Posted on 02/20/2010 11:09:33 PM PST by ErnstStavroBlofeld
I actually had this thought years ago but I never thought it was viable. One big explosion and a 25,000 year half life would spread it all over the world. So then I thought, how about an undersea volcanoe. But about that time I saw a couple of movies, like those things that got all radioactive and moved inland down in California, and Gorgo, and It Came From Beneath the Sea, and Them, and the one with the giant crab.
So I dismissed the idea, and ate a few bags of Cheetos instead.
parsy, who remembers that for some strange reason
“Them” and “It Came From Beneath the Sea” are classics.
“...we have many abandoned mines which are empty and pose no threat to any water table. throw the waste down there and fill it up with concrete and dirt.”
Sure that would work. But the problem exists that this radwaste has a half-life of hundreds of thousands of years. There has never been a civilization that lasted that long and the whereabouts of dangerous waste is likely to be forgotten.
It makes more sense to place the radwaste somewhere man is not going to have access in the next half-million years. Do you savvy?
You know what threw me off was the visualization of the nuke material being carried down with the subducting plate. For some reason, I assumed that is how you meant the material would be safely buried. Of course that would also take a very very long time. So what you are saying then is that it’s simply very deep water at subduction trenches, and that the material would stay at those depths?
You are correct. The star blows up when it tries to fuse iron.
Sorry, never mind. I read what you wrote above and understand (’concrete casks and steel’, until it takes the trip downward millions of years later)
Ugh! Make that: “concrete and steel casks”!
I told you I badly needed sleep! (3:25AM now!!)
:)
I had a conversation years ago with a nuclear engineer, a coworker at the facility which we both worked. I told him about my idea and he said that the casks (developed by Bechtel Engineering way back in the 1970s) would safely store the waste as it was first buried by tons of sediment, then all of it would eventually be crushed molecule thin as it slid under the tectonic plate.
Keep in mind that the Aleutian Trench is thousands of feet deep and the casks would be under megatons of seawater.
This recycling happens slowly over a very long period time. The main idea is to keep it far from human contact.
I’m sure that some at this post will be saddened to know it is highly unlikely that radioactive worms or monsters will be issuing from the trench. Sorry!
Somehow, I suspect movies like that played a large part in the suppression of nuclear power plants in this country.
parsy, who says it’s all Bela Lugosi’s fault
But wasn’t that how Gozilla was created? Japan is also a volcanic arc system. (serious question here)
I agree.
That’s Godzilla, with a ‘d’, and only to his friends. Everyone else gets eaten. (Serious answer here)
Japan has nice deep trenches around about their archipelago of islands, so they have the same opportunity to recycle their radioactive waste. Everyone will have to wait to see what rears up out of those deep-sea trenches. How exciting!
How about launch it at the sun where it would certainly burn up.
Tons of sediment from undersea landslides?
Good guess, but I don’t really know. Never lived there.
He probably meant it would be transported down there by hoist or 'dumped' from a ship.
Or better yet, have Godzilla or his cousin Gozilla stomp around down there and artificially trigger a landslide.
I call BS on that one. A dental or medical X-ray doesn’t make things radioactive. It can harm living tissue, particularly DNA, but doesn’t make it radioactive.
Perhaps the report was garbled by someone who didn’t know physics (like, a reporter, maybe?). The steel for the swing set could instead have come from a radiotherapy device that used radioisotopes. Such devices have gotten out into the wild; there was a story years ago of an abandoned medical clinic in South America where the locals broke apart a radioactive source, and several died from playing with the material.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.