----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Crystall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 3:33 PM
Subject: Re: Bill Moyers Reports: Earth on Edge
> On 2 Jul 2001, at 14:20, Dan Minette wrote:
>
> > > On 2 Jul 2001, at 11:15, Dan Minette wrote:
> > >
> > > > I'll agree that firing the waste into the sun is not practical,
> > > > and should not be considered as a potential solution.
> > >
> > > Why not? We're talking about the less than 1% of the waste which be
> > > radioactive for thousands of years...
> > >
> >
> > There are a few problems that I see.
> >
> > First, which radioactive isotopes are you thinking about. I know of
> > very long lived ones, like uranium(>1 billion year half life), and
> > middling lived ones, like cesium (30 year half life IIRC), and maybe
> > americium at 200 years. But, I don't know of any isotopes offhand
> > that have half lives in the thousands of years.
>
> I din't have the study I read right here. It was the most active
> elements from the fuel rods themselves though.
U-235? But that has a half-life of 7*10^8 years. It is not very
radioactive.
>
> > Second, the risk of the space plane crashing will be higher than the
> > risk of leakage from a salt mine.
>
> Salt Domes? Any IDEA how expensive buring waste under them is.
Roughly, yea. All one has to do is sink a elevator shaft 2000 feet or so,
and then excavate a bit of the salt at that level. Reinforce the shaft and
all is another part of it. Remember, we already put neutrino detectors down
old salt mines at about this depth. Those folks don't have billions to
spend.
The cost is probably on the order of the cost of a coal mine. I would
guess that establishing the disposal site should take tens of millions of
dollars. For political reasons, hundreds of millions would probably be
spent.
> Monitoring them for thousands of years...nah.
Why bother monitering the U235? Actually, its the short lived stuff that we
have to be careful with.
>
> Deep burial has massive ongoing costs with monitoring,
Nah. I'm familiar with the type of costs that are involved. What's wrong
with drilling test wells around the disposal site and running natural gamma
logs through them every year. or so? The ongoing cost of that would be in
the tens of thousands of dollars per year. Send someone down the well a few
times a year. A million/year would probably suffice for that.
>and you
> have to consider the political aspects as well...ongoing costs there
> as well. And let's face it...firing a little radioactive waste into the
> sun isn't about to hurt it...
>
How long do you think before the odds on a crash landing of an ecconomically
viable space plane is less than 0.1%? Plus, if you try to get rid of the
long lived stuff, most of the spent fuel would have to be sent.
Dan M.
