even speak your language?
>
> Mark

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