Nuclear waste

[HayZee518]

After people are long gone from the earth what happens to all the nuclear waste stored at Yucca mountain? I watched Nat Geo about 250 years after man and it scared me. Nature will take over and repopulated itself with trees and disintegrate everything man has created and I assume this also will happen with the storage facilities of nuclear waste. Concrete disintegrates, rebar turns to rust, certain plastics will break down, From what I learned from high school, radioactive products lose their nuclear concentrations after one-half life and every one-half life thereafter. So its possible for a highly radioactive source to remain active for over 6.25 billion years.

[mrcaptainbob]

Radiation...

I guess it is possible for radioactivity to last that long, and maybe longer. The sun and many other stars a fully radioactive and have been for at least that long....

[pushkins]

To me the major problem is that the waste rods need to be stored in a controlled cooled (usually in water baths) environment, the water needs to be changed on a fairly regular basis, this necessitates the use of electricity to pump the water. If the pumps fail to replace the water with cool water the rods will eventually boil the water dry, once the water is gone the rods continue to get hotter and hotter (up to 4000F) before they themselves turn into a small scale explosion, in the scheme of things the explosion isn't all that large but the radiation release is astronomical.
(Life after Humans......Nat Geo.......Love that show)

[Java_Bob]

Well um, I don't think any of us will be around to know...

[dkpbxman]

To me the major problem is that the waste rods need to be stored in a controlled cooled (usually in water baths) environment, the water needs to be changed on a fairly regular basis, this necessitates the use of electricity to pump the water. If the pumps fail to replace the water with cool water the rods will eventually boil the water dry, once the water is gone the rods continue to get hotter and hotter (up to 4000F) before they themselves turn into a small scale explosion, in the scheme of things the explosion isn't all that large but the radiation release is astronomical.
(Life after Humans......Nat Geo.......Love that show)

In 1979 a movie, "The China Syndrome", was released on that exact premise. In the movie there was a loss of the water used to cool the nuclear rods. Supposedly, after the remaining water boiled away, the pile would get so hot that it would melt the ground below it and drop straight down. It would go all the way through the Earth and come out in China unless it hit an underground river or something at which point the water would cause an explosion and release an incredible amount of radiation.

The movie was released 12 days before the almost catastrophic events at the
Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.