🚀 go-pugleaf

hyperion@dimensional.com (Hyperion Systems) wrote:

>In article <3422BA3D.58F7@no.com>, Ambrose Small  <no@no.com> wrote:
>>Hyperion Systems wrote:
>>It can be done.  It just takes commitment and cooperation between the
>>public, the politicians, and the scientific community.
>>It amazes me that we have had fission power plants for over forty
>>years now, and people still have this kind of fear of nuclear power.
>
>OK, like I asked the other person, just name one safe disposal method.  It
>amazes me that in forty years or fission power, the waste is still just
>piled up somewhere "out of the way."  Forty years of human thought, more
>time than I have been alive, and no one has figured out how to dispose of
>the waste.

Sorry, but you are wrong.  My father worked as a chemist at Argonne
National Lab in the late seventies and early 80's doing research on high
level nuclear waste disposal.  He wrote several chapters of the book
"Actinides in the environment"  which you can refer to if you want the
nitty gritty details.

The work involved taking rock samples, injecting them with radioactive
material, then subjecting the rock to waterflows to simulate years of
rain, then scanning the rock with a cat scanner, to see where the
radioactive material goes.

His research found that the radioactive material has an "affinity" for
the rock, and sticks to it. This is contrary to the theories, so he had
to research WHY it sticks to the rock.

With this knowledge, he spent the last years of his career working in
the nuclear medicine group, attaching radioactive materials to
mono-clonal antibodies, for treating cancer.

Nuclear waste is a political and NIMBY problem, not a technical one.