lol nuclear is really uneconommical, way too expensive and therefore really inefficient. You need 10-20 years to build a plant for energy 3 times more expensive than wind. For plants that still require mining. That produce waste we cannot store and still cannot reuse (except for one small test plant). For plants that no insurance company want to insure and energy companies dont like to build without huge government subsidies.
I know lemmy and reddit have a hard on for nuclear energy because people who dont know anything about it think its cool. But this post is ridiculous even for lemmy standards.
Hi, I work in waste handling, and I would like to tell you about dangerous materials and what we do with them.
There are whole hosts of chemicals that are extremely dangerous, but let’s stick with just cyanide, which comes from coal coking, steel making, gold mining and a dozen chemical synthesis processes.
Just like nuclear waste, there is no solution for this. We can’t make it go away, and unlike nuclear waste, it doesn’t get less dangerous with time. So, why isn’t anyone constantly bringing up cyanide waste when talking about gold or steel or Radiopharmaceuticals? Well, that’s because we already have a solution, just not “forever”.
Cyanide waste, and massive amounts of other hazardous materials, are simply stored in monitored facilities. Imagine a landfill wrapped in plastic and drainage, or a building or cellar with similar measures and someone just watches it. Forever. You can even do stuff like build a golfcourse on it, or malls, or whatever.
There are tens of thousands of these facilities worldwide, and nobody gives a solitary fuck about them. It’s a system that works fine, but the second someone suggests we do the same with nuclear waste, which is actually less dangerous than a great many types of chemical waste, people freak out about it not lasting forever.
That’s uhh, not what that says. One of the two mentions of half life are your body converting cyanide into thiocyanate, which will kill you and depending on your last bowel movement, make your corpse into hazardous waste itself.
The other mention is hydrogen cyanide in air, which is lighter than air and will decompose back into cyanide eventually, scattering it over a large area. Which will technically make it go away from your site, but spreading toxic waste over the countryside is illegal for a reason.
Oh yeah, you could totally just leave it in a giant pool and ignore it. It’ll react, evaporate and eventually break down into cyanide again, rain down, subtly poison the area, react again, evaporate again, etc.
And that’s great for the owner of the big pool of cyanide, and very bad for everyone else. Stuff that evaporates doesn’t disappear, the cyanide doesn’t magically change into cookiedough. You’re just spreading it around more.
Hydrogen cyanide will turn into “cookie dough” in 1-5 years. Which is way shorter than “forever”.
The way you said it in your first comment made it seem longer lasting than radioactive waste. Which it isn’t according to the linked PDF. That is the only point I was trying to make.
… Hydrogen cyanide is literally what has been used to execute people in gas chambers and genocide during the Holocaust. The LC(Lo), the lowest recorded lethal concentration is 107ppm, resulting in death in 10 minutes. That’s, objectively, far more dangerous than the respective material that firefighters were exposed to at Chernobyl. You don’t want that in any appreciable quantity in the air around people that you want to continue living.
I mean, spent fuel is actually quite lethal when not packaged, but you get something like 300-400MWh out of a kilo of fuel. And that’s significantly more than I’ll use in my lifetime.
I’d gladly keep a kilo of dry-casked spent fuel in my house. It’d make an excellent coffee table or something, if a bit hard to move. I would absolutely not put a lifetime supply of benzene anywhere near my house.
Edit: it would make a shitty coffee table. 1 kilo of uranium oxide is just under 100ml
Cyanide is used extensively in precious metal recycling too. So even reclaiming resources has a harsh chemical cost. Meeting workers from there I was surprised to say the least about how ‘casually’ they work with Cyanide. Clearly they have safty protocall but nothing like what I imagined something like Cyanide would call for.
In addition to hazardous materials regulations, I also do workplace safety, and this doesn’t surprise me at aaaaall. People get really casual around stuff that kills you slowly.
Might be fun to have fiction that exposes this stuff - that giving coy, five-word responses to concerns of the organization doesn’t actually make someone a good leader.
“Yeah alright, look, what I’m saying is we’re trying, but it’s not really that easy. The Jedi are scattered all across the galaxy and they have that weird force magic to boot, no offense…”
You have to tell them that you love them, everytime, or it’s not even close to a proper bye. That’s how you get an in with the HR folks really quickly so you know that they have your back. Work on easy mode, more or less. Like and subscribe for more social lifehacks.
But we don’t really have it now, which is the main problem. In the time it takes to build these things (also for the money it takes), we could plaster everything full with renewables and come up with a decentralized storage solution. Plus, being dependent on Kazachstan for fissile material seems very… stupid?
Huh? Quick search shows that Oliver Tree is 30 years old, so birth year ~1994 or so. The jazz design came out in 1992 and was widely available through the early 2000s, by solo cup after they purchased it from sweetheart cup in 2004… I really don’t see how he shouldn’t know where the design came from, but regardless it’s become a pop culture/nostalgia symbol because it’s just a good, widely recognizable design. What else does he need to know?
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