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…

  • habanheroEnglish
    4·
    1 year 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.

    • m0darnOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year 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.

      • habanheroEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I’m not sure why you think dispersing nuclear waste into our environment instead of isolating it is a good idea.

        If it’s just a thought experiment from a mathematical / chemical perspective, maybe someone else would like to take on the question and do the math.

        From a sociological and logistical perspective, it’s just not gonna happen. Pretty sure people’s tolerance for radioactive materials anywhere near them is zero. There isn’t any amount of radioactivity / danger that is considered socially acceptable.