There's not a lot on that subject that can be said that hasn't already been beaten to death. Pretty much, we're stuck with our high level of trash production until energy and materials costs start rising, which isn't likely any time soon. Until it becomes cheaper to recycle than to dig the raw stuff out of the ground in some banana republic, we ain't gonna see great leaps in that department. Of course, humanity being what it is, the instant it *does* become cheaper to do so, you'll have people savagely battling each other to the death for the rights to your trash. Which should be entertaining to watch, if we all live that long.
But the really interesting part was when they got to radioactive waste, the bane of modern society. Now, nuclear stuff has always been something I've found darn impressive. Having actually been inside a reactor or two, and actually looked into the core of one (albeit a really leetle one), I have to say that while it's not the most impressive man-made thing I've ever seen, that eerie blue glow of inconceivable things going on deep beneath all that clear, protective water is awe-inspiring. That's the way science should work, durn it.
Anyway, radioactive waste is a real pain in the butt, when you get right down to it. Nobody wants it. They want it even less than they want normal trash, which is pretty much not at all. Nobody even has a place to put it, so your average nuclear reactor has storage tanks devoted merely to holding large numbers of spent, but incredibly hot and radioactive fuel rods, sometimes in neat little containers but more often just piled haphazardly at the bottom of massive water tanks.
Some of this stuff is "only" mildly lethal in large doses, but a non-trivial amount of what's produced is really, really unpleasant and persistant, with half-lives reaching into the 500,000 year range. Half a million years. It's almost an inconceivable amount of time. Long after we're gone, long after the original stones of the great pyramids are dust, long after the evil of Microsoft is just a boogeyman to scare the children at night, this stuff will still be merrily glowing away at the bottom of whatever bogglingly deep pit we've dug to stick it in.
It's definitely cynicism-inducing to realize that of all the things we've done, of all the products of man, the one thing we KNOW that we'll pass on to future generations is not our art, not our government, not our hopes, not our dreams, but this crap, which is so ultimately toxic that there's nothing we can think of to do with it except dig a deep pit and toss it in. And even then, it's so dangerous that it has to be nursemaided, twenty-four hours a day, for millions of years. We don't even dare toss it into space out of fear that a launch failure might scatter the stuff in little doses all over and kill hundreds of thousands in one of the most slow and agonizing ways imaginable.
Barring an advance in technology that we can't even fathom that would allow us to safely break that stuff down, what we've done is created the ultimate make-work government position. As long as human civilization exists on this little rock we call Earth, some schmuck's gonna have to be at that desk, watching this stuff, to make sure it doesn't leak out and cause any more harm than it has already.
What's almost equally impressive is that the EPA, an agency that spends nearly a quarter of its budget cleaning up one single nuclear testing site, has actually thought of this, and posed the question - what do you put on the label of something that's going to be deadly long after the English language has gone the way of the Egyptian heiroglyphs, something only studied by bored students in ancient history classes?
Splitting the atom may be the dumbest thing humanity has ever done, but there's no use crying over spilled uranium. Say what you like about the mistakes of progress, at least people are working to fix this one.
Well, until the next round of budget cuts to give a tax break to the middle class, but hey, those spent fuel rods will keep just fine where they are, right?
Critical mass? No, never heard of that concept...
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