Millions of tons of #radioactive waste, have been stitched into our planet. Much is classified as high-level and will remain dangerous to living beings for more than 100,000 years, we plan to bury the most dangerous of it—the spent nuclear fuel—half a kilometer underground. Deep geological storage sites are already under construction in many countries, including Finland & Sweden, many more are under design. These will present a risk to thousands of generations of human and other beings.
We wrestle with what instructions to leave beside the waste—instructions we imagine will help protect people in the future—oblivious to the fact that the presence of our waste in their world is itself the message.
Long after our cities & monuments have crumbled, long after our languages are unspoken, long after our gods have turned away, our nuclear waste will endure. It is how our descendants will know us.
#histodons @histodons #STS #nuclear #Anthropocene #ColdWarHist
@bojacobs
The same, but worse, probably holds true for regular waste and chemical disposal sites.
What do we say to our ancestors when they find the lake in America that was an abandoned mine, which has become so acidic that we have to keep birds away from it?
https://youtu.be/qtlPTE-UmY4
The countless swaths of land that have become polluted with toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and even trace radioactive elements from coal ash damm spills?
https://youtu.be/a91UqFEMs5A
Or the underground stores of arsenic that we have to keep frozen at all times else they seep into the groundwater?
https://youtu.be/E4nZDSLdIiM
Nuclear waste is highly dangerous, but it is in such low quantity and high density that we have the luxury of enclosing it within incredibly safe and tight containers. We can also learn to reprocess and further minimize the amount of high level waste by reusing spent fuel.
There are countless other sources of toxic pollution that produce waste in far, far greater amounts, and with far less regulation. Those, however, rarely hit the media because they’re not radioactive. Yet there are so many more of them that their impact is far above that of nuclear power generation.
Saying that nuclear waste is a problem while throwing all other kinds of toxic byproducts aside is hypocritical.
Nuclear is one of the few industries with such compact waste that we even have the luxury to think about a contained permanent disposal site.
