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submitted 2 years ago by m0darn@lemmy.ca to c/askscience@lemmy.world

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the scale of the problem of nuclear waste. If we took all the nuclear waste produced in a year and evenly blended it into all gasoline burned in a year would the radiation be deadly? Dangerous? Detectable?

It's easiest to get numbers for the US.

2 000 000 kg of waste per year

510 000 000 000 Liters of gasoline

Obviously this isn't a real proposal, although I think it would reduce carbon emissions...

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[-] m0darn@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago

Is your proposal basically to burn away nuclear waste?

No. It's to disperse it.

The main problem is the safety and handling of such radioactive waste.

It was very much not meant as a serious proposal.

How would this reduce carbon emissions?

Do you want such a substance sitting in your vehicle, garage, gas station with high traffic, etc

[-] habanhero@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 years ago

No. It's to disperse it.

It was very much not meant as a serious proposal.

Okay good. The joke was lost on me, I thought this was a serious post. Didn't expect it in AskScience.

[-] m0darn@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago

Well it's serious in that I would like to know how radioactive 2 million kilograms of nuclear waste mixed into 500 billion liters of gasoline would be.

I guess it's 4 milligrams per liter. So a grain of sand per liter. My car is in the garage with a 40 liter gas tank. So 40 gains of sand worth of nuclear waste. How dangerous is that? Is it like evacuate the neighborhood, or is it don't plan any long road trips.

this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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