{"id":53464,"date":"2020-05-25T06:19:27","date_gmt":"2020-05-25T11:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=53464"},"modified":"2020-05-25T06:19:31","modified_gmt":"2020-05-25T11:19:31","slug":"nuclear-waste-will-last-a-lot-longer-than-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=53464","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear waste will last a lot longer than climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"http:\/\/energyskeptic.com\/2020\/nuclear-waste-will-last-much-longer-than-climate-change\/\">Nuclear waste will last a lot longer than climate change<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Preface<\/strong>.&nbsp;&nbsp; One of the most tragic aspects of peak oil is that it is very unlikely once energy descent begins that oil will be expended to clean up our nuclear mess.&nbsp; Or before descent either.&nbsp; Anyone who survives peak fossil fuels and after that, rising sea levels and extreme weather from climate change, will still be faced with nuclear waste as a deadly pollutant and potential weapon.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to Archer (2008): \u201c\u2026 there are components of nuclear material that have a long lifetime, such as the isotopes plutonium 239 (24,000 year half-life), thorium 230 (80,000 years), and iodine 129 (15.7 million years). Ideally, these substances must be stored and isolated from reaching ground water until they decay, but the lifetimes are so immense that it is hard to believe or to prove that this can be done\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Below are summaries of two articles on nuclear waste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ro, C. 2019.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/christinero\/2019\/11\/26\/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal\/#2078d3d229cf\">The Staggering Timescales Of Nuclear Waste Disposal<\/a>. Forbes.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This most potent form of nuclear waste needs to be safely stored for&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/mosaicscience.com\/story\/how-do-you-leave-warning-lasts-long-nuclear-waste\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">up to a million years<\/a>. Yet existing and planned nuclear waste sites operate on much shorter timeframes: often&nbsp;<strong>10,000 or 100,000 years<\/strong>. These are still such unimaginably vast lengths of time that regulatory authorities decide on them, in part, based on&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/the-long-now-foundation\/the-other-10-000-year-project-51425d40f93\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">how long ice ages are expected to last<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Strategies remain worryingly short-term, on a nuclear timescale. Chernobyl\u2019s destroyed reactor no. 4, for instance, was encased in July 2019 in a massive&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/ensia.com\/features\/radioactive-nuclear-waste-disposal\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">steel \u201csarcophagus\u201d<\/a>&nbsp;that will only last&nbsp;<strong>100 years<\/strong>. Not only will containers like this one fall short of the timescales needed for sufficient storage, but no country has allotted enough funds to cover nuclear waste disposal. In France and the US, according to the recently published&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/worldnuclearwastereport.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>World Nuclear Waste Report<\/em><\/a>, the funding allocation only covers a third of the estimated costs. And the cost estimates that do exist rarely extend beyond several decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nuclear waste will last a lot longer than climate change Preface.&nbsp;&nbsp; One of the most tragic aspects of peak oil is that it is very unlikely once energy descent begins that oil will be expended to clean up our nuclear mess.&nbsp; Or before descent either.&nbsp; Anyone who survives peak fossil fuels and after that, rising [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[11836,11859,288,579,13570,617],"class_list":["post-53464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-alice-friedemann","tag-energy-skeptic","tag-extreme-weather","tag-nuclear-power","tag-peak-fossil-fuels","tag-peak-oil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53465,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53464\/revisions\/53465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}