MCCSC purveys eco-fascist propaganda
Our 13-year-old daughter Liana is now in 7th grade in the Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC). The MCCSC is the public school system here and Liana is in a program for gifted students. Despite this, what I’ve seen thus far confirms my worst fears about the public school system. In this posting, I’m going to share a message I sent to Liana concerning information contained in her social studies book. In a future posting I’ll have something to say about the MCCSC administrators.
When you asked if your social studies book was right about there being “no safe way to dispose of nuclear waste”, I said I’d give you some info on the Oklo Natural Reactors. I think this provides the most straightforward refutation to the book’s claim. If you want more, I can direct you to the file cabinet in the downstairs library that has my research from the late 70’s. It was clear even then that nuclear waste could be safely buried in one of several ways (I can describe them for you if you like). Your social studies book, first published in 1986, might as well have been written by anti-nuke propagandists from Greenpeace. Here’s a quote from a Department of Energy (DoE) piece on the Oklo reactors titled Oklo: Natural Nuclear Reactors.
Once the natural reactors burned themselves out, the highly radioactive waste they generated was held in place deep under Oklo by the granite, sandstone, and clays surrounding the reactors’ areas. Plutonium has moved less than 10 feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago.
I’ll have more to say on this in due course.
A group called Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy (makes one think of Christian Fundamentalists for Darwin) is a real organization that counts James Lovelock (the progenitor of the Gaia Hypothesis) among its members. Here’s an excerpt from Lovelock’s The Ages of Gaia about the Oklo reactors. To understand why Oklo provides a complete refutation of anti-nuke hysteria requires a little background on radioactive high-level waste (HLW) disposal.
When uranium fissions, there are a variety of possible reactions – the nucleus doesn’t split cleanly into two equal pieces (in fact, it doesn’t always split into just two pieces). All of the different possible reactions produce characteristic percentages of different “nuclides” – nuclei with varying numbers of protons and neutrons as depicted in this nuclide chart. Here’s a detail of the nuclide chart showing some of the Actinides including Uranium. The rows give the number of protons (Plutonium is 94, Neptunium is 93, Uranium is 92 and so on) and the columns give the number of protons + neutrons. You’ll notice that the number increases from left to right. The gray shading indicates half-lives (the amount of time required for half of a given amount of the material to undergo radioactive decay) greater than 100,000 years. The half-gray/half-white boxes (for example, U-236) are for isomeric states – I won’t explain that here. I also have an old chart in the cabinet I can show you that provides more detail. That chart actually shows typical fission by-product percentages. It also shows “natural decay chains”. A natural decay chain is the nuclides that result from the decay of a long-lived “natural” radioactive element (such as Uranium-238) to a stable element (such as Lead-206). The U-238 decay chain is in this part of the chart and runs from U-238 to Pb-206. An unstable nucleus in this chain decays by giving off either an alpha particle (helium nucleus) or a beta particle (electron). An alpha (2 protons and 2 neutrons) decay by U-238 (92 protons and 146 neutrons) produces Th-234 (90 protons and 144 neutrons). This nucleus, in turn, throws off a beta and becomes Pa-234 (91 protons and 143 neutrons), which then throws off a beta to become U-234 (92 protons and 142 neutrons). This process continues until one reaches the last few links in the decay chain with Pb-210 beta decaying into Bi-210 which decays into Po-210 which finally alpha decays into stable Lead-206.
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