[stevep98]

And the advances in robotics necessary to handle processing the waste are probably just a few decades away.

And if we don't develop these machines, our AI augmented successors will.

Ironically, it's just really short-sighted to plan for something that far in the future.

[rbanffy]

The difficulty here is that radiation fries the brains of the robots, not that they aren't smart enough to work with the stuff. I was a bit shocked the robots people send to observe Fukushima die in minutes of exposure.

It's not something making smaller and faster transistors can solve.

[skocznymroczny]

Have they tried rewriting it in Rust?

[DiThi]

There must be ways to make them more resistant. Ways that we haven't tried or that we haven't thought of. That's where more intelligence comes in.

[jessaustin]

If things go well, we'll eventually have enough surplus energy that it will become reasonable to drop the worst stuff into the mantle.

[brians]

Isn't the delay from mantle entry to volcanic exit much less than 100000 years?

[dredmorbius]

Dilution is useful.

The mantle is ... large.

[ptx]

A few decades ago people reasoned the same way about throwing trash in the sea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t03saJVFkv4

[dredmorbius]

As I said, the Earth's mantle is large.

The total volume of the oceans is about 1.35 billion cubic kilometers.

The total volume of the mantle is 909 billion cubic kilometers, roughly 1,000 times greater.

Moreover, the radioactive minerals which came out of the Earth's crust either originated within, or are otherwise found in, the Earth's mantle and core.

We're also talking about timecycles of hundreds of thousands of years, and, frankly, a mixing dynamic which is probably not well known.

I'm actually not much a fan of nuclear power (it's potentially useful, but highly problematic, and much more limited in capacity than is generally understood), but deep-mantle-injection would actually be, on the grand scheme of things, statistical noise so far as any radioactive risk is concerned.

We're also not aware of any biological activity occurring within the mantle. The problems with ocean pollution -- plastics, metals, fertilisers, etc. -- were that these are:

1. Generally unevenly distributed, with concentrations in specific areas.

2. Highly interactive with life forms -- biological concentration of heavy metals, forming algael blooms, etc.

3. For lighter detritus (especially plastics), confined to what's effectively a film at the surface of the oceans, rather than mixed throughout the full volume of the ocean.

Even for substances which do mix with seawater, such as CO2, the rate of mixing through the entire benthic column is a concern.

Where radioactive waste has entered seawater (numerous reactor cores, mostly from the nine nuclear-powered submarines which have sunk, waste disposal, and liquid discharge e.g., from Daichi-Fukushima), dilution with seawater tends to make this a very low-level threat at any distance from the immediate site.

(Despite this, I strongly discourage the practice.)

My point: in the list of risks to worry about, this isn't one I'd spend much time on. I've already spent more than it's worth.

[vacri]

I'm still waiting on our flying cars that we were supposed to be commuting in. And our free beamed energy.

[adventured]

Meanwhile we're making rapid progress on things radically more beneficial than flying cars, such as AI or CRISPR.

[rayiner]

We're making progress in scientific fields that are still in the growth stage of their evolution. There is little reason not to believe that these fields will not soon be any more moribund than say airplane technology has been for the last 40 years.

[vacri]

We still don't have the android maids that are past due, either. We've got a robot that does the vacuuming, and recently it was counted a major success to have a robot that could merely fold clothes (and only that). I don't know about you, but I think that free beamed energy is way more beneficial than a clothes-folding robot.

Or even if you count the awesome toys that Boston Dynamics puts out; they're still just that, toys. Incredible toys, but nowhere near taking over from humans.

We're nowhere near the AI that futurists of the past thought we'd have by now. Same goes for cancer cures (CRISPR).

[dredmorbius]

This misses a few points. Key among them that projections of future technological development from 50 - 100 years ago have proved woefully inaccurate.

Drawing targets around what you shot at regardless of where you're aiming has a name: Texas Sharpshooting.

It's an exceptionally poor rebuttal or response to the observation that forecasts have failed. Moreso if in doing so the reasons for the deviation isn't specifically analysed.