Somebody. A French name.”
She touched a switch. “Get me the head of the U.S. Engineers. How would you
dispose of nuclear power plant wastes? Rocket them onto the Moon as someone
urged last week? Why wouldn’t the Sun be better? We may want to go back to the Moon
someday.”
“Oh, my, no! Neither one, Ma’am.”
“Why not? Some of those byproducts are poisonous for hundreds of years, so
I’ve heard. No?”
“You heard correctly. But the really rough ones have short half-lives. The
ones with long half-lives- hundreds, even thousands of years, or longer-are simple
to handle. But don’t throw away any of it, Ma’am. Not where you can’t recover it
easily.”
“Why not? We’re speaking of wastes. I assume that we have extracted anything
we can use.”
“Yes, Ma’am, anything we can use. But our great grandchildren are going to
hate you. Do you know the only use the ancient Romans had for petroleum? Medicine,
that’s all. I don’t know how those isotopic wastes will be used next century .. .
any more than those old Romans could guess how very important oil would become. But
I certainly wouldn’t throw those so-called wastes into the Sun! Besides, rockets do
fail
– . . and who wants to scatter radioactives over a couple of states? And there’s the
matter of the fuel and steel and a dozen other expensive things for the rockets. You
could easily wind up spending more money to get rid of the ashes than you ever got
from selling the power.
“Then what do you do? They say we mustn’t sink it into the ocean. Or put it
on the Antarctic ice cap. Salt mines?”
“Madam President, honest so help me, this is one of those nonproblems that
the antitechnology nuts delight in. Radioactive wastes aren’t any harder to handle
than garbage. Or hot ashes. Or anything else you don’t want to pick up in your bare
hands. The quantity isn’t much, not at all like garbage, or coal ashes. There are at
least a half dozen easy ways. One of the easiest is to mix them with sand and gravel
and cement into concrete bricks, then stack them in any unused piece of desert.
“Or glass bricks. Or let the stuff dry and store it in steel barrels such as
oil drums and use those old salt mines you mentioned-the bricks you could leave in
the open. All by remote manipulation, of course; that’s the way a radioactives
engineer does everything. Waldoes. That’s old stuff. No trouble.”
“I thought you said you were obsolete.”
He grinned sheepishly. “Ma’am, it’s easy to talk. As long as I know that
young fellows will have to do the tedious drudgery that goes into making anything
new work. But the solutions I’ve offered are practical. No new discoveries needed.
“How about air pollution?”
“What sorts, Ma’am? The two main sources are internal combustion
engines-trucks and autos-and industrial smokes. Quite different problems.”
“Pick one.”
“Transportation pollution is going to solve itself soonither the hard way or
the easy way. Oil, whether it’s our own or from the OPEC, is too valuable to be
burned in cars and trucks; it’s the backbone of the chemical engineering
industry-fertilizers, plastics, pesticides, lubricants, and so forth. So, quite
aside from the energy problem, we need to stop burning it. We can either wait until
it’s forced on us catastrophically . . – or we can turn to other transportation
power voluntarily, and thereby become self-sufficient in oil for peace or for war.
Either way, transportation pollution is ended.”
“But what other transportation power, Doctor?”
“Oh. Half a dozen ways, at least. Get rid of the I.C. engine completely,
both Otto cycle and Diesel cycle, and go back to the external combustion engine and
steam. The I.C. engine never did make sense; starting and stopping combustion every
split second is a guarantee of incomplete combustion, wasted fuel, and smog. Air
pollution. External combustion has no such built-in stupidity; no matter what fuel,
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it burns continuously
and can be adjusted for complete combustion. The Stanley Steamer used
kerosene. But that’s petroleum again. I would use wood alcohol as a starter-it hurts
me every time I pass a sawmill and see them burning chips and slash.