Re: The Year 2038 Problem

From: Gerry Quinn (gerryq_at_DELETETHISindigo.ie)
Date: 05/29/04 

Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 15:32:11 +0100

In article <2hrgvfFd8qnpU1@uni-berlin.de>, Jens.Toerring@physik.fu-
berlin.de says...
>
> > Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that are hidden
> > 'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called uranium with a half-
> > life of 4000 million years, just hidden in rocks in unmarked locations
> > all over the planet. If you have a granite fireplace, there's even some
> > in your house, oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.
>
> Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
> difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
> the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
> common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
> away in. Or did they come upt with a way to distribute that stuff
> evenly over a volume of a small mountain range and nobody told me?

The irony is that that (dispersion) is precisely the sort of thing that
people object to! The result is that radioactive waste is held in
concentrated form and everyone is afraid of it. If it were diluted, the
environmentalists would protest that where there were once a thousand
tons of nuclear waste, there are now a million.

Note how frequently you see a casually implied estimate of the threat
from nuclear materials in terms of the mass of material multiplied by
the halflife.

And people complain about quite insignificant amounts of radionucleides
in seawater.

- Gerry Quinn

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