why cant we chuck radioactive material into subduction areas in the ocean

[zalmatra]

exactly what the title says we could easily find a uninhabited subduction zone where the earth is getting sucked down back into the mantle where it wont be moving for 10s of thousands of years unless there is a catastrophe that would already probably elminate most life forms on the planet?

seems to me the safest place to keep it wouldnt be on land but just chucking it back into the planets core :3

[Tokru]

I think you don't really know what a subduction zone looks like in reality. Just dumping it on the ocean floor will most likely not make it go underneath the adjoining plate.

[zalmatra]

no it wont but there are already engineering concepts to drill quite far down into the mantle and pump out oil why could we find a nice vien of magma or slow moving earth thats going in a downwords direction very slowly and just pump down the radioactive material into a part of the crust that isnt going anywhere geologicly for a couple hundred thousand years

[Tokru]

Because it sounds fucking expensive I think.

[Hypasonic]

Why can't we just use geothermal and other sources of renewable, clean energy thereby eliminating the need to create and dump such hazardous wastes?

[Bigbazz]

Why not just dump it in space, on the moon!

[Catta]

Why can't we just use geothermal and other sources of renewable, clean energy thereby eliminating the need to create and dump such hazardous wastes?

Because a wind powered car is hard to build and a geothermal powered car is going to be... well... stationary

[zalmatra]

apparently thats not legal at this time but they already have plans that are essentially the same but closer to land and not in subduction zones but in geologicaly stable regions

[helheim]

the biggest issue with this is the potential for the fallout to affect the environment. we are barely able to reach the depths of the ocean floor, so while it seems like a decent idea in theory, unless a viable transport method currently exists, the notion that cost is a primary issue is probably correct.

you'll get a bunch of whale loving activists running around with their pitchforks as well.

yucca mountain wasn't a terrible idea.

nuclear power isn't terrible in and of itself, people are simply afraid of what they don't understand. it doesn't help that the nuclear power industry hasn't done much to update their systems and methodology from the 70s and 80s either.

[zalmatra]

increasing our ability to derieve nuclear energy from atoms is how we will be able to get enough energy to explore the universe.
without nuclear fission/fusion there isnt another form of power that could carry us across the stars at any apprecialble speed unless we transition our society into one constructing a literally huge intersteller vessal that requires probably mining and using most of the resources of the solar system literally consuming mars mercury venus the planet earth pluto and charon the moon the gas giants wouldnt be exempt ethier we would have to extract massive amounts of matter from them severly depleting there size. the size of the freaking ship would be about 20 earths big with about three roughly earth sized biospheres.
the construction of this is a physical possibility but we lake the engineering resources to actully build it. :3

nuclear power however lets us really compress the size of the ship needed down to more managable levels lol. there is a good reason we need to continue to increase our knowledge of nuclear energy

---------- Post added 2013-01-26 at 03:23 PM ----------

im all for renewable sources of energy but nuclear power is how we will explore the galaxy

[Tokru]

Why not just dump it in space, on the moon!

The Moon Nazis would not agree.

[Noomz]

exactly what the title says we could easily find a uninhabited subduction zone where the earth is getting sucked down back into the mantle where it wont be moving for 10s of thousands of years unless there is a catastrophe that would already probably elminate most life forms on the planet?

seems to me the safest place to keep it wouldnt be on land but just chucking it back into the planets core :3

Not sure how that is any better than storing it deep inside mountains like we are doing right now. We have control over where we store it now, and that's a good thing. Dumping it in the ocean means we have no control, and the waste we dump could turn up just as much as it could never be seen again.

[cudomix]

Sad thing is that we could reuse vast majority of spent nuclear fuel because of advances in reactor technology in last few decades, but it isn't cost efficient because we deposited waste way too safe to get it out

[Grummgug]

Why not just dump it in space, on the moon!

We could load radioactive material onto a rocket and fire it into space. Those rockets are always perfectly safe and nothing ever goes wrong with launch. Well, except once every 10-20 years, where the thing explodes shortly after liftoff.

We could have perfect, safe launches for 19 years. But on the 20th year, just one rocket with a radioactive payload explodes and spreads radiation across a wide area. Then there is outrage and bureaucrats careers are RUINED. No way that is allowed to occur.

[Tzalix]

Because just dumping stuff "somewhere else" is only a temporary solution.

[Nilinor]

http://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

Very informative, kinda on the subject we are talking about here, but not quite, this is just storing it. The subduction zone plan has already been talked about though here. Pretty much this is the reason why it wont work.

[Deleted]

We could load radioactive material onto a rocket and fire it into space. Those rockets are always perfectly safe and nothing ever goes wrong with launch. Well, except once every 10-20 years, where the thing explodes shortly after liftoff.

We could have perfect, safe launches for 19 years. But on the 20th year, just one rocket with a radioactive payload explodes and spreads radiation across a wide area. Then there is outrage and bureaucrats careers are RUINED. No way that is allowed to occur.

The US alone has more than 70.000 tons of radioactive waste lying around. They couldnt send it to space, even if they wanted. Besides, theres hardly any point. Its much much cheaper to just strip a plant of the most dangerous parts and let the rest stay where it is and decay over the years. Like GB who now faces a 15 billion dollar cleanup to tear down the buildings immediately instead of just leaving it and cleaning up the remains 50-70 years from now, where most of the radioactivity is gone and where it probarbly can be done for a few hundred mio. dollars instead.

[iscalio]

Why can't we just use geothermal and other sources of renewable, clean energy thereby eliminating the need to create and dump such hazardous wastes?

Nuclear power can be clean. The only reason our current nuclear waste is emitting radiation is because it is still chock-full of energy. Governments should heavily invest in the necessary research to improve the efficiency of our technologies of using nuclear fuel instead of trying to curb the biggest known energy source man has access to.

[Bigbazz]

We could load radioactive material onto a rocket and fire it into space. Those rockets are always perfectly safe and nothing ever goes wrong with launch. Well, except once every 10-20 years, where the thing explodes shortly after liftoff.

We could have perfect, safe launches for 19 years. But on the 20th year, just one rocket with a radioactive payload explodes and spreads radiation across a wide area. Then there is outrage and bureaucrats careers are RUINED. No way that is allowed to occur.

So it's safe then too, the Moon sounds like the best bet!

[slime]

Why not just dump it in space, on the moon!

I say send it to that great big incinerator in the sky!