Its natural melting has added over 250 feet to the ocean level over the past ten thousand years.

Let's watch this process unfold and figure out where did all those people only 275' above sea level.

With lots of seldom discussed items too. If only I had a daughter like this,

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-if-all-ice-earth-melted-overnight-2019-10

Sounds a bit like the FFTF that was closed at Hanford...test facility, liquid sodium cooled, testing breeder reactor tech...unfortunately was deactivated... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Flux_Test_Facility#:~:text=The construction of the FFTF,especially relating to breeder reactors.

... it's a tempting thing for any country that might want a nuclear weapons program.

But it is a topic we all need to discuss. Hopefully cold fusion is starting to make sense for energy production - what do you think in the next twenty years?

...in the fossil fuel waste that will kill about 20,000 people today.

These deaths won't take "thousands of years;" they're constantly taking place:

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249).

The full paper cited in the OP is predicated on the idea, that despite much Bob Kennedy type ignorance to the contrary, there is no such thing as "nuclear waste." Specifically it is a paper about producing energy from the valuable contents of used nuclear fuel, which uneducated people continue to call, out of lazy sloganeering ignorance, "nuclear waste."

Of course, it's a scientific paper and has nothing to do with sloganeering.

Under these conditions, reprocessing valuable used nuclear fuel and putting its contents to use. naturally occurring uranium, which has a half-life equal to about the age of the Earth, 4.5 billion years, has its half life reduced to about a few years, and in the process removes the formation of all of the radioactive components of the uranium decay series.



Source: USA EPA Radioactive Decay

I really don't know where people come up with these "thousands of years" or "tens of thousands of years" or "millions of years" numbers - it varies from antinuke to antinuke, but probably it comes from the circle jerk of antinuke websites dedicated to the promotion of ignorance - but the scientific literature readily compares the radiotoxicity of used nuclear fuels - if they were to escape, which they are unlikely to do, especially if put to use to save the planet - the effect would be, in a few hundred years, to reduce the radioactivity of the planet, which may or may not be a good thing:

I excerpted this figure (of which there are many examples in the literature) from a post here I put together in response to just one of the poorly educated antinuke radiation paranoids around here who was whining stupidly about a collapsed tunnel at Hanford:

828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

I always invite any and all antinukes - who as I suggest in the OP are responsible for this vast death toll from air pollution - to show that the storage of used nuclear fuel, that as many people have been killed, in the nearly 70 year history of the accumulation of used nuclear fuels, that they have killed as many people as will die today between noon today and 6 PM today in any time zone anywhere on this planet by air pollution, never mind climate change.

Only reference in the peer reviewed scientific literature can be accepted as evidence of the same.

The antinukes never answer the question. They change the subject or they slither away without even attempting an answer into the hellhole of their ignorance, ignorance that clearly, with a planet in flames, is appalling.

Nuclear energy saves human lives. It doesn't need to be without risk to be vastly superior to everything else, just as vaccines need not be without risk to save lives.

In Bob Kennedy Junior we have the coalescence of two forms of pernicious ignorance, antivax rhetoric and antinuke rhetoric.

I personally hold the people handing out this shit - from Bob Jr. on down - beneath contempt, but in Bob Jr.'s case, he readily exemplifies the equivalence, to which I often point, of the two very dangerous bits of mindless anti-science propaganda which, regrettably, too many people take seriously, resulting in a vast death toll.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Quote: (In molten fuels, materials science is indeed critical, liquid plutonium is an excellent solvent. It dissolves steel and many other metals.)

It dissovles steel ?!!? .... What can ever keep it from reacting and dissolving any contanier?

Best we just stop making any more plutonium.

There are almost 60 metals in the periodic table available in macroscopic quantities, and iron is only one of them.

The current paper proposes to use tungsten, which would have the interesting property under these conditions to be transmuted over a period of time into the very valuable and very rare metals rhenium, osmium, iridium, and even platinum.

Beyond specific metals, there is also a huge and very advanced science called "Materials Science" that is way more sophisticated than when the LAMPRE reactor operated in the 1950's and early 1960's. (It did not leak.) There are many concepts that can be utilized to manage hot liquid plutonium, for example, metalloceramics, certain classes of metallocarbides, very corrosion and temperature resistant nitrides, as well careful design to exploit peritectic systems to make plutonium migration into metals be effectively self healing.

My son is a materials scientist and he is, in fact, working on nuclear materials in a nuclear engineering program.

The point of a liquid plutonium fueled reactor is that to allow continuous reprocessing without removing or isolating the fuel. Under these conditions we could recover valuable fission products by rather mundane chemical processes on line, such as distillation and extraction.

Note, the LAMPRE did not operate on pure liquid plutonium but actually the fuel was an iron/plutonium eutectic. The reactor exploited the solubility of iron in plutonium.

The point of having more plutonium is to save what is left to save from climate change and fossil fuel related chemical pollution, and perhaps to restore what can be restored. It can be shown that converted to plutonium, the world inventory of uranium already mined, which is mainly ²³⁸U. Plutonium is, I have convinced myself, the last best hope of the human race. The question is to make it fast enough to accomplish this vital task. Liquid plutonium can exhibit very high breeding ratios, perhaps only exceeded by some americium isotopes, although this data should be subject to update.

Without plutonium, to my mind, there isn't all that much hope for the future.

I have read where reactors were being used to make gold >>> transmutated

I guess plutonium in very controlled situations can be transmutated into who knows what but any researchers would be susceptible to its pollution. How many years does it take plutonium to kill? We know it can be deadly for a long, long time.

Plutonium was discovered in 1941, and the element now exists on a more than 1000 ton scale. Since it was discovered it has been used once in a nuclear weapon that killed a significant number of people, at Nagasaki, where it was used to end a what started as an oil war, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to eliminate the US fleet on its flank as it drove for the oil fields in what was then Dutch East India, now Indonesia.

That was the last and only nuclear war. It is notable that in the last and only nuclear war, the number of people killed by petroleum weapons of mass destruction dwarfed the number of people killed at Nagasaki, even if one were to add the people killed by the other nuclear weapon, the one that utilized naturally occurring uranium, the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima.

Since 1945, oil wars, some on a very large scale with a vast death toll, have persisted; nuclear wars have not.

Multi-ton scale plutonium only became available by the late 1950s or mid-1960's at best, probably later, and in isolated form, only by the 1980s. The largest isolated quantity is currently in the UK.

Today, yesterday, and tomorrow, every day of this year, every day of next year, 19,000 people roughly will die from air pollution, largely from the combustion of oil, gas, and coal.

The standard language I use to make this point is here:

If we take an unusually high estimate of the death toll at Nagasaki, around 100,000 people, this means that air pollution is generating a "Nagasaki" roughly every six days.

Since 1946, there have been a few instances in which plutonium led to a few deaths, generally in criticality accidents, probably fewer people than died on the oil platform when the oil rig in the Deep Horizon accident killed 8 people instantly; to this we can add other oil related explosions, but these are trivial in comparison to the vast death toll associated with the use of petroleum.

I think this history, in which the total number of deaths related to the use of plutonium represents less than a few hours worth of the number of deaths routinely caused by petroleum suggests that plutonium isn't all that "deadly."

By comparison, petroleum and its products are extremely "deadly."

When plutonium is used in nuclear reactors in peaceful productive settings, it saves human lives, myths and mysticism and marketing aside:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895).

If we are to ban any form of energy, fossil fuels should be the target, and the banning of fossil fuels is 100% dependent on the use of plutonium, whatever its minor risks.