Friday, May 19, 2006

Waste Management

There's been a fair bit of talk about Australia being the storehouse for radioactive waste. The argument is that since it was mined here then we should be responsible for the waste. Now apart from there being no similar policy for other energy sources - should we send all our fossil fuel waste back to the middle east? - I actually have no problem with this idea. With one proviso. Secure storage of nuclear waste isn't cheap and the times involved before the waste becomes safe is in the order of millenia (some up to 50,000 years or more). So this means that we have to cover that cost. Now base rate of $1/kg sounds fine by me, and of course we'd have to take inflation into consideration so let's add an anatocism of 1% (I'm an optimistic about our economy =) to that for every year of storage. Let's take a worse case scenario and say we'll store it for 50,000 years. So that would come to roughly $11713566086530747339140669859104000000000000000000... [shitloads more zeros]...000/kg. Payment up front of course.

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