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  #1  
Old July 9th 03, 11:38 AM
Earl Colby Pottinger
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Default Books lunatics hate

Joann Evans :

Kaido Kert wrote:

[snip]

For instance, its only me thinking that billions spent on yucca

repository
could be better invested in getting solar power sats up and operational
instead. But building nuclear waste repositories obviously makes much

more
long-term economic and environmental sense.


Not a good example. We would *still* have to deal with the existing
high-level wastes somehow, no matter what other sources of energy we
find.


I don't see what is wrong with just a big concrete structure in the middle of
Death Valley, glassify the waste and store it there. Costs would be low, the
material is accessible if we find a need for it, and people don't wander by
accident into the middle of Death Valley. (Ps. yes I know a few are dumb
enought to do that, but they are going die anyway if they are in Death Valley)

Plus I would love to see the anti-nuke protestors trying to deal with the
heat.

Earl Colby Pottinger

--
I make public email sent to me! Hydrogen Peroxide Rockets, OpenBeos,
SerialTransfer 3.0, RAMDISK, BoatBuilding, DIY TabletPC. What happened to
the time? http://webhome.idirect.com/~earlcp
  #2  
Old July 9th 03, 01:10 PM
Scott Lowther
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Default Books lunatics hate

Earl Colby Pottinger wrote:

Joann Evans :

Kaido Kert wrote:

[snip]

For instance, its only me thinking that billions spent on yucca

repository
could be better invested in getting solar power sats up and operational
instead. But building nuclear waste repositories obviously makes much

more
long-term economic and environmental sense.


Not a good example. We would *still* have to deal with the existing
high-level wastes somehow, no matter what other sources of energy we
find.


I don't see what is wrong with just a big concrete structure in the middle of
Death Valley, glassify the waste and store it there.


Even better:

Crush the wastes into a fine powder. Mix at a 1:10,000 mass ratio with
concrete (and at a 1:50 mass ratio with non-radioactive powder of the
same basic elementary materials), and form into 50 cm cubes. Then cast
those cubes into the centers of 1 meter cubes of straight concrete. You
now have a large structural block of concrete with a virtually
undetectable and essentially unextractable radioactive component. Use
those bocks, in their hundreds of thousands, to build up artificial
island, dams, bridges, walls.

--
Scott Lowther, Engineer

"Any statement by Edward Wright that starts with 'You seem to think
that...' is wrong. Always. It's a law of Usenet, like Godwin's."
- Jorge R. Frank, 11 Nov 2002
  #3  
Old July 9th 03, 03:21 PM
Andrew Case
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Default Books lunatics hate

Earl Colby Pottinger wrote:

I don't see what is wrong with just a big concrete structure in the middle of
Death Valley, glassify the waste and store it there.


Glassifying the waste just makes it harder to get at and mixes it up with
a bunch of non radioactive material. Much better to keep it in compact,
relatively pure form under active guard. That way when people finally
figure out how to use it as a feedstock for some useful process it will be
easy to get at.

Even better would be transmutation into high activity short lifetime
isotopes. Once the isotopes decay into something stable (which they will
do in short order) you can either bury them or use them as feedstock for
some industrial process. Since the resulting stable isotopes will tend to
be oddball things which aren't very common there is a good chance of
finding some interesting property or other that is commercially
useful. Transmutation can be accomplished using the neutrons from D-D or
D-T fusion, and the additional heat from the neutron capture and
subsequenct decay of the isotopes gives an additional source of energy
that allows you to run the fusion side at under Q=1, which is nice since
nobody's exceeded Q=1 yet, and probably nobody will for quite a few years.

This is also the best bet for getting fusion out from under the government
funding model (which rewards slow progress towards ill-defined goals) and
into the commercial funding model (which relentlessly drives towards what
works). As it currently stands fusion promises to be a cash cow for
universities and research institutions for the next three decades until
it starts to get commercially viable, at which point someone will notice
the neutrons and the resulting backlash will kill it. The best hope is to
make a virtue out of a necessity (neutrons from the easy reactions) in the
short term, and once we have real experience with running commercial
fusion reactors develop the means to first reduce the neutron flux
(D-He3) and then eliminate them entirely (p-B11).

.......Andrew
--
--
Andrew Case |
|
  #4  
Old July 9th 03, 06:41 PM
Mike Combs
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Default Books lunatics hate

Joann Evans :

Not a good example. We would *still* have to deal with the existing
high-level wastes somehow, no matter what other sources of energy we
find.


True, but at least SPS could help keep an already-existing problem from getting
steadily bigger over time.

--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the
best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the
Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely.
Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable - the best site is
"somewhere else entirely."

Gerard O'Neill - "The High Frontier"
 




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