🚀 go-pugleaf

L.Mar@mailbox.uq.oz.au (Leon Mar) wrote:
>Hi!
>
>I'm doing an essay on toxic waste management, though the subject has
>interested me extremely. What do you think?
>
>Should toxic waste be disposed of through high temperature 
>incineration? 
>
>If so, should a high temperature incinerator be built in Australia -
>where?
>
>Or are there any other solutions to this controversial problem?

There will always be toxic waste - industrial, radiological, biological, 
medical, and whatnot.  The question is one of what to do with it as a 
real world solution (as opposed to political or religious, which have 
poor track records).

Incineration has the wonderful advantage (except for radiological waste, 
of course) of reducing volume by 90+% and leaving nothing but inorganics, 
plus producing co-generation energy to help pay for itself.  Exhaust 
scrubbing technology is mature.  Build the things on the coast where the 
prevailing winds are out to sea.  The solution to pollution is dilution 
(as long as the objectionable species are reactive - not polychlorinated 
hydrocarbons or aromatics).

Add a designated national landfill out in the desiccated middle of 
nowhere, dug deep and huge, perhaps lined with geotextile for drainage 
control.  You cannot avoid waste, but you can redcue it, corral it and 
put it in one place with a big sign:  If You Enter Here You Will Die.  
Sacrifce 100 square miles of desert to preserve the other 7,686,748 
square miles of the Commonwealth of Australia.  It makes sense to me.  
(And the leachate from the ash and other stuff, if any, might be rich 
enough in strategic metals to be worht mining.)

An alternative is the US model:  30,000+ waste dumps, 2500 SuperFund 
sites (and about 150 "remediated" to date), about $10 billion in 
litigation, illegal dumping, Environmentalist hysteria... and massive 
contamination.

Environmentalism is that philosophy and dialectic in direct opposition 
to progress in its every form

Mediocrity is a vice of the doomed.

-- 
Alan "Uncle Al" Schwartz
UncleAl0@ix.netcom.com  ("zero" before @)
http://www.netprophet.co.nz/uncleal/
 (Toxic URL!  Hazardous to children, Liberals, and most mammals.)
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"  The Net!