Misinformation
April 7th, 2010 - 8:07 am
Today’s News 8 poll is about whether or not Texas should store radioactive waste for other states. I’m opposed, not because I think radioactive waste storage is all that dangerous anymore, but because I believe states should have to deal with their own garbage. If you make the trash, you should have to do something about your own trash and not ship it elsewhere. But I really don’t care too much one way or the other about radioactive waste storage, so long as they put it in the parts of Texas that are already pretty much unlivable.
My reason for posting this at all is just to point out some misinformation I read in the comments on the poll.
Radioactive waste cannot be loaded into a rocket and blasted into space. Sure, it sounds like a great plan, but what of the consequences of a rocket failure? Rockets do have a failure rate and every so often they do blow up on launch or just after. Do we really want to take the chance of releasing a lot of radioactive crap into the stratosphere to infect the entire ecosystem with it? Or having a rocket full of radioactive waste screw up and land in some other country to screw up their environment? Yeah, sounds great but the risks are FAR too high.
MRI scans do not create radioactive waste. Seriously, people, Google is your friend. Use it if you think it’s possible you don’t know what you are talking about, and really, most people should just assume they don’t know what they are talking about and do some reading before opening their mouths (or putting their fingers on the keyboard). Let me repeat, there is nothing at all radioactive used or created for MRI scans. They use magnets and magnetic fields, which would be why it’s called Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
Anyway, these two things were annoying me enough I just had to post about. The poll comments aren’t the first time I have seen people spreading these two misconceptions around, and every time someone does some other person believes it and starts spreading it around too. If only people would use Google, do some reading, and think for a minute, I wouldn’t have to point out the stupidity and correct it. This will never happen, so I guess I’ll be pointing out stupidity for the rest of my life.
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3 Responses to “Misinformation”
Rockets? The value extracted from uranium is a minuscule fraction of the cost of the fuel which would be needed to send it into orbit, let alone outer space, and still not even counting the cost of the hardware required. There are hundreds of thousands of tons of the stuff. This is the ‘thinking’ that results from allowing World of Warcraft to substitute for school science classes.
Well, there’s that too. But even if it was cheap, I would not want to know there were rockets full of hazardous waste being shot off, because you know one would eventually fail and then there’d be a problem.
Apparently the stuff they intend to store somewhere in Texas isn’t even actual radioactive waste (like spent uranium etc.) but more like tools, overalls, and whatnot that has been near radioactive waste. Still wouldn’t want the stuff sitting around my living room, but if they want to bury it in bunkers out in our desert, I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to cause a problem. Not thrilled about it, as I said in the post, but eh, whatever.
Lots of problems could be solved by space flight becoming cheap and reliable. Don’t hold your breath for that initiative though.