As it came out though, most of your statements seem to be either really off topic, or responding to your misreading of comments; so I don’t see the point, honestly. You seem to be reacting strongly to things nobody said here, by erroneously or deliberately misreading them.

Kieran’s was clearly was not an argument from the specific to the general in the sense that you seem to believe. There are good disaster response documents out there, nobody has denied that. There are also politically-driven fantasy documents, it seems (and nobody has refuted that).

Err, you mean when Kieran said this:

“The sociologist Lee Clarke has argued that plans of this sort, designed to cope with huge disasters or accidents, are fundamentally rhetorical “fantasy documents” that have no prospect of working but which are produced as ritual symbols of social order and control.”

“If you are correct about Clarke’s analysis (and I haven’t read the book, so can’t speak to it) it has no bearing on the fact that there are many `fantasy documents’ around,”

Sure, but that is no reason to trash the practice of preparing plans to deal with large-scale hazards or risks; Kieran seemed to be arguing the general from the particular (as I took you to be). We’re only eight months from one natural disaster that, with a minor amount of planning, could have saved many lives with little upfront cost.

In that case, you really should have been clear that you were ignoring the main thrust of the original post and consequent comments….

By following this up by appearing to respond to particular comments, while ignoring or misreading the content of those posts can only increase the confusion, no?

I agree at this point that we may well be talking at cross-purposes … but it seems to me at least that in your case this is purposeful.

If you are correct about Clarke’s analysis (and I haven’t read the book, so can’t speak to it) it has no bearing on the fact that there are many `fantasy documents’ around, and the Yucca mountain plan is one of them. This has more to do with politics than engineering, though, as pointed out by others.

No, you didn’t contest any point I made.”

No, you missed mine. You said:

“Are you really claiming that your (plausible) claimed improvement in chemical industry short term practices can actually be extrapolated to mean `we know what we are doing with nuclear waste over a 10,000 year period’?”

You assumed that I was defending the Yucca mountain document; instead I was attacking Clarke’s book, which asserts that the disaster planning is a “fantasy”. Disaster planning is an application of the engineering method to hypothesize the potential impacts of the disaster, failure modes and how to respond. The fact that ‘cos it is an application of the engineering method, it involves making assumptions to make the problem tractable does not mean it is “fantasy”. Like I said, Clarke’s problem is that inevitably the disasters he discusses are those where the planning was inadequate or failed.

As several commenters have noted, while we argue about engineering problems that can’t be solved now but also don’t have to be solved now, far more pressing concerns like global warming and energy conservation get knocked down the list. Unfortunately, demagoguing legislation is often a rational move for politicians of all stripes. So how do we get out of this trap? (Note: this is not a rhetorical question.)

No, you didn’t contest any point I made. You asserted an extension of one type of expertise to another without any sort evidence that it actually works. There is no logical connection between the emergency response teams at Pearson airport, and nuclear waste containment, but you seem to be claiming there is. You can’t cargo-cult this stuff, planning requires understanding.

Although it really isn’t (as stated earlier) my area, having for example recently presented at SIAM geosciences conference I have a reasonable idea of state of the art transport models and approaches, from the people who have designed them. If you talk to these guys, one of the things they will tell you is about all the areas they don’t really understand yet. Sure, there is a lot more expertise than we had 30 years ago. And none of it suggests we know what to do over 10,000 years scales.

I contested your point because you’re not taking into account how one form of disaster affects learning on how to prevent a similar disaster, and also how where the regulatory envelope affects the behaviour and precautions taken by the responsible party. Love Canal happened before RCRA and CERCLA, not after. 30 years ago, you’d have had a hard job finding a hydrogeologist with experience with fate & transport of pollutants; now you’ll find a swathe of them in your local yellow pages. There’s expertise we have now that we didn’t have 30 years ago when the solution to pollution was dilution. To discount using that expertise, as Clarke and Kieran do, is the exhaltation of ignorance.

The million-year standard has more to do with protecting Congress and the EPA than it has to do with protecting citizens. I’ve written more here.

No accident, this: The anti-nuke movement has been pursuing a strategy of choking the industry to death in it’s own wastes, by opposing reprocessing to maximize the amount of wastes, while relentlessly opposing every proposal for permanent waste storage.

Pretty darned effective strategy, too.

Time to go offline now.

Anyway, based on what he says I find myself somewhat more concerned about the financial health of Social Security in the thousandth millenium than I am about nuclear waste then. There are other hazards to be thinking about if you take these long-term perspectives. In a given million year time span you expect several impacts by asteroids greater than 1 km in diameter, with energies in the 100,000 to 1 million megaton range. You expect several volcanic eruptions the size of Toba 75,000 years ago, or the size of the series that created the topography of Yellowstone National Park. You expect that in the shorter run humans will have done some serious tinkering with the climate with our ongoing carbon dioxide production program, and you’d expect introductions of ingenious new technologies with apocalyptic potential. So if there are human settlements around Yucca Mountain 500,000 years from now, I hope they won’t have any problems with their drinking water, but after 15,000 years Cohen says the Earth will be slightly less radioactive because the original uranium ore has been turned into waste, so for people as a whole the hazard will have been reduced.

I’m not actually pro-nuke—it’s just that discussions of nuclear waste remaining dangerous for a million years seem a tad overstated to me.