You must log in or register to comment.
Ah what fresh new horrors will today bring…
Let’s hit up the Internet and… Oh god. OH GOD.
5 stars on Google Maps, marked “good for kids”
That’s the thing with the radioactive waste and it being still dangerous for many thousands of years… We humans manage to ruin the planet within a fraction of that time already. How could we ever manage anything correctly, let alone something that requires attention for tens of thousands of years. It’s like the ultimate technical debt. A burden we can’t handle, among many other problems we also can’t handle. Collectively speaking.
Engineering-wise we could manage, but no-one would be willing to spend more than anything considered ‘good enough’.
It’s like the old roman concrete question - it’s not that we’re worse at making concrete today, quite the opposite, but that we’re working with maximum cost to value ratio.Humanity’s greatest fault it’s it’s lack of responsibility. Most of our issues trace back to that.
Soon…
Damn. I came here to do exactly this!
this is such a 2026 headline. click here to learn more about this terrible thing you are powerless to stop
I’m no engineer, but 33 feet does not seem like a deep enough hole to be pushing a bunch of radioactive debris into. seems shortsighted…
Shortsighted? That’s not a word I relate to the government AT ALL.
So there was this carefully selected place called Yucca mountain where radioactive waste could be safely stored for a million years without concerns like this. However, due to public opposition we dont use it, and instead theres just kind of… Nowhere good to go. That doesnt solve this problem, pretty sure this issue predates Yucca, but if you want to see the kind of engineering solution that should be used then Yucca mountain is a great example.
If I remember correctly, one of the biggest problems was the transportation issue, which no one had a solution for. How exactly do you safely transfer several tons of nuclear waste from, say, Shearon Harris to Yucca Mountain? that’s a very long train route. And you want to do this on a recurring basis? from several different locations around the country?
How exactly are you going to convince the states in between that they should permit you to transport nuclear waste across their borders, repeatedly? Who is going to provide security for all of this nuclear waste while it’s in transit? Who is going to accept liability for any accidents that occur, and who is going to handle the PR when a truckload of irradiated water gets dumped in some neighborhood?
Good luck getting anyone who even wants to explore establishing those arrangements as their full-time job. “Yes, I brokered the agreement for transporting radioactive material that resulted in a half-ton of waste being spread across ten backyards and an elementary school playground just outside of Birmingham.” Sounds like career suicide, and maybe not career suicide.
The Russian fueled tankies came up with lots of reasons
Waste is their anti nuclear trump card and they’re not willing to give that up
There are people who do that now. I’m not an expert but I know there is specific DOT training for exactly that purpose. By regulation the waste is packed into a specifically strong cask that has been tested to withstand being dropped, lit on fire, etc. Good luck breaking one of those open.
https://robateltech.com/transportation-and-storage-casks/
Found this in a quick search. If you pay people enough they will do it. Liability is owned by the people sending the shipment.
https://cleanmanagement.com/blog/understanding-the-cradle-to-the-grave-waste-disposal-system/
Another good one is Onkalo in Finland.
Its the US military. I cant name a time where “shortsighted” doesnt describe them
The concrete cap of a tomb encasing radioactive fallout now has cracks, and what’s beneath can rise from the dead. The U.S. military, in 1958, conducted a nuclear test on Runit Island in the Marshall Islands with an 18-kiloton bomb called Cactus. The resulting blast left behind an almost 33-foot deep crater, which later became a dumping ground for the debris from a myriad of nuclear tests from the 1940s to 50s. In 1977, the Runit Dome was created to contain that radioactive waste. But the dome’s deterioration could contaminate the ocean and displace hundreds of people.
Nuclear consequences
The Runit Dome contains more than 120,000 tons of contaminated material from nuclear testing, including lethal quantities of plutonium. The isotope plutonium-239 is a “radioactive element used in nuclear weapons that remains dangerous for more than 24,000 years,” said the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
Merely coming into contact with the radioactive element can kill you. Concrete, unfortunately, does not endure that long. “There are already cracks in it in less than 50 years,” Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, said to the ABC
Since the concrete tomb was built, “groundwater has penetrated the otherwise-unlined crater, beneath which there lies a bed of porous coral sediment,” said Science Alert. The leaked water in the dome is “soaking the radioactive waste with the daily rise and fall of the tide,” said ZME Science. The tomb’s outer shell also contains cracks, “allowing contaminated waste to wash into the surrounding lagoon,” said the ABC. Runit Dome is approximately 20 miles from a human population that regularly uses the lagoon. Continued radioactive waste would lead to its displacement.
While these are the current problems, there are also “concerns that layers of the dome intended to sit above sea level are not going to stay above water much longer,” said Science Alert. “Sea levels are rising and there’s indications that storms are intensifying,” Ivana Nikolic Hughes, a senior lecturer in chemistry at Columbia University and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, said to the ABC. “We worry the integrity of the dome could be in jeopardy.” Higher water levels could bring radioactive contaminants further into the Pacific Ocean.
Radioactive risks
Despite experts’ concerns about the Runit Dome, the U.S. Department of Energy has claimed that the “dome was not in imminent danger of collapse,” the “cracks were consistent with aging concrete” and the “lagoon already contained large amounts of radioactive material from past tests,” said the ABC. The U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests across the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, some of which were bigger than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over 300 Marshallese people were removed from the area in 1946 before the U.S. began nuclear testing.
The ocean has been “steadily encroaching on the dome over the years,” and “residents fear nuclear contamination if the site were to collapse,” said The Cool Down. The problem is expected to worsen over time without climate change mitigation. “Legacies of nuclear testing and military land requisitions by a foreign power have displaced hundreds of Marshallese for generations,” Paula Gaviria Betancur, the UN Special Rapporteur, said in 2024, and the “adverse effects of climate change threaten to displace thousands more.”
