In addition to hazardous materials regulations, I also do workplace safety, and this doesn’t surprise me at aaaaall. People get really casual around stuff that kills you slowly.
In addition to hazardous materials regulations, I also do workplace safety, and this doesn’t surprise me at aaaaall. People get really casual around stuff that kills you slowly.
I mean, spent fuel is actually quite lethal when not packaged, but you get something like 300-400MWh out of a kilo of fuel. And that’s significantly more than I’ll use in my lifetime.
I’d gladly keep a kilo of dry-casked spent fuel in my house. It’d make an excellent coffee table or something, if a bit hard to move. I would absolutely not put a lifetime supply of benzene anywhere near my house.
Edit: it would make a shitty coffee table. 1 kilo of uranium oxide is just under 100ml
Oh yeah, you could totally just leave it in a giant pool and ignore it. It’ll react, evaporate and eventually break down into cyanide again, rain down, subtly poison the area, react again, evaporate again, etc.
And that’s great for the owner of the big pool of cyanide, and very bad for everyone else. Stuff that evaporates doesn’t disappear, the cyanide doesn’t magically change into cookiedough. You’re just spreading it around more.
If Russia and the west start shooting eachother, one of four things will happen.
1 - Russia grows a brain and backs down when they horribly lose a conventional war. (Unlikely, unless someone takes command authority away)
2 - Russia kept their nuclear arsenal up to date, and a tiny remnant.of humanity gets to enjoy the Stone Age again. It won’t hurt if you live in a city though.
3 - Only a tiny fraction of their nukes launch, and the west responds proportionally. A lot of people die, but at least we’ll fix global warming.
That’s uhh, not what that says. One of the two mentions of half life are your body converting cyanide into thiocyanate, which will kill you and depending on your last bowel movement, make your corpse into hazardous waste itself.
The other mention is hydrogen cyanide in air, which is lighter than air and will decompose back into cyanide eventually, scattering it over a large area. Which will technically make it go away from your site, but spreading toxic waste over the countryside is illegal for a reason.
Hi, I work in waste handling, and I would like to tell you about dangerous materials and what we do with them.
There are whole hosts of chemicals that are extremely dangerous, but let’s stick with just cyanide, which comes from coal coking, steel making, gold mining and a dozen chemical synthesis processes.
Just like nuclear waste, there is no solution for this. We can’t make it go away, and unlike nuclear waste, it doesn’t get less dangerous with time. So, why isn’t anyone constantly bringing up cyanide waste when talking about gold or steel or Radiopharmaceuticals? Well, that’s because we already have a solution, just not “forever”.
Cyanide waste, and massive amounts of other hazardous materials, are simply stored in monitored facilities. Imagine a landfill wrapped in plastic and drainage, or a building or cellar with similar measures and someone just watches it. Forever. You can even do stuff like build a golfcourse on it, or malls, or whatever.
There are tens of thousands of these facilities worldwide, and nobody gives a solitary fuck about them. It’s a system that works fine, but the second someone suggests we do the same with nuclear waste, which is actually less dangerous than a great many types of chemical waste, people freak out about it not lasting forever.
It’s not renewable, but known reserves will power the world for a century, based solely on current average efficiency and not modern improvements
The world of a hundred years ago. Where I live, the liberal parties mostly want to create more freedom for companies to fuck people over.
Also, obviously you don’t want the lounge opening right into the bathroom. Unless that’s your thing, but then you should just convert your gay room into a multipurpose area.
I dunno, seems really inconvenient to me. What if you decide to get married at some point? I would just build a sex-regardless-marriage room, to get a little potential future-proofing done.
And maybe expand the gay room a bit.
Mike can fuck right off.
But Uhm, it’s also true
An aircraft carrier only has a draft of some 12 meters. Godzilla is over 100m. Much of the North Sea is only like 40m deep, with shallows much less than that.
Especially in Australia, where there’s an insane amount of empty nothing to place wind turbines. Northern Australia gets twice as much solar irradiation as western Europe, it’s absolutely ideal for (rooftop) solar.
Economies of scale and “high density” power generation make sense for some places, but even a place with the population density of the Netherlands can cram in enough wind turbines to get a significant fraction of renewable energy. It should be a total no-brainer for Australia.
If you’re trying to make the argument that google isn’t just a search engine, then I fully agree.
And the 19th, and a large part of the 20th too
So, you’re saying they’re sexist and racist, and we should all be enraged and immediately donate to our favourite bigots?
Removed by mod
Well, they’re funding a fusion reactor. I think that’s very solidly outside of making videogames.
An unfortunate reality is that while we CAN store things safely, that doesn’t mean they always will be.