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YET
ANOTHER
MODEST
PROPOSAL:
The Roentgen Standard
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It happened around the time of World War I. The Director of
Research for Standard Oil was told, "There's all this goo left
over when we refine oil. It's terrible stuff. It ruins the
landscape, and covering it with dirt only gets the dirt gooey.
Find something to do with it."
So he created the plastics industry.
He turned useless, offensive goo into wealth. He was not the
first in history to do so. Consider oil itself: useless,
offensive goo, until it was needed to lubricate machinery, and
later to fuel it. Consider some of the horrid substances that go
into cosmetics: mud, organic Goo out of a sick whale's head.
Consider sturgeon caviar:
American fisherman are still throwing it away! And the Japanese
consider cheese to be what it always started out to be: sour
milk.
Now: present plans for disposal of expended nuclear fuel
involve such strategies as
1) Diluting and burying it.
2) Pouring it into old, abandoned oil wells. The Soviets
tell us that it ought to be safe; after all, the oil stayed there
for millions of years. We may question their sincerity: the
depleted oil wells they use for this purpose are all in Poland.
3) The Pournelle method. The No Nukes types tell us that
stretches of American desert have already been rendered useless
for thousands of years because thermonuclear bombs were tested
there. Let us take them at their word. Cart the nuclear wastes
out into a patch of cratered desert. Put several miles of fence
around it, and signs on the fence:
IF YOU CROSS THIS FENCE YOU WILL DIE
Granted, there will be people willing to cross the fence.
Think of it as evolution in action. Average human intelligence
goes up by a fraction of a percent.
4) Drop the radioactive wastes, in canisters, into the
seabed folds where the continental plates are sliding under each
other. The radioactives would disappear back into the magma from
which they came.
Each of these solutions gets rid of the stuff; but at some
expense, and no profit. What the world needs now is a way.
We need a way to turn radioactive wastes into wealth.
And I believe I know the way.
Directly. Make coins out of it.
Radioactive money has certain obvious advantages.
A healthy economy depends on money circulating fast. Make it
radioactive and it will certainly circulate.
Verifying the authenticity of money would become easy.
Geiger counters, like pocket calculators before them, would
become both tiny and cheap due to mass production. You would hear
their rapid clicking at every ticket window. A particle
accelerator is too expensive for a counterfeiter; counterfeiting
would become a lost art.
The economy would be boosted in a number of ways. Lead would
become extremely valuable. Even the collection plates in a church
would have to be made of lead (or gold). Bank vaults would have
to be lead lined, and the coins separated by dampers. Styles of
clothing would be affected. Every purse, and one pocket in every
pair of pants, would need to be shielded in lead. Even so, the
concept of "money burning a hole in your pocket" would take on
new meaning.
Gold would still be the mark of wealth. Gold blocks
radiation as easily as lead. It would be used to shield the
wealthy from their money.
The profession of tax collector would carry its own, well
deserved penalty. So would certain other professions. An Arab oil
sheik might still grow obscenely rich, but at least we could
count on his spending it as fast as it comes in, lest it go up in
a fireball. A crooked politician would have to take bribes by
credit card, making it easier to convict him. A bank robber would
be conspicuous, staggering up to the teller's window in his heavy
lead-shielding clothing. The successful pickpocket would also
stand out in a crowd. A thick lead-lined glove would be a dead
giveaway; but without it, he could be identified by his sickly,
faintly glowing hands. Society might even have to revive an
ancient practice, amputating the felon's hand as a therapeutic
measure, before it kills him.
Foreign aid could be delivered by ICBM.
Is this just another crazy utopian scheme? Or could the
American people be brought to accept the radioactive standard as
money? Perhaps we could. It's got to be better than watching
green paper approach its intrinsic value. The cost of making and
printing a dollar bill, which used to be one and a half cents, is
rising inexorable toward one dollar. (If only we could count on
its stopping there! But it costs the same to print a twenty...)
At least the radioactive money would have intrinsic value.
What we have been calling "nuclear waste," our descendants may
well refer to as "fuel." It is dangerous precisely because it
undergoes fission... because it delivers power. Unfortunately,
the stuff doesn't last "thousands of years." In six hundred
years, the expended fuel is no more radioactive than the ore it
was mined from.
Dropping radyoactiwes into the sea is wasteful. We can
ensure that they will still be around when the Earth's oil and
coal and plutonium have been used up, by turning them into money,
now.