DEEP UNDERGROUND

A few countries carry out very cautious and very sophisticated studies about possibility of long-term storage (and indeed, veeery long) of used nuclear fuel. The main worry is , what would happen if in a hundred thousand years from now, a handful of poor post-humanoids would seek shelter a thousand meter underground and by chance tap on long-forgotten "hot spot". Assuming that for next five hundred years whole globe population would use only nuclear power (which, would be perhaps feasible if new uranium deposits are found and fast-breeders are made ubiquitous) , then there would be maybe several hundred such hotspots worldwide, each containing several thousand tons of highly radioactive wastes. In total , maybe 0.000....001% of Earth's crust weight , and substantially less than its natural radioactivity.

Projecting what will be human needs or habits in such a distant future exceeds the imaginative power of even such sf -authors as Mr.Stan Lem. I daresay : digging a kilometer underground to seek shelter makes no sense even if our Sun turns to Red Dwarf. And still , you would have to have a very,very bad luck to pinpoint a hotspot. And no Geiger-Mueller at hand...

But indeed , we can not guaranty so far.

The problem boils down , however, to simple question : is it better to release billions and billions tons of fuel-burning wastes (CO2, mostly) into the atmosphere , or several thousand tons deep underground ? Considering, that apparently the only effective option to get rid of CO2 is also to store it underground , the question is even further reduced : what is bigger - a thousand or a billion ?

Journalists habitually mistake millions with billions in press articles, and nobody pays attention. What shows, that people have troubles to visualize big figures. As I recollect, there was even a certain primitive tribe , in whose language every figure above ten was simply named "a very big number".

Even if numerical proportions are somehow digested, the designers of underground depots still have technical worries: :" we have to supervise the wastes, cool them, measure , control..." For more inquisitive minds: in case of underground full-core melt, traces of light gaseous isotopes might perhaps diffund , over centuries , up to surface –in amounts comparable to natural.

In a blog , an engineer may perhaps show some more irresponsibility than in real life . And certainly so a kilometer underground than on the surface.

Therefore , I would just say: DPF (dump, plug, forget)...