2022-12-05

The problem with nuclear waste

Read this! It is by far the best account I have ever read about what to do about waste from fission reactors. There is a lot of irrational fear about nuclear power, because the physics that allows power stations to work is the same physics that gave us Hiroshima. The waste products of nuclear reactors are dangerous, especially immediately after they have been removed from the reactor. But storing them above ground in concrete casks is the correct way to handle the problem. The consensus always used to be to bury the waste deep underground in inaccessible ‘geological’ storage.

The post explains better than I ever could why this is a terrible idea. Oddly enough, I worked on a project to examine the feasibility of doing just this, but without any understanding of the biological effects of the three types of radiation caused by radioactive decay. It is only gamma rays that really damage tissue; sure, you don’t want to ingest an alpha emitter: those helium nucleii can do a lot of damage. But they are stopped by a minimal barrier, unlike gamma rays which carry no charge and therefore can penetrate deep into tissue, sometimes passing right through it, but too often damaging DNA.

Anyway, the piece explains why gamma emission decays relatively quickly compared to beta and alpha emission, resulting in a drop which is for all practical purposes complete within 500 years. This sounds a long time, but Pu239 has a half-life of 250K years.

The other fantastic point that the article makes is that U238 and Pu are both fissile in the right reactor. Because of a highly successful campaign by Friends of the Earth, no western government dared continue (or even start) a fast-breeder research programme. Although fast-breeder reactors are hugely challenging to build, they hold huge potential for the production of low-cost carbon-free energy. Although I would prefer this to come from fusion reactors, it would seem sensible to continue research into this technology, which surely will become acceptably safe and economic at some point in the next few decades.

Trends

It seems that consumers of cosmetics are switching from skincare to fragrances, and Millennials are giving up vaping and switching to smoking. Weird, or what?

Intuit (seller of expensive bookkeeping and tax-accounting software and accidental owner of Mailchimp and Credit Karma) is in trouble, according to Edwin Dorsey. Oddly enough, I’ve used Mailchimp, Quickbooks and Credit Karma. I think, ages ago, I even paid for a copy of Quickbooks. I did notice that Credit Karma does do a lot of heavy selling of credit cards, although I’ve trained myself to ignore that sort of crap.