Getting Rid of Nuclear Waste

Getting Rid of Nuclear Waste

Instructions/Descriptions

Getting Rid of Nuclear Waste

The United States has over 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste that needs to be put somewhere safe. This material could not explode! But it will be dangerous for at least 100,000 years or more, and so requires special handling.

We will investigate one idea for nuclear waste disposal — dumping it into a deep-sea trench.

Here’s the idea:

Put the radioactive waste into steel and concrete containers that are bullet shaped.

Dump the containers off the back of a ship as it passes over a trench. When the containers hit the sea floor point first, they’ll be going fast enough to bury themselves in the mud.

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Plate motions will slowly carry the material down into the mantle, gone forever!

You will decide whether this is a good idea that would work, or not. You will consider things such as: [Order Now]

Accretionary wedges (page 276 in your book). Do you think accretionary wedges might have faults? Or big earthquakes? Or lots of folding (bending) of the rock layers? Or landslides? If so, how might these things affect containers of nuclear wastes?

Composite volcanoes, which are common at convergent plate boundaries (see figure 4.19 on page 109). These volcanoes often have explosive eruptions that throw lots of volcanic ash into the air.

Then, in question 6, you’ll decide whether this is a good idea, or not. (I won’t grade you on your opinion, so feel free to be honest.)

NOTE: You don’t need to know much about nuclear waste to do this homework — it’s a geology homework. But if you have questions, or you’d like to know more, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste. As always, you can also ask me!

Download the homework (another fillable PDF): Trench_HW.pdf

There is one simple graph, that you can easily do using the drawing tool in Acrobat Reader. However, feel free to use a different app, or print and scan the homework.

If you have questions, ask!

Enjoy your time as a policy maker, deciding what to do with our nuclear waste!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

Getting Rid of Nuclear Waste

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