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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Waste disposal isn't that hard. The Onkalo nuclear waste repository in Finland pretty much has it covered.

First, you find a hard-rock mountain where geology shows nothing much happening in the last few million years, and there's nothing worth mining. Worldwide, there are many mountain ranges like that. Then tunnel way down, but preferably above the water table. Drill holes in the tunnel floor. Put waste in suitable containers. There are a few approaches. Mixing the waste with molten glass and pouring it into big stainless steel thimbles is one approach. Put containers in holes. Fill with bentonite. Seal off with concrete. Eventually, seal off the whole installation and forget about it.

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How do we communicate to civilisations in the future what we did in that mountain?

How do we communicate to civilisations in the present how bad the emissions from goal and gas plants are? https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/wh...

Because we appear to have no sense of proportion, or trade-offs.

Current thinking is not to mark the place. Why attract attention to it? Any future civilization capable of finding that it's interesting and digging down through a mile or more of hard rock and concrete probably knows about radioactivity.

> How do we communicate to civilisations in the future what we did in that mountain?

The more dangerous stuff burns itself out quickly (short half-life), and the longer-lasting stuff is not very dangerous given the type of radiation it is and can be blocked quite easily

So, probably bury it deep enough with little external sign that it's actually there, and if it is actually discovered it won't be that big of a deal:

> The main concern associated with spent nuclear fuel – radioactivity – diminishes with time.

> About 40 years after it's done making power, the heat and radioactivity of the fuel bundle will have fallen by over 99%.

* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148416881180674

> About three containers are needed to store the quantity of fuel that is removed each 12-24 months; the space taken up by even a 60 year plant life is less than is needed for a Wal-Mart even without any efforts to efficiently stack the containers.

* https://atomicinsights.com/time-for-plan-b-yucca-mountain-pr...

10,000 years from now, I hope the civilization has got to a point where robots or whatever sentient thing is around can sniff out radioactivity.

Long term thinking > Short term thinking > Extreme long term thinking.

Is this a serious concern? That there will be some kind of civilization in 10000 years that:

1) has lost all records of current generations

2) doesn't know about nuclear waste disposal sites and radioactivity

3) is still advanced enough to dig several hundred meters into hard rock

4) for no discernible reason digs up the entire waste disposal site and then what? contaminates their excavation crew?

>has lost all records of current generations

Doesn't seem impossible. Just see how much trouble we have understanding writing systems from 8000 BCE.

You only need a few generation of lost ability to read/write for solid documentation of nuclear waste and radioactivity to turn into myth at best. This does not seem unlikely over a duration of 10000y. Such a myth may be just enough for people to seek out a dangerous place without understanding the danger.

> Is this a serious concern?

Yes.

See The art of the 10,000-year warning[1] and the full Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory Across Generations report[2].

Other proposed solutions include: the breeding of so-called "radiation cats" or "ray cats". Cats have a long history of cohabitation with humans, and this approach assumes that their domestication will continue indefinitely. These radiation cats would change significantly in color when they came near radioactive emissions and serve as living indicators of danger.[3]

[1] https://www.ans.org/news/article-416/the-art-of-the-10000yea...

[2] https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_15088

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...

Maybe we should be more concerned about ensuring that there is an advanced civilization to worry about in 10,000 years. We can start by making sure humanity is well situated with energy supplies for the next few centuries, and nuclear is part of the answer to that step.

Besides, nuclear fuel dumps are few and far between, and easily avoided once identified. I'm touched that you care so much about a few individual lives 10,000 years from now, but we've got millions if not billions of lives to worry about in this century.

This is for the most part not a realistic practical issue. Either the civilizations in the future are continuations of our current civilization and have records or they're advanced enough to have the ability to detect radiation thus making the issue moot or they've regressed enough to lose that knowledge and people stumbling into a radioactive waste storage facility is the least of our concerns.

How do we communicate with civilizations in the future to not eat the fish and mollusks out of the rivers. You know, the ones that are currently being contaminated with mercury and other forever chemicals from both coal ash and rare earth tailing?

Please, let us know your plan.

P.S. This is not a hypothetical problem, like the demands you are making of nuclear. This is a current and ongoing one. Your green energy isn't as green as you claim it is, please tell us your solution.

This will not be a problem at all, there will not be a lot of edible freshwater molluscs around. They are going extinct really fast.

We talk about humans, is guaranteed that they will lick the warm shiny stones behind a huge "don't lick this" banner.

But they will learn eventually after a couple of deaths, as we did every single time. We are trying to solve the wrong problem here; Is the population what counts.

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