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by perihelions 591 days ago
That doesn't really work because marine life is good at filtering and concentrating a subset of the elements that are in spent nuclear fuel. There are already ocean fish that are too poisonous too safely eat because of (coal-emitted) mercury pollution—and that's only 100,000 tons of mercury, total, in the history of human industry [0]. If you dig in to the hard numbers surrounding spent fuel, it's a much, much more toxic and difficult problem than mercury—diluting it in the oceans is a complete non-starter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_mercury_pollution
2 comments
meindnoch 591 days ago
Mercury from burning coal is an extremely dilute pollutant. There's zero hope for capturing and containing it. Nuclear waste in contrast is literally just barrels/boxes of stuff. You can pick it up with a forklift and put it inside a sealed container for the next thousand years.
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cesarb 591 days ago
> Nuclear waste in contrast is literally just barrels/boxes of stuff. You can pick it up with a forklift and put it inside a sealed container for the next thousand years.

You can't pick it up with a forklift to put it inside the sealed container. That would make the forklift (and its operator) radioactive. You can only use a forklift after it's already within the sealed container. See for instance this real-life video (shot on a nuclear power station in my country), which shows used nuclear fuel rods being put inside a sealed container for long-term storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X5K46ALdD0

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meindnoch 590 days ago
You park the forklift in the storage container and seal it in. It's not that hard.

Anyway, the forklift example wasn't about literally picking up pieces nuclear fuel with a forklift. You obviously use the forklift to move the shielded container around which contains the nuclear waste. Nuclear fuel in general is always at least in a water bath, which shields the neutrons, so your forklift is going to be fine.

In contrast to nuclar fuel, you cannot use a forklift (or any other equipment) to feasibly pick out the evenly mixed mercury atoms from the ocean or the atmosphere that we put there from burning coal.

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LargoLasskhyfv 591 days ago
s/ocean/subduction zone/

aka the solution to pollution is magmatic delusion err... dilution.

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