quote: Currently, teams of scientists, linguists, and anthropologists are struggling to properly identify Nuclear Waste burial sites. It sounds simple at first... until you consider the half-life of this crap will far out live any facility or structure that contains it, the memory of what it was, or our descendants' ability to read the warnings on the labels, leaving us Neglectful Precursors to our own descendants. As an added twist, future archaeologists might successfully decode the labels, just to brush off our warnings as the superstitious ramblings of an ancient, underdeveloped culture. Damn Interesting has an article on the process.
I've found the issue hilariously put in a clever anology.
"GM: Having climbed for days, your party reaches a summit in the Sierra Nevadas. There is a clearing here, with a raised dais adorned with engravings depicting horrible, ritualistic deaths. Many of them feature people touching barrels and being smote with disease and suffering. A heavy metal door hangs ajar, but it is surrounded by the contorted corpses of other mountaineers. D&D Player: There must be awesome loot in here!"
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Time line of our buildings and what not when we die
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
Also an interesting thought on how to reproduce the human races from 3 breeding pairs.
quote: Basically, you need an artificial gestation environment and a means of gene sampling (preferably germ-line). Label the males A-x and the females 1-n, with x & n being the highest number or letter of the respective gender left. Produce 1 of each combo in each gender, whose identifier is the combination of the two parents (Male A + Female 1 = Male A1 and Female A1). Place in artificial gestation environment and grow for 9 months. When these reach adulthood, produce a new set of offspring from them, but this time, leave out all combinations that share a letter or number (indicating shared heritage) (Thus Male A1 can produce 2 children A1B2, for instance). Within 7-10 18-year generations, you should have a sufficient genetic pool to go back to the old-fashioned way, though I'd still keep records for safety's sake.
posted
I really have trouble caring all that much about post civilized societies with nuclear waste.
If they aren't advanced enough to understand it, then they probably have worse things to concern themselves with than some out of the way nuclear waste. And if people do get in and loot, I'm sure that word of the dangers will get out before too long after the first few people who break in.
But I doubt it will even matter. I suspect that long before this would ever take place, we'll have long since reprocessed pretty much all of the fuel there for further use in reactors.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
I think of it in the way that in principle its our first ogligation to make sure our successors do not inheret our problems or suffer from our negligence.
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It's actually really good that we haven't glassified the spent fuel and buried it because only about 5% of the energy in the fuel is used up by this generation of reactors. I think the best option is to reprocess the fuel and use most of the remaining energy in it. That will also mean the final waste products will be much smaller and will be radioactive for a much shorter length of time.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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