The Last Frost

Some people have been touting Nuclear Energy as being the solution to global warming. Afterall nuclear power plants produce no greenhouse gasses in their day to day operations. Well, if you don't count the emissions released during the arduous process of Uranium mining and enrichment, which are considerable. Oh, and if you're able to ignore the pesky problem of nuclear waste. 

Nuclear waste is some pretty nasty stuff. If a living organism (cockroaches and a few others excluded) gets even close to the stuff unprotected it begins to damage it's DNA, more than likely causing a nasty death. The stuff also has a tendency to stay this way for extremely long periods of time, like 250,000 years or so. Think about that… 250 milleniums. Why a mere 4 thousand years ago some Egyptians were working on building these cool new structures called pyramids. 10 thousand years ago our ancestors were living in caves and just figuring out how to grow food.

So if you have to store something so toxic that it will kill almost any living thing that comes near to it, how do you ensure that the "danger" message get's through? What can you do when you don't know what species you will be communicating with, what language they will speak? How do you ensure anything you build today will be around by then? Well these guys have some ideas.

My opinion is that this is exactly why nuclear energy sucks so damn much.

Future Be Warned: Keep Out! » [Wired News]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Predictions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.