Might be, but I personally don’t feel comfortable it being stored. What if it leaks. Not my problem, as I will be dead by then, but still we will leave it for future generations.
I have seen the chaos building the Hinkley reactor and the costs, so my personal opinion there are cheaper ways of producing energy.
Might be, but I personally don’t feel comfortable it being stored. What if it leaks. Not my problem, as I will be dead by then, but still we will leave it for future generations.
The long term storage of the long lived highly radioactive components of spent reactor fuel is not solvable IMO, because the time needed to store until safe (tens of thousands of years) exceeds the life span of all known human civilisations and will take much longer than the age of the oldest known writing systems, so there is no known way of preserving the knowledge of a storage site and its associated dangers.
At the required time scale, even picking the medium to preserve the record on is a challenge, the only half way safe bet is carving it into granite or any similarly hard rock, but even that can erode significantly if exposed to the wrong conditions during that time frame.
Writing itself, as we know it, is only roughly 5500 years old.
One famous example of an early writing system that left extensive records are ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. After the knowledge of this writing system had been lost in the aftermath of the christianisation of the Roman empire and the resulting closure of the remaining ancient Egyptian temples, it took humanity hundreds of years to decipher them again, despite great interest and effort, and was finally only possible thanks to sheer luck: The discovery of the proverbial Rosetta Stone, which carries inscriptions of the same text in Hieroglyphs, another ancient Egyptian writing system, and ancient Greek, of which only the ancient Greek could be understood at the time.
There are many other old writing systems we have records of, but are unable to read, because nobody knows how. This is how any record of a nuclear waste dump site and its dangers will most likely eventually end up. Millennia before the waste has become harmless.
Might be, but I personally don’t feel comfortable it being stored. What if it leaks. Not my problem, as I will be dead by then, but still we will leave it for future generations.
I have seen the chaos building the Hinkley reactor and the costs, so my personal opinion there are cheaper ways of producing energy.
The long term storage of the long lived highly radioactive components of spent reactor fuel is not solvable IMO, because the time needed to store until safe (tens of thousands of years) exceeds the life span of all known human civilisations and will take much longer than the age of the oldest known writing systems, so there is no known way of preserving the knowledge of a storage site and its associated dangers.
At the required time scale, even picking the medium to preserve the record on is a challenge, the only half way safe bet is carving it into granite or any similarly hard rock, but even that can erode significantly if exposed to the wrong conditions during that time frame.
Writing itself, as we know it, is only roughly 5500 years old.
One famous example of an early writing system that left extensive records are ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. After the knowledge of this writing system had been lost in the aftermath of the christianisation of the Roman empire and the resulting closure of the remaining ancient Egyptian temples, it took humanity hundreds of years to decipher them again, despite great interest and effort, and was finally only possible thanks to sheer luck: The discovery of the proverbial Rosetta Stone, which carries inscriptions of the same text in Hieroglyphs, another ancient Egyptian writing system, and ancient Greek, of which only the ancient Greek could be understood at the time.
There are many other old writing systems we have records of, but are unable to read, because nobody knows how. This is how any record of a nuclear waste dump site and its dangers will most likely eventually end up. Millennia before the waste has become harmless.