Nuclear Waste Manifesto - Part III

A continuation from Part II. (God knows when this going to end, I write on the fly).

These are the Harry Potter Laws of Nuclear Waste (notice that she had to write the Laws of Magic, because everything would go heck pretty fast if there weren't any!)

1. No free-riders! You want the high-tech industry, live with responsibility!

2. This is an industrial facility, just the same as a giant Toyota plant. The stuff comes in giant steel and concrete containers and goes underground. Nothing escapes, because it is physically impossible. It has nothing to do with nuclear bombs, or Chernobyl, or all that other dreck.

3. We are doing this because it is better to put these steel things underground than have them in flimsy warehouses with cracked floors, with the seismic design of a Toronto Condo.

4. We are putting them into absolutely bone-dry rock that produces rock cores you could use for a baseball bat. It will be so nice, warm and comfy that you'll want to live there, if the US ever decides to bomb Iran!

5. Forget this 'million years' shit! Our knowledge of the world completely turns over every few years, we can't predict to a million years. You might as well just roll over and die, if you want a million year guarantee. All we can say is that there is less than a million to one chance that something bad will happen within 100 years. You can translate that to a million years, if you believe all the probability crap that the nuclear plants give you.

6. Since the rock is bone dry and solid, this is what we call a 'diffusion regime' which is the only way to place nuclear waste. That means if even old Putin starts a world war, and our mutated survivors go to ratshit, and all those big steel containers crumble to dust, the farthest that the plutonium can go is about 5 cm into the rock.

7. Of course, the most probably scenario is that the stuff becomes more valuable than gold, and we make out like bandits!

Harry Potter isn't real, and this manifesto will never see the light of day. Most likely, we will bicker forever, and the waste will go where people want the money, even though the rock is swiss cheese (yucca-yucca), or underwater gravel (Bruce).