- cross-posted to:
- wikipedia@lemmy.world
- wikipedia@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- wikipedia@lemmy.world
- wikipedia@lemmy.world
You must log in or # to comment.
Does anyone else get a little annoyed by the restrictions nuclear tech has to jump through, while other tech doesn’t?
Like yeah, we should be thinking about how to handle nuclear waste and communicate with our future selves. And how to manage nuclear danger in general.
But maybe we should be doing that with burning carbon resources too? And mining in general? Where’s the wiki article on “Mining tailing deposit warning signs for the far future”? Mining has created open lakes so basic/acidic that they’d disolve you. And they aren’t protected by any signs.
What really bothers me is the whole “well, we should be careful” line, then when we’re not careful saying “well, we’ve done this before”. We’ll freak out over Chernobyl, with its dozens of deaths, and then ignore the local coal stack, with hundreds of unreported deaths. Yeah if every current watt of power was nuclear, we’d be seeing more nuclear deaths… But would we be seeing more deaths compared to our carbon caused ones?
Other renewables have problems, but its clear how much carbon tech is freaked out by how much those problems have been centered in the conversation about them. Coal kills birds almost certainly more then windmills, but ask Average Joe about wind power and he’s gonna mention birds. Coal? Eh, might be a problem.
you have to make a bomb or engineer a reactor that catches fire for nuclear fuel to be imminently dangerous to people outside of a moderately sized room
fossil fuels can blow people sky high every stage from extraction to consumer use, nevermind dispersing carcinogens and warm the planet juice freely into the atmosphere.
it’s fucking comical. you know that joke about swimming in the spent fuel pool? “you’ll die from bullets before reaching the pool”–you can cause a fire that could kill more people than just yourself at every gas station, with the cigarettes they sell at the station.
if fossil fuels made your meat fall off your bones just days after touching them we’d be way more careful with them too
fossil fuels can make your meat fall off your bones immediately
Yeah but they got warning signs for that
A 1993 report from Sandia National Laboratories aimed to communicate a series of messages non-linguistically to any future visitors to a waste site. It gave the following wording as an example of what those messages should evoke:
This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
Wow, there’s gonna be a totally kickass beam weapon down there!
They have all these weird symbols when skulls have been pretty universally understood to mean “death” across damn near every culture because before x-rays the only way to see someone’s skull was if they’re dead
Just put skulls and skeletons all over it people will get the message
But then they might think it’s pirate treasure!
“It’s an ancient burial site! Maybe they were buried with expensive jewelry”
what if everyone in the future is a metalhead and they think there’s a cool collection of records inside
when they die from radiation poisoning that would be pretty brutal
Angel flavored magic candy, those ancients had so much food they just buried it with fancy signs! They were always throwing food away, my favorite campfire bed time stories are those about a place called the supermarket.
Imo either people in the future will be able to read a sign that says that it’s dangerous, or they will figure it out on their own quickly
Yeah
Most of these alternative messages seem to be even more convoluted than the plain English
I still love the idea of making the landscape itself psychologically scary, jagged monoliths etc
They are also including plain English (and other languages) usually, so it’s not really counterproductive
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
unless you broke in and started cracking open glowing casks ideally you actually wouldn’t. which is why the warnings are important so people give them wide berth so they don’t make communities nearby that’d get cancer on slower timescales
Is that not exactly what is being depicted in the image? If a catastrophic failure is a safer option (i.e. 1 or a few people die from full exposure vs radioactive waste leaking into groundwater) then I would hope they design the storage system for it.
they’re tandem concerns, you don’t want people breaking the storage on purpose, but even the best designed/most optimistic incarnation of this storage schema will probably leak eventually and you don’t want people exposed to that either.
Leaking is absolutely not an option, and I imagine the engineers designing these systems are aware of that. If they weren’t sure of that, I would hope they would have plans to send the message of how to safely move the waste to a new container and rebury it.
leaking is not an option yet unavoidable when the economic paradigm is “bury and forget”. there is no material, no architecture, no place you can put a bunch of highly engineered containers and expect them to be fine for thousands of years.
you could just pay people to look after them and have institutional capacity to manage waste correctly long term, but that costs a lot more money than sticking things in a hole and crossing your fingers
the industry is consolidated around the idea and have a handful of good, expensive examples for these fascilities, but the trend (as in all capitalist ventures) is toward the cheapest and that compromises both the long-term viability and often indigenous land. Seismic disruptions can be somewhat accounted for and planned around but climate disruptions (average rainfall around a prospective site/the sea level) are not planned for or predictable.
don’t get me wrong, the least safe nuclear waste disposal is WAY safer than other more common kinds of waste today, but we’re talking about the thousands of years question here
i love that pic so much because it looks like a guy getting spooked by moths
Somewhere a nuclear engineer who draws pictures his children say they really, really like - is crying.
the worst idea is probably making the landscape intimidating, man made and jagged. it just makes it more intriguing to explore in order to see what they were hiding.
if they want people to stay away, they should make it look like new jersey
Ctrl-f “here be dragons” 0 results
Pathetic
Born to be in the atomic priesthood
Resigned to shit posting on hexbear dot net
deleted by creator
when the radiation safety officer doesn’t say thank you
