Hypothetical: nuclear waste "disposal"

[His Divine Shadow]

Not really disposal, infact it's an insane scenario. But I want to bring this up in order to get some perspective or insight into the relative effects of fallout from nuclear fuels vs. the stuff we already spew into the atmosphere for the fun of it.

I'm curious as to what health effects there would be on the human population if we treated nuclear waste like coal and oil? I.e. we just fucking burn it and let it out through giant chimneys to disperse in the atmosphere, store it in open pits and whatnot. Assuming such procedures would've been running for as long as commcercial nuclear power has existed. Just spread the waste out as much as possible in the atmosphere, analogous to burning coal or oil then. Would the health effects compare to those of coal, or would they be worse? Any way to know?

Would we all die in a fallout-esque scenario, would every one get cancer, would nature and animals mutate?

I just got to thinking about this because nuclear waste is a concentrated mess of insanely dangerous stuff that'll kill you. But coal and oil waste are pretty fucking dangerous too when concentrated and give you cancer after little exposure (chewie). But we disperse that shit really well in the atmosphere, what if we took the same approach to nuclear waste, wouod the effects be equivalent or far, far worse?

[fnord]

Well, for starters, you'd have roughly a million or so times less stuff emitted per unit energy (MW-d, GW-a, etc) than for fossil fuels (coal, fossil gas, oil, etc).

So what exactly is being rejected to atmosphere? Just the naturally volatile fission products?

[His Divine Shadow]

Yes, all the nuclear waste we'd currently bury / keep in pools / reprocess.

[redwag0n]

I am not sure of your question? Are you asking what would happen if we burned the by products of a nuclear facilities? Or if we burned fissionable material as a fuel source? If its the first point it would kill us all. Depending on the type of fuel it could be slow and painful or short and painful. One example of what happens when radioactive material enters the body is the assassination of the former KGB agent in Britain by the use of polonium-210. Subcutaneous plutonium is also poisonous and cancer causing.

Another effect would be similar to putting lead into the air U-238 is a heavy metal and has very much the similar effects as the ingestion of lead. Really what it boils down to is the element and what form it is in.

The second point is that we don't burn fissionable material it decays creating heat, thus creating steam and turning turbines to generate power. When you use nuclear materials as energy your left with spent fuel rods not something that burns and emits gases. Plutonium and Uranium are metals. We don't burn them, they decay extremely fast producing heat and making steam to produce power. They just give off radiation. They have barriers protecting us from that radiation.

[Sea Skimmer]

Burning nuclear fuel would be about the same as living downwind from a mercury smelter with zero pollution controls; really fucking toxic. You might get away with it using a ocean incinerator ship as used to be used to burn PCB laden waste, but it makes no sense. Simply throwing the clad fuel rods into a deep ocean trench and then triggering an underwater landslide to bury it would be a far far far better option and cost even less. Stacking the fuel in the desert in dry concrete casks would also work perfectly fine. The only reason disposal is hard is because people demand fool proof solutions that will last as long as human evolution.

[His Divine Shadow]

It's mostly a question to know what the health effects on people would be, as compared to coal and other fossil fuel pollution. Not any practical issue. Like we pump this crap out and distribute it in the atmosphere like we do with coal and other shit, would it lead to more deaths / disease than oil & coal does? Just trying to say that if those things where equal, what'll kill/hurt more people?

[Sea Skimmer]

That would depend on tonnages, but I've stood around a coal fire and inhaled the fumes, and far more often a wood fire and nothing much has happened. I don't know that a person can survive even one breath from a plutonium fire.

[Steel]

That would depend on tonnages, but I've stood around a coal fire and inhaled the fumes, and far more often a wood fire and nothing much has happened. I don't know that a person can survive even one breath from a plutonium fire.

But I find it unlikely that you have taken a million breaths from a coal fire, and that is the difference is energy density.

So per unit energy generated what are the relative risks?

[Sea Skimmer]

But I find it unlikely that you have taken a million breaths from a coal fire, and that is the difference is energy density.

I live downwind from a lot of coal plants, plus another one which is under 3 miles away but usually downwind, so more like every breath I've ever taken is from coal fire, just dispersed.

So per unit energy generated what are the relative risks?

Calculating the dispersion isn't that hard, its just way too stupid to be worth my time. Someone else can do it.

[someone_else]

Well, maybe doing it in the atmosphere is stupid. Also because I have doubts on how volatile can you make radioactive waste.

I know that in seawater there are huge amounts of uranium Wikipedia claims 3.3 mg of it per cubic meter of seawater.
My gut tells me that you can try to disperse your stuff in the water like this and there will be little effects.
But I don't know about how radioactive is the long-lived nuclear waste (more or less than natural uranium?), and I really hope none dumps useful uranium like this.

[starslayer]

Well, maybe doing it in the atmosphere is stupid. Also because I have doubts on how volatile can you make radioactive waste.

Getting it to burn is only a matter of raising the temperature sufficiently/pumping in oxygen. And the longer-lived a radioactive isotope is, the less radioactive it is. U-238 (half life of 4.7 billion years) is barely radioactive at all, while short-lived stuff like I-131, Cs-137, and Sr-90 is all highly radioactive. The main danger of nuclear waste in dry storage is its high chemical toxicity, since it's mostly heavy metals/other poisonous elements.

[madd0ct0r]

Ignoring the question of how we disperse it, I'm trying to sit down and work out the damage.

it's complicated.

There's the total radiation given off, making sure to correct for alpha, beta and gamma emissions.
There's the half lives of the elements involved, and what they then turn into (most go through multi-stage decomposition)
There's the fact that hard numbers on nuclear waste, including military stuff, are pretty hard to come by.

Do you account for reprocessing? What about waste produced before reprocessing was developed. It's been reprocessed now (creating some more fuel and a lot more waste), but under your scenario it'd be in the air.

Finally, you have to track the elements, because certain of them are biologically active.
In some cases (iodine) it means you body deliberetly collects it, allowing alpha particle to do real damage.
In other cases, it isn't the radiation that gets you, but the element. Plutonium is really toxic (like most heavy metals). Rad-output is almost irrelevant.

At a guess, I'd say the widespread build-up of heavy metals in the food chain would be far more damaging then the radiation.
Assume mass sterility in most/all apex predators, increased rates of learning difficulties, kidney and liver problems ect.

[defanatic]

IIRC, nuclear power produces less radioactive matter per MWh than coal fired power. Like, yes, many of us (although less now, given that most places don't even have fireplaces, and barbecues are mostly gas run) have breathed coal smoke, I think that the number of "coal breaths" you would need for the equivalent power of one "plutonium breath" would probably kill you in other ways first.

[Aldroud]

Build a base on the Moon, we'll call it "Alpha". Then start shuttling nuclear waste to the Lunar surface and deposit it in landfills guarded by laser fences.

Wait for inevitable explosion to hurle the Moon out of Earth's orbit.

Watch as hilarity ensues.

[Simon_Jester]

OK, I think the problem is that the OP's scenario is a bit... vague.

I'm going to suggest some more specific ones, in the spirit of the original.

1) "Careless but sane" disposal

In this case, we imagine that nuclear waste is disposed of in ways that are relatively careless about the prospect of radiation leakage, but that are at least vaguely rational: we aren't deliberately trying to make them more dangerous, any more than we do with oil and coal fires.

For example, we might put radioactive waste in 55-gallon drums, mixed in with assorted rocks, and dump the drums into the sea. We might store radioactive waste in pits in the desert, spread out enough that we wouldn't get Fukushima-style overheating from the waste, and dump sand on them.

In short, we're looking at the cheapest possible means of disposal consistent with not causing huge, obvious, short term disastrous consequences (like spent fuel rod fires).

Can we assess the amount of health damage that would result from this, at least in rough terms? There are precedents: the "sink it in barrels off the coast" method of disposal was actually used once upon a time, for instance.

2) "Psychotic" disposal

In this case, we imagine that the Powers That Be deliberately dispose of the radioactive waste in fashions as effective as possible at dispersing it into the environment- burning the spent fuel rods on purpose, for instance. In this case, we can get a rough guide by assuming that the distribution of nuclear waste will resemble the kind of fallout patterns we get in a nuclear war: large amounts of fission byproducts dispersed into the atmosphere, "hot spot" areas on the ground near disposal sites, and the like.

In this case, what we'd want to do is get a rough sense for the two main factors involved: the mass of heavy metals (uranium and plutonium, mostly) dispersed into the environment in this way, and the ongoing scale of release of various short halflife radioactive byproducts.