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from the How-About-Colour-Changing...People? dept.
Recently on Last Week Tonight John Oliver discussed the problem of nuclear waste storage, which despite a number of attempts to designate a central storage site is still stored in "temporary" sites throughout the US.
The idea of a central nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain was raised again. However one additional problem, highlighted by a consultation in 1981 by the US Department of Energy, was how to design radiation warnings which could be understood tens of thousands of years into the future even though language, culture, and iconography may undergo significant changes.
And on that note, here's an old guardian article on how colour-changing cats might be the solution.
In 1984, writer Françoise Bastide and semiotician Paolo Fabbri suggested the answer could lie in breeding animals that "react with discoloration of the skin when exposed" to radiation. "[Their] role as a detector of radiation should be anchored in cultural tradition by introducing a suitable name (eg, 'ray cat')."
And following up on that is the project The Ray Cat Solution, in conjunction with Bricobio, the Montréal biology maker community:
New Hampshire Institute of Art's Type 1 class has joined forces with Bricobio and The Raycat Solution to help insert Raycats into the cultural vocabulary.
While Bricobio works towards genetically altering cats so they change color when in the presence of radioactive material, the NHIA Type 1 class is working to insert the idea that if a cat changes color, that space might be dangerous to others.
There is an associated film on the subject on Vimeo.
Originally spotted through the 99% Invisible Episode "Ten Thousand Years"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27 2017, @08:24PM
No, you don't want to inhale it, mainly because it's toxic like many other heavy elements, e.g. lead. But unless someone gets the bright idea to use tetra-ethyl-plutonium as a fuel additive, there's not much reason you would inhale it. And if you did inhale trace amounts, bad as that would be, when it does decay it goes straight to relatively harmless 235U. Shit like radium is much worse -- not only does it decay much faster, but it decays through a whole series of junk including radon, which, being a gas, merrily bubbles through your bloodstream causing cancers everywhere. Cesium-137 is horrible because it forms salts that dissolve in water and thus get everywhere (oh yeah, it decays way faster, too). As these things go, plutonium is practically friendly.
I get it, 24000 is a big scary number. And it's truly daunting to imagine engineering a containment system that will remain safe through tens of thousands of years of unknown natural and man-made disasters, prevent/dissuade post-apocalyptic illiterates from busting it open with sledgehammers, and all that. But if you actually understand this stuff, that big number is good -- the fact that it has a long half-life means that decay events are rare, meaning low intensity of radiation. There's just no way around it, high intensity means short half-life, long half-life means low intensity. The factor of 106 difference in half-life between, say, iodine-131 and plutonium-239 dwarfs the variation between decay chains. (Something like 238U's radium series has between 10 and 20 stages of decay products, so that's a total of 10x as many particles/rays emitted per half-life as something with one or two stages like 239Pu or 131I.)
The low intensity of that 1% 239Pu means that, once you store unprocessed spent fuel long enough for the short-lived isotopes to decay away, the multi-thousand-year isotopes that are left just aren't a very big problem. Sure, it wouldn't be good to build a house out of them, and worse to grind them up and disperse them in the air, but they're not scary like the medium-short half-life products that can leach into groundwater and deliver serious radiation doses.
GP is technically wrong, of course, as the highest figures I know for uranium ore are single-digit kBq/g, while natural uranium is 180 kBq/g, and 1% 239Pu is 23MBq/g; that's a factor of 104 difference to "when we dug it out", and a factor of 10 even if he meant refined, but unenriched, uranium metal. But compared to, say, 137Cs's 3.2TBq/g (yep, tera), it's far closer to uranium ore than to spent fuel straight out of the reactor.