“Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never Is, but always To be blest.” – Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1733.
Pope goes on to say – “The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.” I’m not sure what he means, but “never is, but always to be blest” really does suggest that the blessed solution actually never comes.
All that is fine, in the religious context. Because that way, it will all come good when we get to Heaven, in the next life. In the nuclear waste context, the powers that be are as confident as the religious leaders, that all problems will be solved – later on, so we can go on hell-for-leather, making the poisonous trash.
I was prompted to these thoughts by January 22nd news from Missouri – High likelihood of radioactive waste in smoldering landfill, Missouri officials say. I’ve been following this particular radioactive trash problem for at least 12 years. And that fire’s still going! And that radiation is still causing cancers in the local community.
Dr Helen Caldicott, founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, visiting St Louis in 2016, said – the radioactive contamination in north St. Louis County is “worse than most places” she’s investigated, and called the situation “obscene.” Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste.
So, the cleanup of St Louis’ County radioactive sites, contaminated by wastes from nuclear-weapons – making, goes on, with ever hopes to complete it – while the nuclear-weapons-making goes on, creating even more radioactive trash
St Louis County is symbolic of the whole obscene nuclear waste situation across the planet
Energy expert Kurt Cobb, writing in Oil Price, examines Sweden’s options for disposing of nuclear waste. He argues that climate change, political instability, and technological limitations could all pose threats to the long-term safety of nuclear waste storage. The Swedish plan is to fill the storage site – “60 km of tunnels buried 500 metres down in 1.9 billion year old bedrock” – sometime by 2080 at which time it will be closed.
Cobb points out that civilization, that is, human settlement in cities, has only been around about 10,000 years, but the wastes must be safe and secure for 100,00 years. The containers, copper capsules, are likely to corrode, and leak radioactive elements into groundwater, in a much shorter time.
He questions our faith in technological progress, which is supposed to absolutely solve the nuclear waste problem. It’s very like the Christian view on Alexander Pope’s statement – we’re not going to be blest in this world, so just look to life in the hereafter.
Kurt Cobb also discusses nuclear reprocessing, which brings its own problems, and still creates more waste, and he mentions other suggestions – shooting such waste into space or into the Sun.
Now here’s where I’m shocked at Mr Cobb. In all my years of reading worthy treatises on nuclear waste disposal, this is the first time I’ve found an energy expert to come up with a heretical thought like stopping making radioactive trash:
“I wonder if we were wise to create something in the first place that requires 100,000 years of care, given how heedless we as a species are to hazards of our own making that may destroy our current civilization much, much sooner than a thousand centuries from now.“
Really, Mr Cobb, wash your mouth out with soap! You don’t say things like that, if you want to be taken seriously by the world’s reputable nuclear experts.
Also by Noel: Dangerous climate radical, Lloyd’s of London, appears to be threatening the world economy
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Unfortunately in Aus, the people who need to read the final quote – led by that fool Dutton and his cronies – will not, and if it’s mentioned to them, will deny its accuracy or relevance here.
Fortunately we in Australia have nuclear experts like Spudley Dutton who has explained that under his plan for Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s) all this talk of nuclear waste is so much malarkey. “If you look at a 450 megawatt reactor, it produces waste equivalent to the size of a can of Coke each year, Mr Dutton explained.”
Now that fact checking is no longer a thing I am going to try and include references, citations and the like from reliable sources as otherwise it is all just a wisp of smoke : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-21/what-happens-nuclear-waste-coalition-plan-/104003454
Thanks Noel. I had not known of the Missouri site which is bad enough, but that may pale in comparison to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, once the United States’ largest plutonium production site, and is now designated the most toxic place in America.
As this report notes:
“The EPA designated Hanford the most toxic place in America; it is also the most expensive environmental clean-up job the world has ever seen, with a $677 billion price tag that keeps growing. Huge underground tanks, well past their life expectancy and full of boiling radioactive gunk, are leaking, infecting groundwater supplies and threatening the Columbia River.”
[ https://www.counterpunch.org/product/atomic-days/ ]
I wonder if Mr. Dutton has offered a solution – have to get some detail on that.
Humanity has somehow “accidentally” allowed, or permitted, or stumbled on a form of rule, control, organisation, based on the very worst in charge, often because of extreme greed, ignorance, ambition, stupidity, loudmouthery, threats, coercion. If you would insist on a clot in your heart, an abscess in your brain, a boil in your bladder, a pox suffusing your genitalia and a carbuncle up the clakka, vote for a Trump or Dutton type.