From Warren Bullock
I am troubled by one thing in your article on permanent waste disposal: the timescale involved surely invalidates some of the audacious assumptions that underpin such projects (4 March, p 38). Climate change and the rise and fall of nations – for which there are arguably no effective countermeasures – are two factors guaranteed to occur during the 100,000-year period described.
The designers of these repositories should also plan for the sites to be “relocation-ready”, so that when conditions change, as they will, the cost of doing this is minimised.
In just a few hundred years our descendants will start looking at using their various space elevators as a cheap, efficient means of sending Earth’s most hazardous material on a one-way trip to the sun. A bit of forward thinking when designing repositories (multiple shafts, redundant access points, transportable containers) will put them in a better position to clean up our nuclear mess.
Singapore
