Comment on nuclear

• renzev@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Back in middle school, our science teacher decided to make the class do a debate about different types of energy sources in order to learn about their advantages and disadvantages. I was on the pro-nuclear team, and we were wracking our brains trying to come up with a rebuttal to “but what about the waste?” until some madlad basically came up with this great argument:

  We can just dump all of the nuclear waste on Belgium. It will take a really long time before it fills up, and nobody cares about Belgium anyway

  The anti-nuclear team had no good response, and we actually got a point for that argument because we looked up the relevant statistics (nuclear waste output, belgium surface area, etc.) and calculated exactly how long it would take to turn belgium into a radioactive wasteland.

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  • Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    There’s a really simple answer to the waste problem though. And it’s super, blatantly obvious.

    All nuclear material is basically ground up rocks that we dug out of a hole and then filtered the spicy bits out of. So grind it back up, pour it into concrete and stuff it back down the same hole it came from. Of course, you can’t legally do that, but that’s only because we have a ton of rules what constitutes safe disposal, etc. Recreating the original conditions basically meant you’re (re)creating something unsafe, but we do that in a LOT of places.

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    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      fair argument

      I want to add something to it:

      First of all, a lot of that uranium seems to have been there and slowly decaying for a long time. I think, what we humans did was to “wake it up” and turn it into some more violently-reacting other elements, for the sake that we get the energy out of it at an acceptable pace. Not, though, it’s severely more toxic than it was before.

      Also, I’ve an idea about what to do with the waste: Since the waste tends to activate itself due to neutron activation, put a lot of it (but just barely not enough to make a bomb) together and it will activate itself to react violently at very high speeds, but just barely not fast enough to explode (make a bomb). That way, you can get a lot of heat out of it rather quickly, and are left with burned-out material (which contains less radioactive potential).

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      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        First of all, a lot of that uranium seems to have been there and slowly decaying for a long time. I think, what we humans did was to “wake it up” and turn it into some more violently-reacting other elements, for the sake that we get the energy out of it at an acceptable pace. Now, though, it’s severely more dangerous than it was before.

        it’s weird, but it’s not “more violent” it’s just more energetic. Either through enrichment, making it more potent, which is an industry standard across the entire western world. Or through making fertile material, like uranium 238, fissile by going through the decay chain until it becomes something more spicy, like pu 239 or whatever.

        The big problem is that the energy it releases is definitionally incompatible to human life. That’s the ONLY problem.

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