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by freeflight 2004 days ago
> Luckily the ocean is very big

As is the planets atmosphere, which for the longest time served as a justification to pump it full with emissions, that now leave us with a run-away problem at a scale that's still difficult for most people to wrap their heads around.
1 comments
azernik 2004 days ago
That's a problem because we're still pumping out emissions. RTG losses have been a small number (under 5) accidents that have probably emitted in total under 10kg of material.
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freeflight 2004 days ago
But RTG losses ain't the only emissions of pollutants into the oceans.

Fukushima is leaking into the Pacific to this day even with Tepco collecting vast amounts of it to store in tanks. The US is dumping the majority of its PFAS into the Atlantic completely untreated, large parts of the world use the oceans as their dumpster, for agricultural, industrial, plastic and all kinds of other waste, to such a degree that we are running out of great coral reefs but instead have great garbage patches.

Yet for the longest time we only worried about oil spills, which are also an still on-going issue in addition to all the aforementioned ones, old ones like the vast amounts of munitions dumped into it, which also includes chemical weapons [0] and possibly upcoming ones like deep-sea mining.

It's mind-boggling to me how we as a collective species can be so unbelievably short-sighted to only recognize these problems once they've already run so far away from us that any attempts at solving them are borderline impossible.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapo...

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azernik 2003 days ago
Sure. But the question was about the environmental impact of RTGs, which is many orders of magnitude smaller than other problems.
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freeflight 2003 days ago
There wasn't any question, there was the statement that plutonium couldn't be that harmful because "the ocean is very big".

Which is another version of "the solution to pollution is dilution", but that ignores that dilution doesn't scale indefinitely and if overdone can also lead to saturation.

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azernik 2003 days ago
There was absolutely a question.

morsch said: "The cask survived re-entry, as it was designed to do,[18] and no release of plutonium has been detected. The corrosion resistant materials of the capsule are expected to contain it for 10 half-lives (870 years).[19]"

nafizh asked: "So after 870 years, it begins to pollute the water?"

It was a question about the Apollo 13 SNAP-27 unit, which was spilled in a freak accident that is unlikely to be repeated.

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