MEMES
Nuke waste 'vitrification'.
Here’s an algorithm that must be as old as humanity itself.
Got something very unpleasant to get rid of ?
Dig a hole, chuck it in, and bury it.
There is an important modifier we should add to the algorithm, that is :
The nastier it is, the further away ( from yourself ) you should dump it.
The Dalai Lama has recently been complaining ( no, that’s the wrong word, the Dalai Lama doesn’t complain he – ‘draws attention to’ ) about the fact that China is apparently continuing to get rid of its nuclear waste by dumping it in Tibet.
See:
http://www.phayul.com/news/
The problem for the US, the EU and Japan is that they don’t have ‘ a Tibet ’ to dump things on. So they are desperate to come up with ways to safely dispose of nuclear waste ’in their own back yards’ so to speak.
The scale of the ‘Intermediate level’ nuclear waste problem is awesome. As Tim Radford, the UK Guardian ’s science editor put it in a recent BBC interview : “ We’re producing this stuff at a rate of 7000 tons a year “ and “ In 24,000 years it will only be half a poisonous as it is right now ”
One possible disposal method, developed in the 1980’s is ‘Vitrification’. In essence, the basic tech behind the process is very simple. You mix the waste with silica-rich soil, and then pass a gargantuan electric current through it. About 3.5 Megawatts, for a week or so, should do it. Not surprisingly, the soil heats up to around 1,800 degress C. If you’re lucky, and you don’t experience an MEE ( Melt Expulsion Event ) then you’ll be left with a block of glass-like material which encapsulates the waste.
The world leader in this type of vitrification process is a company called Geomelt , a subsidiary of the UK’s AMEC Plc. For an overview of the tech, see their site http://www.geomelt.com
We don’t want to be picky, but what would be the first question you would ask yourself if you were thinking about disposing of some ‘Intermediate level' nuclear waste ? . . . Perhaps, ‘How long will the containment last ?’ . . . Maybe we missed it, but after searching high and low through the Geomelt site, we can’t find any mention of the life-expectancy of one of these glassy blocks. Could it be that they are hesitant to specify it for some reason ?
Depending on who you ask, it’s generally reckoned though, that the lifetime of such encapsulations, which can weigh up to 1000 tons, would be ‘ thousands > millions ’ of years – providing, of course, they don’t crack in the meantime. Bearing in mind that they may contain products which produce heat for tens of thousands of years, that would seem, to us at least, a distinct possibility.
To sum up, we’d like to ask the question : If there are any humans around in, say, ten thousand years, will they be overjoyed that their ancestors managed to safely store away all their mega-toxic nuclear waste in highly durable and manageable obsidian monoliths – or, will they be cursing us to hell and back for dumping the stuff all over the place in slowly deteriorating 1000 ton blocks - when it must have been obvious that there was never any real possibility of foreseeing the ultra-long-term consequences ?
For an overview of the tech, see:
http://tech.inel.gov/documents/PlanarISV/
or, for really in-depth info ( large .pdf file )
