You can, but it’ll hurt:
The sea has a lot of radioactive material in it. There is deuterium and tritium, which are nasty as they can get exchanged for hydrogen, and get incorporated into living material. And there are heavy metals such as radium. There is also a lot of gold in the sea. The German chemist Haber, who invented the industrial process that made ammonia, spent a lot of his money trying to extract the gold. However, the sea is big, and the concentrations are low, and Haber never got his money back.
The island would probably have been better off if the concrete lid had never been built. The radiation could run into the sea, and provided it mixed in, it would hardly be detected above the background, which was not zero in the first place. In the sea, the isotopes would be surrounded by low atomic number material (most oxygen and hydrogen) so you won’t get radiation daughters, as you might if it was surrounded by steel and concrete.
When I was doing my PhD on the same site, people in clean suits and breathing apparatus unlocked a room in Rutherford’s lab that had been sealed since 1937. He and his friends had splashed around and dropped an unknown amount of radioactive stuff in the early days. If you want a toxic room analogy, this is probably a good one. It isn’t a great situation, but there are many non-toxic rooms, so just lock it up, and don’t go there for 40 years or so. Radiation goes away eventually. If it doesn’t go away, you can detect it in tiny concentrations. Just be glad it isn’t something like mercury (yes, there is another room in the same block where people don’t go).
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shrugs I honestly don’t know what to do, what would be best. I know what we’re doing isn’t it. There really isn’t a good way forward for the people who lived on these islands; and with global warming the rest of the islands. I am hoping that as the island territories become less habitable due to global warming the people who live there are welcomed to the USA… but I know how well that will go. (I mean, Puerto Ricans are Americans in every way, and it is so rough for them here.)
I mean, granting them independence and washing our hands of the mess is wrong; we made this mess and we messed it up and we need to make this right. We can’t clean up this mess. We can make it easier for them to move here (I’m not sure what the legality of that is, currently) but that sucks from a cultural preservation standpoint. Rounding them up and forcing them to move someplace else is horrifying.
I mean, giving them more medical support and a good social safety net and letting them opt to move elsewhere and giving them financial support for that is probably the best option I can think of, but even it sucks.
If you have a suggestion that doesn’t suck please don’t be coy; what am I missing?
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What do they get in exchange for their UN vote?
Hey, how come the tank has a cute little happy face on it, but the helicopter just rains down a hail of death with no expression whatsoever?!
Helicopters, man. They’re cold. I mean, a tank has feelings. It feels joy, pain, sadness, the satisfaction of a job well done. Helicopters, though …
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$62.7 million / year and a superpower backing their sovereignty.
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I agree with being mad at the US over this, but let’s also remember that the Soviets did the same damn thing with their nuclear waste, except that they just dumped it straight into the ocean or ground and kept the location a secret.
Really? FFS. Can I have whataboutism for $1000 Alex?
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Which is a shame, because - among other things - it’s a lovely building.
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Oh, I didn’t mean it to be taken that way. I guess I didn’t phrase it well. Sorry about that.
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