Buried French Toxic-Waste 'Time-Bomb' Could Poison Drinking-Water For Millions in Europe (theguardian.com) 42
Bruce66423 writes (slightly edited to add more context): A former potash mine at Wittelsheim in Alsace now entombs about 42,000 tonnes of toxic industrial waste, and scientists warn that, over time, contaminants could seep upward into the Alsace aquifer, which in turn feeds the transboundary Upper Rhine groundwater system supplying drinking water to millions in France, Germany and Switzerland. Campaigners argue that leaving the waste underground instead of removing it creates a long-term 'time-bomb' for people and wildlife.
Was probably cheap to just bury it... (Score:5, Insightful)
And now it will get excessively expensive for socity. Evil at work.
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Evil? This is the price of modern life. You want your electronics, medical devices, cars, cozy homes, etc, etc? They all require manufacturing that generates lots of waste. It has to go somewhere.
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Evil? This is the price of modern life. You want your electronics, medical devices, cars, cozy homes, etc, etc? They all require manufacturing that generates lots of waste. It has to go somewhere.
Fine. But maybe not somewhere near groundwater, hm'kay?
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Maybe price safe disposal in? Because society always has to pay for it, or, worse, pay a lot more for the disaster that results otherwise. Hence this is _not_ "the price of modern life", it is unfettered greed, willingness to accept a massive damage to society for a moderate personal gain. Evil does not get much more well defined than this.
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"Pricing in" safe disposal would have only covered the cost of burying the stuff in an old potash mine. Whoever dumped it there in the first place obviously judged it to be safe.
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Evil? This is the price of modern life. You want your electronics, medical devices, cars, cozy homes, etc, etc? They all require manufacturing that generates lots of waste. It has to go somewhere.
Fine. But maybe not somewhere near groundwater, hm'kay?
Is there anywhere in Western Europe that isn't "near groundwater?"
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Greenland, obviously.
Re: Was probably cheap to just bury it... (Score:2)
Re:Was probably cheap to just bury it... (Score:4)
Of course. But what is the alternative? Launch it into the sun? The reality is much of waste is simply best buried since we have no meaningful alternative in which to deal with it. The reality is putting it in old disused mines is one of the best waste management practices we have. There was also nothing "cheap" about this mine. Part of the waste management process involves sealing the mine to make it a suitable place for long term storage.
The issue here is that this mine was determined to be geologically unstable and that inspection has shown that water is still able to migrate in and out despite best civil engineering efforts.
Before criticising this as evil, why not tell us what better idea you had in mind.
Welcome to the wonderful world (Score:2)
That's the most obvious example but there are tens of thousands of others.
Salt Holds ... Until It Doesn’t (Score:5, Informative)
Cracks -> water -> salt dissolves -> collapse -> toxic waste leaks -> aquifer poisoned !
Salt mines look perfect for waste storage, dry, impermeable, ancient...
But extracting potash weakens the structure. Water finds its way in. Salt vanishes. Tunnels deform. Containers rupture.
Stocamine (France): 42,000 tons of chemical waste, now sealed under concrete and... under pressure... literally.
Asse II (Germany): same idea, but with nuclear waste. It’s collapsing. Radioactive brine is rising.
Salt lasts forever, until disturbed. Then it flows.
Re: Salt Holds ... Until It Doesn’t (Score:5, Funny)
"Nothin' lasts forever,
And we both know mines can change.
And it's hard to dodge Uranium,
In the toxic November rain."
- Flasks N' Doses
And put it where? (Score:3, Insightful)
Calls to remove it. Ok, where should it go? Dump it somewhere else? Transporting it will have protests against transporting it through their towns. Incinerate it? People freak out over that. So where should it go? You can't break down things like heavy metals, they are elements. Trap them in filters? Ok, now the filters need to be dumped somewhere.
People want modern life and comforts but can't accept the cost of it.
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What do you do with toxic waste? Not every location is equally bad.
It's the principle of: Don't shit where you eat.
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Calls to remove it. Ok, where should it go?
Wherever is they said in their 1991 proposal when they wilfully applied for REVERSIBLE storage in order to get AUTHORISATION as per LAW which also required them PRE-FUNDING for the later removal.
It was not planned as a definitive storage site. It happened as a definitive storage due to haphazards: mine fire, bankruptcies, years in tribunal, being right now too damaged to move, and today the Court decision to leave it like that.
Since you ask, an adequate site for long-term storage would be one of the geologi
Neutralizing agent X-Prize... (Score:2)
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The solution to getting rid of waste of all kinds is to continue to reduce the cost of escape launches.
Starship is targeting $20/ kg and under.
The annual cost to store nuclear waste starts at $200 / KG and goes up to $2000 / KG.
IE, it is very soon going to be 10x, to 100x cheaper to just launch this stuff into space with a general solar trajectorm, than to store it.
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yeah because those things never fail....
It is not in anyway much more risky that something like a slat mine leaking, than a rocket failing and spraying toxic soup across hundreds of square miles.
Trying to launch large volumes of toxic waste into space is CRAZY.
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You can engineer around that. Its actually not a hard engineering problem at all to design a safety shell for the payload.
Re:Neutralizing agent X-Prize... (Score:5, Insightful)
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It does not need to get to the sun.
It just needs to get out of orbit and on a general, slow trajectory into space.
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In other words, continue to pollute. Only the location is different.
Re:Neutralizing agent X-Prize... (Score:4, Funny)
In other words, continue to pollute. Only the location is different.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
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and them it returns 200 years and you have it crashing in the earth (or whatever planet we colonize) ...
or get hit by some asteroid and you have a cloud of waste incoming
that is the problem with nuclear waste, the lifetime is so large that is hard to plan anything.
industrial waste, depends what it is and how it behaves in space to see if it is still dangerous 20, 100, 200 years after
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"and them it returns 200 years and you have it crashing in the earth"
I saw that episode of Futurama also
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Re: Neutralizing agent X-Prize... (Score:2)
You could also just send it to the moon.
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Unless you throw it out of the solar system entirely, which is almost as hard as hitting the sun, then you still run the risk of the orbit eventually intersecting Earth again. Store it in proper containers in a geologically stable place [youtube.com].
Why is hitting the sun hard? Hitting it and surviving, yes, but launching something into the sun is downright easy.
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It just... isn't. If you were to launch right at high noon from the equator on the equinox and aim straight at the sun, you'd miss. You'd just end up in a slightly different orbit than the Earth. There's a huge amount of momentum that anything launching from Earth already has, and you need to cancel that out. This is a good thing actually (it's what keeps the Earth from hitting the sun).
It's a lot of delta-v, sure, but I'd argue that doesn't make it difficult — just expensive.
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It just needs to get out of orbit and on a general,
1) It's escaping Earth ("out of orbit" in your sentence) that is the expensive part. 2) Even at the prices for low earth orbit, it's still 100x of times more expensive than the existing solution. StocaMine in TFA was planned for 320,000,000 kg. It closed after some years of being unprofitable, having accumulated losses of 65 million euros. The price you propose leads to 6.4 billions, about 100x more than the losses that forced this storage mine off.
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If we feel the need to move transuranics off planet, I would argue for the moon. That way future humanity could still recover it if needed and it wouldn't be completely impossible.
Wait until the French people realize (Score:2)
You need water to make both bread and wine.
How serious is this? (Score:2)
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Arsenic, yes, pretty bad
Cyanide, sure, but it is not alone, may connect to other things and be more stable
mercury, while liquid that is true, but again it can connect to other things and escape
the problem with arsenic and mercury is that they climb the food chain and guess what is in the top of the food chain, storing all those dangerous components and unable to eliminate them!!
Hey Europe, Look at Love Canal! (Score:2)
For the love of all that matters, don't make the mistake the US did, fix it now before it's too late.
But Switzerland (Score:2)