Why all the failures to natural disasters?

Death Valley is pretty much the suburbs of LA compared to some places.

Here in Australia we have deserts with nobody living for a 100 kms in every direction, sitting on hard rock that has been geologically undisturbed for

Drill a nice, big hole 1 kms deep in any of these places, drop the waste down the hole, then fill the hole with a 1000 metre concrete plug. That waste isn't going anywhere.

Problem solved.

Hmm, 1 km minus 1000 m doesn't live much room for the actual waste. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Why? Does Nymnonuts infest that group as well?

sci.math is not just a "maths" (academic?) forum is it?

Actually, usenet is thick with several types of sociopaths. Usenet is like an insane asylum that was taken over long ago by the inmates.

But isn't sci.math supposed to be for APPLIED math rather than just academic bullshit math?

Are you one of those "pure math" misfits?

Archie's fellow autist GX wants to punish society for making him wear clothing that chafes.

Is that how you see real world problems?

Where do you fit on the autism spectrum?

If you're vouching for Nymnonuts, yes.

| >>> Say, maybe we could dig a big hole in, say, Nevada... | >>

| >> And pick a place where if it leaked, it would contaminate, say, Death | >> Valley. | >

| > Death Valley is pretty much the suburbs of LA compared to some places. | >

| > Here in Australia we have deserts with nobody living for a 100 kms in | > every direction, sitting on hard rock that has been geologically | > undisturbed for 100 million years. | >

| > Drill a nice, big hole 1 kms deep in any of these places, drop the waste | > down the hole, then fill the hole with a 1000 metre concrete plug. That | > waste isn't going anywhere. | >

| > Problem solved. | >

| | Hmm, 1 km minus 1000 m doesn't live much room for the actual waste. ;) | It might leave live mushroom.

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What do fast breeder reactors and mixed-oxide fuel have to do with reprocessing uranium? If there is plutonium present in the spent fuel rods it can be extracted by anyone who is able to steal the rods-- there's no magic to doing that and they do not have to be reprocessed in order for someone who has stolen the rods to extract the plutonium, so how does reprocessing them and sticking them back in reactors create "proliferation issues"?

Cesium 137 has industrial applications and a relatively short half- life--it's not one of those substances that has to be stored forever.

That sentence contains 8 extraneous words. If there is a nuclear attack, what is attacked is of secondary importance.

I love all these brilliant solutions by people who don't have a clue what problem is being solved.

When the rods come out of the reactor they are dangerously radioctive and producing heat at a significant level. They are stored on site until the radiation and heat production diminish to manageable levels.

It was intended that at that point they would be reprocessed. Thanks to Carter that didn't happen. If you want to bury them a thousand feet deep you need to find a safe way to transport them in the condition they are in when removed from the reactor. Do you have such a method to present?

Fast breeders cause proliferation concerns because they can make U235 and Plutonium from U238, eliminating or reducing the need to enrich Uranium with centrifuges etc. As that is the hardest part of making a bomb, a nation having a fast breeder gets most of the way for free.

And you seem to be confusing two different concepts. Yes, plutonium can be chemically extracted in some quantity from any used fuel rods, but the difference is that fast breeders actually create useful bomb making products as part of their cycle, not consume them as do traditional reactors.

The highly radioactive components producing the heat have short half lives, and burn out quite quickly.

You don't really care about isotopes with half lives measured in weeks or less. In a years time they are gone.

Nor do you have to care about isotopes lasting 100,000 years or more. These can be treated simply as hazardous chemicals; they are not sufficiently radioactive to present a health risk when dispersed.

You do a rough chemical extraction - which may take several weeks - to extract the stuff in the middle. That can be transported whever you like with enough lead wrapped around it.

Change the condition they are in.

Remove the most radioactive isotopes chemically and let them burn-off on site. The rest can be transported in lead lined containers.

On 2011-04-13, Stretto wrote: [ Why all the failures to natural disasters? ]

Yes, it is easy to design a safety mechanism that does its job. Usually there are many safety systems that are capable of doing their job.

However, no matter what safety systems you implement, there is always a set of triggers for disaster that can render them useless. All we can do is plan for the worst we expect to happen and some of the things that we do not expect to happen. We cannot plan for everything that could possibly happen, because we cannot know everything that could possibly happen.

Nothing is perfectly safe. A natural disaster killed more than 10,000 people, and you focus on a nuclear accident caused by it that has not even killed a single person? If you're going to focus on failures of safety systems following one of the most powerful earthquakes on record, why not focus on any one of the innumerable failures that actually *caused deaths*?

Chernobyl's causes were (at least morally) "criminal". Bhopal's were (both legally and morally) criminal. Fukushima's were just horribly unfortunate.

Actually if you go by chances of death or serious injury from disasters of various sorts (human or natural), we're in a very strongly *safer* trend.

If my country's government allowed them, I'd be quite happy with living near a nuclear power plant. My chances of death, injury, or major inconvenience would be much lower than, say, the terrible design of the intersection at the end of my street. If you're going to rant about safety, convince my local council to fix that instead.

In sci.math Tim Little wrote: ...

...

I think the death toll among the plant workers is up to 7 now.

A similar number of elderly residents in nearby towns that had to be evacuated because they were inside whatever was then the limit (and now the limit is being extended to several towns even further out) died during or shortly after the evac.

Some of the remaining 600 plant workers that are being rotated in and out are now legally allowed to receive 250 mSv (about 200 times the legal limit for "civilians" in the US) to perform their jobs -- and some that have indeed already received a large part of that limit -- have an increased probability of an early death.

This is a very misleading figure being widely quoted: the figures on the front page of today's Asahi are 13,232 dead and 14,554 missing. "Missing" people are being discovered from time to time, having gone to stay somewhere without telling their families, so the total of "dead"+"missing" has come down from its peak of over 30,000, but it seems unlikely that the total death toll will be less than 25,000. (The precise number is of course uncountable, if that brings this back on topic...)

Brian Chandler

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Not true. A direct hit with a nuclear bomb on one of the French nuclear reactors would contaminate most of Europe. It releases an enormous amount of radioactive material, and spreads it across a substantial area.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You were attempting to have a dialog with a complete loon. Ignore him, and he will go back to the kook group, where the little brainless, immature ditz belongs.

Fukushima had defenses to cope with this sort of thing (e.g., (12 ft?) seawall as anti-tsunami measure)... just not strong enough to scale with "unprecedented disaster". Three-Mile Island is largely a case of the safety backups eventually kicking in (total radiation release was less than your standard coal power plant, as coal has trace amounts of radioactive material). Chernobyl was a dangerous experiment which should have been postponed given the circumstances (it was delayed from the experienced day shift to the inexperienced night shift). Bhopal is more nuanced in that the exact cause is unknown (accident, mismaintained equipment, or sabotage), although it is clear that safety systems were underequipped and probably mostly nonfunctional, on orders from management.

...and the problem is? ;-)

Hey, I have an idea... What about Nevada, in the salt caves? I heard the government even dug a big hole and then decided they didn't want it. Ask Harry about that.

At last, an intelligent post. Thanks.

This will give folks some idea about exposure levels and how to consider news about nuclear radiation releases, emissions, etc.

What's "misleading" about it? More accurately it might be said to have killed somewhere between 13,000 and 28,000, but it's certainly a true statement that it killed more than 10,000. And that statement is more accurate than that it killed more than 3.

As for the precise number being uncountable, you've posted this to physics and math newsgroups, so you should know that the number most assuredly _is_ countable. It may never be counted accurately for reasons having to do with human nature, but this has nothing do with the mathematical concept of countability. Don't use technical terms in technical venues unless you know what they mean.

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I understand your point and it is irrelevant. The political ramifications of a nuclear strike will result in so much carnage that most of Europe will be contaminated anyway and there won't be enough civilization left for anybody to give a damn about being contaminated.

The tsunami put boats, cars and a house on top of three storey buildings. It was 40 feet high, not 12 feet. Google Earth has updated photographs of the region but the "streetview" images are still present, showing a road that used to be but is now underwater, the entire coastline is now 3 feet lower than it once was. Check the streetview photograph here: 37°59'56.82"N, 140°54'51.43"E

I think that what is now considered a dangerous waste, in the future it will have very high value. Because if it is dangerous that means that it have great amounts of remanent energy . Then the best solution is to store it in monitored profund caverns drilled in granite. The country that receive that material will have buried gold. Ludovicus