The Future Lasts a Long Time

“I’m not an expert on any of this,”

You certainly aren’t. If you think that the emergency vehicles arriving in less than at the recent Air France crash Just Happened Without Any Planning, then you’re kidding yourself, as is Lee Clarke.

What such planning documents can do, as well as identify response strategies, is also identify critical vulnerabilities in your facility and procedures.

Frex, there hasn’t been a Bhopal or even a Flixborough-level disaster in the Chemical Industry for the last decade-and-a-half; when you consider the volume of flammable or profoundly nasty stuff made and transported by that industry, that might strike you as surprising. But it’s ‘cos the engineering practices improve based on past experience. Frex, the lessons out of Bhopal were to reduce inventory of reactive intermediates stored at one location, and to reduce the volumes stored in a particular vessel.

Want an example? Phosgene is used to produce polycarbonate plastics (like are used in CDs). Phosgene is nasty stuff. But you’ll find minimal inventories of phosgene at polycarbonate producers, ‘cos PPG Industries developed small-scale phosgene plants that are about the size of a large room; so no need to store phosgene.

Similarly, you have procedures with hot work in areas processing flammables, etc.

usoa: You missed his point. 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’? Let alone a million? Not to mention that a lot of what we’ve learned about storing large amounts of dangerous chemicals boils down to: don’t do that. We don’t really have that option in the nuclear waste case…

Your emergency vehicle example is off-target, as well. Emergency protocols have improved because we’ve had a lot of experience with, say, airplane accidents. There is some predictibility. Fundamentally, we don’t know what we are doing with nuclear waste. This means that while we may be able to design fairly good disaster response plans (because disasters, we know something about) around failures of our storage plans, we probably can’t really design good storage plans. Bear in mind how much repitition and new data aids this sort of data, combined with the fact that nobody has ever done such a thing before.

The Onion: Bush Vows To Eliminate U.S.
Dependence On Oil By 4920. The proclamation comes on the heels of Bush’s plans to pay off the national debt by the early 6300s, and win the war on terror by 7450.

You know, I read this post, and I say to myself, “Well, gee, the people who write these things aren’t, as Kieran implies, complete morons and shills. They must have some basis for these predictions. Their report probably spells out the assumptions, the problems, the knownk unknowns (to quote Rumsfeld). The predictions are probably mostly based on material fatigue studies, which can be extrapolated to some extent, based on our understanding of physics, material science, and chemistry, though there will always be uncertainty. Sure, the government mouthpiece exaggerates the claims, and doesn’t point out the uncertainties, but that’s what PR people do.”

So, then I think about posting something like this, and I say to myself, “Well, I don’t really know how they came to those conclusions; maybe there are other factors that haven’t been considered. Maybe material fatigue studies aren’t reasonable to use for this scenario, I don’t know enough about material fatigue to say. I’m just not enough of an expert to comment on this.”

And, as I’m pressing the back button, I realize, this is why I can never have a huge, popular blog. I am totally unwilling to commit myself on the record to commenting on things about which I have absolutely no clue. Kieran, apparently, has no such qualms (a trait he retains, as I recall, from his days writing opinion pieces for the Daily Prince.) It requires a special type of hubris to be a pundit, I think, one which I lack. Which is not to say that I lack hubris, or even that I don’t enjoy Kieran’s posts, or that I don’t think this one is interesting and thought provoking. But, seriously, I can’t figure out for the life of me where an sociologist gets the balls to comment on materials science. It’s just totally foreign to me.

m. gordon: I have no idea where Kierans conclusions are drawn from, but mine are from the following. Although I have a hard science background, I am not a material scientist either. I have, however, had this or related conversations with people who are, and people in the nuclear industry. The main problems are a) we don’t actually know how to engineer anything over these time periods. Nobody has ever done it. b) historically, many of the measures that were taken with nuclear waste have failed (eg there are a large number of burst containment vessels … yes these were designed as temporary measures but did not last out their design liftime, if I understand correctly (I’ll try and find a cite for that if I have a chance) c) the problem with the comparison with ore deposits is that almost tautologically the ore deposits were for the most part in geologically stable areas etc. until we disturbed them. When looking at storage, we don’t have economically feasable ways to be sure of reproducing this, as I understand it, even if (and this is questionable) our geoscience is up for it.

I am always a bit leery of optimistic claims of `our engineers/experts’ have sorted it out, simply because there are so many historical cases where this was just wrong. Every failure does improve our knowledge, yes, but that has no predictive power over the mistakes we don’t know we’ve made yet.

When I heard about the report on the radio this morning my first reaction was similar but as I pondered it I assumed they were focusing on the Yucca option over other options and then trying to test it against the “known unknowns” as stated above.
Ultimately that’s a good thing to me. But of course the fall back position still available with Yucca is that if too many “unknown unknowns” start to crop up in the future, the technology will hopefully be there to address the situation in some new way.
Better in Yucca than spread around the country in deposits of varying quality and security in my book.

If we can count on the survival of civilization, storing nuclear wastes for 10,000 or 1,000,000 years is not much of an issue because if a storage system develops a problem, people can just go in and fix it. What made the safety assessments of Yucca Mountain so unrealistic was the requirement that the site take care of itself for 10,0000 years. That’s what nobody knows how to do.

There are genuine problems with nuclear power, but most of the folks I’ve talked to who actually know something about the issues are more skeptical about the economic viability of new plants than the difficulty of taking care of nuclear wastes. Indeed, since the sheer volume of wastes is rather small by industrial standards, it’s rather hard to believe that solutions aren’t available if the politics can be taken care of.

Jim Harrison,
Could you expand on what you meant about the economic feasibility of nuclear power? I was under the impression that including everything form fuel production to waste management to plant decommissioning, nuclear power costs almost the exact same as coal power. And coal power is dirt cheap, about 3-5 cents/kWh, or about 150 times less per kWh than Californians pay :P

I think Donald is right. Stuff with a half-life measured in thousands of years might as well be spread in a thin layer across the desert because it can’t be high-energy stuff. The nuclear waste that you’ve got to watch out for tends to decay much more quickly.

“Your emergency vehicle example is off-target, as well.”

OK, planning for disasters doesn’t work. Except when it does. Right.

“Are you suggesting that very large-scale catastrophes are susceptible to rational planning in the same way that a jetliner crash is?”

Certainly no rational planning is going to be worse than having a plan, however inadequate. And the relative cost of preparing a plan is minimal compared to the cost of being unprepared.

As a sociologist, you should easily have spotted that Lee Clarke’s argument has a selection bias; big catastrophes are the ones where the accident prevention plans, engineering interlocks or whatever were bypassed or ignored and the accident continguency plans failed; this is certainly true of Chernobyl and Bhopal, which Clarke mentions in his book. Further, Bhopal had no evacuation plan; wheras the similar Carbide plant at Institute in West Virginia did have an evacuation plan, and when a substantial chemical release happened at Institute a year after Bhopal, 135 were injured instead of thousands killed. I note that Clarke doesn’t even mention Institute in his index.

Overall, I think your argument is like arguing that seat belts are pointless because people still die wearing them.

The French heavily recycle their waste into new rods, so they produce relatively little waste. Thats the good part of their strategy. The bad part is the waste they do end up with they have no current final plans what to do with, which is not bad 30 years after building 56 nuclear plants.

The had planned to bury it and forget about it, but that was found to be unpopular, so they are talking about ‘stocking’ it underground for later potential reuse. I think 2006 is the current deadline for a stocking spot to be chosen, and I believe the idea is for teams of scientists to be based at the site to conduct further research into reusing, detoxifying, or whatever they can do for the waste.

“Kieran, apparently, has no such qualms (a trait he retains, as I recall, from his days writing opinion pieces for the Daily Prince.) It requires a special type of hubris to be a pundit, I think, one which I lack. ”

Kieran is actually quite qualified to post on this because this is not a debate about science, it is a debate about values (or more accurately pseudo-values) and thus about sociology. The current situation is that a certain group of people (who, for various reasons oppose nuclear power) have managed to get their way through pushing the line that we, the people of today, care so much about our ancestors 10,000 or 1,000,000 years from now, that we will do whatever it takes to protect them from nuclear waste — with the all-important side effect that nuclear power goes nowhere. This position is clearly bullshit — if we cared about future generations we’d be doing something about the problems of generations 1, 2 and 3 coming up in the next hundred years, eg using up all the oil, global climate change, deforestation, water reserves, and species extinction. We’d be spending more money on AIDS vaccines and less on anti-retrovirals. And so on.

In twenty years or less, the science won’t have changed a bit, but people will suddenly decide, as the price of electricity triples, “you know what, screw future generations; stick the waste in the desert somewhere with a big fence around it, just give me cheap nuclear power”.

i said: “Your emergency vehicle example is off-target, as well.” (usoa removed the context describing why this is true)

usoa said: “OK, planning for disasters doesn’t work. Except when it does. Right.”

So, are you intentionally being obtuse, or just didn’t read carefully? Clearly my point was that the issue is *not* disaster response (which we can do, with varying degrees of success). The issue is containment design (which whe can’t do on these time scales).

Or are you suggesting that we should implement a containment strategy, assume it will fail catastrophically, but rely on a good disaster response plan?

Either way, your comment seems to claim that I said disaster response doesn’t work. Which is absurd.

Well, you can be awfully messy on this little plot of land, and still rank very well next to fuel sources that require turning whole mountains into flat ground, and arguably anyway, alter the planet’s climate. Just because nuclear manages to concentrate it’s nastiness into relatively small areas doesn’t mean that it’s total nastiness is greater than chemical fuels.

I found an online book about nuclear power by Bernard Cohen, a pro-nuclear power physicist which was linked by the Wikipedia article on radioactive waste. Cohen was the physicist whose writings I had remembered–I think he originally published this stuff in the peer-reviewed Reviews of Modern Physics many years ago. He calculates that the toxicity of high level nuclear waste is equal to that of the original uranium ore after 15,000 years. 99 percent of the toxicity is lost after the first 600 years. He also does calculations of what a lethal ingested dose (eaten or drunk, not breathed, since he says contamination by groundwater is far more likely than some accident which turns the waste into fine dust particles that get inhaled) would be at every stage from removal of the reactor to hundreds of thousands of years into the future.

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.

Dark satanic mills–that’s what I meant to say, rather than smoke-filled industrial revolution stage. Darn–where are the vaguely-remembered literary references when you need them?

Time to go offline now.

But the point of recycling it is that you don’t “dispose” of the weapons grade material, you burn it in another reactor. Most of the mass of our “waste” is really just fuel.

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.

The solution which sounded best to me was building large concrete pyramids in a dry area. The ground under the pyramids would have sensors and wast collection pipes for monitoring; the pyramics would be laced with them. The idea would be to fill each pyramid and cap it. The pyramids would be very, very difficult for miscellaneous small groups to break into; but accessible in case of things going seriously wrong.

“I contested your point because you’re not taking into account how one form of disaster…”

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…”

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.

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

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.

It is not that nuclear waste justifies the construction of a mountain which would consolidate and limit it; rather, the mountain–which, once completed, will be perhaps the single greatest piece of art trouve from the 20th century–justifies the existence of nuclear waste, the atomic bomb, and even the entire United States of America.