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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.
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
Yeah, unless you’re going around and picking up all the tiny little bugs, you’re not really doing anything to fix the pollution…
They accumulate it in a specific organ, but they aren’t magical alchemy machines. It stays in their bodies until they die, then they decompose and it goes back into the ground.
And when they say “more than 5ft” they mean it’s closer to 10.
What’s the point of a flail if it doesn’t even give me a small advantage against shields?
Excuse me, KILOcurie source?
Remember when last year Australia panicked because a source fell off a truck? That was a 0.3 Curie source.
I wouldn’t exactly say “any technician” can operate this with “minimal instruction”.
But Uhm, it’s also true
Ahhh, a true classic!
Fun fact: almost no country has legal requirements to operate a forklift. But almost every country requires your employer to “properly instruct” you in the use of heavy machinery, and for reasons of legal ass covering, they all use external certification.
But there is basically nothing preventing you from some private recreational forklift operating
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
Removed by mod
Well, they’re funding a fusion reactor. I think that’s very solidly outside of making videogames.
Sometimes when you bet, you lose. And it’s better to cash out when you do.
An unfortunate reality is that while we CAN store things safely, that doesn’t mean they always will be.