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Hottest Day of December on Record in Australia - Most of It Over 42C

posted by martyb on Wednesday December 18 2019, @04:20PM   
from the let-it-snow-let-it-snow-let-it-snow dept.

c0lo writes:

Only 6 years after the weathermen needed a new color for just one spot of extreme temperatures on the map, this is how it looks when that color needs to be used for over 30% of the Australia's area. And that for 3 days in a row, starting today, Dec 18 2019 (like, meh, just a balmy 40C in Melbourne at 18:30, she'll be apples).

[40C is 104F and 50C is 122F --ed.]

Coverage:
BBC - Australia heatwave: Nation endures hottest day on record

Guardian Australia heatwave: records forecast to be broken as temperatures surge past 40C

Severe-weather.eu An extreme heatwave is about to swipe across Australia, raising maximum temperatures up to near 50°C (122°F) in S/SE parts of the continent, breaking many all-time records!

AFP Australia has its hottest day on record, more to come

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Original Submission

• Re:You know what this means... Re:You know what this means... (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @07:58PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @07:58PM (#933875)

  I've not seen a decent very long term strategy for dealing with the waste, even if there's less with thorium. What happens when someone digs it up in 500 years in a civilization where Geiger counters no longer exist?

  Roughly, the half-life of a material is an inverse approximation of how radioactive it is --> the longer the half-life, the less radioactive (and therefore, less dangerous to handle).

  Stuff with very short half life can be very dangerous but irrelevant long term as it will all be gone. Iodine-131 falls into this category.

  Stuff with very long half life will stick around for the long game but also isn't very radioactive so not a big worry.

  The worrisome bits are reaction products that fall somewhere the middle, very typical nuclear waste products in this category are Strontium-90 and Caesium-137, both with a half life of about 30 years.

  We can estimate the scenario you describe based on past incidents. Caesium-137 was the material involved in the a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident'>Goiânia accident when a scavenger found a 93g sample, did not know what it was or the dangers it posed, and 4 people died from exposure to high energy gamma rays.

  So with a half life of 30 years, after 500 years this will have decayed by half a little less than 17 times. So if we bury 10 tonnes of Caesium-137 and 500 years later someone digs it up, about 100g will remain and we have roughly the same amount of material that lead to the Goiânia accident. However, a key difference is that remaining caesium-137 will not be very pure, mixed with ~10 tonnes of other crap and I suspect it will be less fascinating to the people who find it.

  Parent

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• Re:You know what this means... (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @01:02PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @01:02PM (#934183)

  you're going to need quiet a few nuke reactors to make enough electricity to smelt enough iron and possibly lead to to build that ginormous dig-dug that can handle 10 tons of radioactif caesium ^_^

  but i guess it's ok to concentrate more power in fewer hands ... sunburn is for losers.

  Parent