A dumping ground for nuclear waste located near the British coast is "virtually certain" to be washed away by rising sea levels, a new report warns. The UK Environment Agency has admitted that constructing the Drigg Low-Level Waste Repository so near the coast was a mistake, and that one million cubic meters of nuclear waste will begin leaking into the ocean "a few hundred to a few thousand years from now."
Organized crime is famously good at exploiting time-sensitive industries like construction, fishing, and—of course—garbage removal. But revelations about millions of tons of toxic waste buried haphazardly and illegally by the mob are causing an uproar in southern Italy, where cancer rates are nearly 50 percent higher than the average in certain areas.
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First, dig a hole. Then, reinforce it with clay, concrete, steel, and plastic. Fill it with nuclear waste and cover it in forty more feet of concrete. Then profit. That’s how one company in Texas has struck radioactive gold, charging companies $10,000 per cubic foot to store nuclear refuse.
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Nuclear power is great, but the waste it creates is a problem. Best case scenario we can turn it into more power
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The wonders of graphene never seem to cease. Desalinization, flexible semiconductors, and now nuclear waste clean-up. It turns out graphene-oxide is fantastic for clumping up around radioactive waste making it easier to get rid of the stuff. More »
Us humans have been quick to embrace digital technology for preserving our memories, but we’ve forgotten that most of our storage won’t last for more than a few decades; when a hard drive loses its magnetism or an optical disc rots, it’s useless. French nuclear waste manager ANDRA wants to make sure that at least some information can survive even if humanity itself is gone — a million or more years, to be exact. By using two fused disk platters made from sapphire with data written in a microscope-readable platinum, the agency hopes to have drives that will keep humming along short of a catastrophe. The current technology wouldn’t hold reams of data — about 80,000 minuscule pages’ worth on two platters — but it could be vital for ANDRA, which wants to warn successive generations (and species) of radioactivity that might last for eons. Even if the institution mostly has that pragmatic purpose in mind, though, it’s acutely aware of the archeological role these €25,000 ($30,598) drives could serve once leaders settle on the final languages and below-ground locations at an unspecified point in the considerably nearer future. We’re just crossing our fingers that our archived internet rants can survive when the inevitable bloody war wipes out humanity and the apes take over.
[Image credit: SKB]
France’s ANDRA developing a million-year hard drive, we hope our badly-written blogs live in perpetuity originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 15 Jul 2012 13:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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