The nuclear waste even without the radiation is going to be toxic. Anything with even trace amount of plutonium left (which has a half life time > 200,000 years), will be toxic (much more than e.g. mercury).
Eh, I don't think I agree. Let's talk about the long-lived isotopes: Pu-239 and Pu-242.
Significant inhaled Pu-239 has a fair risk of causing cancer even after a long time. However mercury is volatile and it's a lot easier to end up inhaling fumes.
And mercury is absorbed well through ingestion and Pu isn't, and most of the risk after ingestion would be chemical, not radiological. From that standpoint, it's looking a lot better than other heavy metals.
The reason we don’t have more solid non-radiological toxicity data on Plutonium (compared to other toxic heavy metals) is because any amount significant enough to count kills people radiologically super quick.
That doesn’t mean it’s non-toxic if we ignore the radiological effects.
* Plutonium is not well absorbed by ingestion compared to other heavy metals and know ballpark ingestion toxicities
* We also know that pretty much all the plutonium except the long-lived isotopes are gone on a timescale of tens of thousands of years-- leaving behind mostly uranium isotopes.
* There's no real reason to believe this mixture of uranium and a small fraction of long-lived plutonium isotopes is significantly worse than ingesting uranium. It might be worse to inhale fine dust, though.
* Mercury is way worse than uranium because it is so readily absorbed.
Elemental mercury is not absorbed at all. You’re probably thinking of methyl mercury and various mercury salts (which, by the way, are not very common).
We have nearly zero experience with weathered or bio modified plutonium. And the experience we do have with plutonium compounds, is limited by the fact people die awfully fast when they’re anywhere near them.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Especially not when the evidence is absent because we can’t get there because everyone dies first from the more obvious bad things happening.
And the experience we do have with plutonium compounds, is limited by the fact people die awfully fast when they’re anywhere near them.
The US nuclear weapons program had several hundred people who were accidentally exposed to measurable doses of plutonium. Those workers did not die at the time. The government set up The United States Transuranium and Uranium Registries (USTUR) to track long term health outcomes for such exposed workers.
When I worked with the USTUR, they had also acquired some data from former workers in the Soviet nuclear weapons complex. The most exposed workers there received higher doses than any American workers. Even then health impacts were not immediately fatal.
It's a lot to read, but there has yet to be a human plutonium exposure accident so severe that the exposed individual died quickly. Or at least no published accident of that sort. There is however a dose-dependent risk of lung cancer from inhaling aerosolized plutonium.
> Elemental mercury is not absorbed at all. You’re probably thinking of methyl mercury and various mercury salts (which, by the way, are not very common).
Basically any mercury that I'm going to ingest accidentally is likely to be a salt. Because elemental mercury is going to evaporate.
> Especially not when the evidence is absent because we can’t get there because everyone dies first from the more obvious bad things happening.
Rats given Pu-239 show LD-50's of hundreds of milligrams per kilogram. Versus something like 20 mg/kg for inorganic mercury.
We have human studies where people were injected with several micrograms of plutonium and went to live on normal lives; and we have human studies where adults absorb less than 1/1000th of the plutonium ingested.
Metallic mercury doesn't really exist as something one could ingest unless you break a thermometer or something. People get mercury poisoning, but they get it from inhaling fumes (not too much like the plutonium risk) or from ingesting salts.
When we talk about mercury in the environment, we talk about the forms that it exists in-- just like we'd be talking about plutonium oxide.
> Why do you dodge the question?
I'm sorry-- I assumed we were talking about something useful or that made sense-- not to say, it's more dangerous than mercury (when choosing the form of mercury that's not implicated in toxicity events too often).
Why are you moving the goalposts? We have animal and, unfortunately, a lot of human data on plutonium exposure.
There is nothing in this entire thread that is useful or makes sense, eh?
Just like arguing that the only common form of mercury people would run across in daily life (elemental!) isn’t applicable, since it isn’t implicated in toxicity events (duh! Because it’s not particular toxic and requires massive exposures over time!) - when we’re talking about relative toxicity of elemental plutonium and mercury compounds, eh?
Or do you want to try to guess if we can make a plutonium equivalent of methyl mercury - which we haven’t really tried to make, because it’s insane.
If all else is held equal, then yes, that follows. But the debate is more or less that some think it will hasten that timeline (through nuclear warfare and accidents) and some think it will delay it (by reducing pollution/climate change).
I think we should use more nuclear energy, I think nuclear powered container ships are under explored for instance. But it's not so simple. Nuclear energy programs can become nuclear weapons programs. A larger uranium mining and processing industry lowers the barriers of entry for building a weapons program. We're not going to exhaust our uranium reserves anytime soon. We're not going to be wiped out by a nuclear accidents, but we're heading into a future of stronger storms and more frequent wildfires, and nuclear power has a way of making disasters even worse.
I've been thinking about nuclear powered container ships for a while. Ships burn the worst fuel, bunker fuel or heavy fuel oil. Nuclear is a lot more clean.
And yes there's the risk of greater nuclear proliferation but we already have colossal stockpiles of nuclear weapons that pose a massive threat to mankind. That's been the reality for 70 years.
No, forever isn't a rounding error compared to forever. No human civilization has any reason whatsoever to make any distinction between "this field over here will be safe for farming in 10,000 years" and "this field over here will never be safe for farming".
In addition, nuclear isn't competing against coal, it's competing against solar.
If anything is competing against solar, it's solar + batteries + high cost semiconductor switch yards + massive amounts of new transmission lines + replacing the panels every 20 - 30 years + being dependent on China for solar panels.
