So I saw this silly movie the other night...

[JamesOlsson]

It was something to do with Onkalo, Finland where they're digging a rather large pit to put their "hot" garbage in. The movie revolves around -you- being a visitor to the waste site thousands of years from now. In very ominous overtones, the chief narrator tells you that you shouldn't have come down here... this is a place of death... blah, blah, blah. The rest of the movie is pondering what sort of "markers" our generation is going to leave the following generations so that they'll know exactly wass-up-wid-dat. Will we use pictograms? Written text in 26 languages? (YAWN) Finally, the movie closes after an hour plus... and you're no more informed about the dangers of these casks coming out of the movie than you were going in. So my question is, what effects would standing next to an open barrel of high-level nuclear waste be 10 minutes after it was packaged? How about 10 years later? 100? 1000? 10,000? and finally 100,000. The Nuclear Energy Institute seems to think after a mere 1000 years you could eat this stuff like breakfast cereal. Would some doofus 10,000 years from now never notice any symptoms if he walked around all day with a pocket full of pellets? I thought maybe some of you "slide-rule" guys could answer this. Thanks in advance. ~Jim~ ( source: http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/do ... e-research )

[Matte]

I have not seen "Into eternity" yet, but what from I have heard it raises some good questions. However I agree with you, the fuel is not accutely poisonus after 500 years or so, after about a thousand years it would be fairly harmless as the material would not be interesting to anyone of 15-16th century technology level.

It would probably require some cataclysmic event to drive humanity back 5-600 years of technical development, which is required for the issues raised to be a problem, realistically it would probably take 5-10 000 years before anyone digging into the repositories at which point the stuff is not more active than the concentrated uranium from whence it came...though the plutonium would probably be useful for weapons at that point?!

[KitemanSA]

Try this.
http://energyfromthorium.com/11-google- ... lly-waste/