Here's the quantification: "shiploads" times "decades" times "all over the world". I would like to be more specific but they never, ever, gave the numbers. French dumpings do not appear in US paper linked before, as I said.
More quantification:
Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137Iodine-131 is the most popular radionuclide. It has a half-life of just 8 days. But the cousin iodine-129 has a half-life of 15 million years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_iodineIIRC, it's said that after 10 half-lives one could consider there's not a problem anymore. That gives us about three months for the iodine-131 and 300 years for cesium-137. For iodine-129 we are speaking about 150 milion years.
So let's take something about the middle. Plutonium is produced in nuclear power plants and it seems to be basically alfa-emitter, thus could easily be considered "low-level waste". Of course, since it's needed to make the bombs, most of it is carefully collected. But no process is perfect. So, again, it could easily be at least a tiiiiny little bit on each of these barrels, too. But there were "shiploads" x "decades" x "all over the world" of these barrels.
We can bet that non-economical-to-collect amounts of plutonium are effectively there. In that time France's NPPs were trying to do "very advanced things". Like, now we burn uranium, that will make plutonium, then we will burn plutonium, that will make garbanzonium... and so on and on. Nuclear energy was going to be "eternal" IIRC. So who knows exactly what that shit really is. Moreover, they dumped not just their own shit, more about that later.
You can't say there isn't any, either plutonium or garbanzonium, because neither you, nor me, know what's really on those barrels. It was "secret of the State" then and it's still secret now. All we know is: it's nuclear waste, supposedly "low level waste"
What we know for sure is plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24.000 years. Times ten=240.000 years. There weren't so many Homo Sapiens 240.000 years ago. Most cave paintings are from 10.000-15.000 years ago. Just to put things in perspective.
I think you should look again at your numbers. Please don't think I'm cherry-picking, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decayAnd:
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/plutonium.htmlI also think you should really look at the chapter about low level waste ocean disposal I linked previously. You say:
"(...) nowadays the nuclear waste gets stored underground or on site were control is much more effective".
Sorry, but I have to say "Bollocks". And I have to say "Fukushima". Because they are dumping their shit into the ocean right now. Deliberately.
Because it's cheaper. So, please think twice before parroting Westinghouse's bullshit. Stored underground? Please don't be naive.
Spain still has perhaps half a dozen nuclear reactors, and that waste goes now to France like it did 40 years ago. No underground storage in Spain. BTW, I'm not really sure the Netherlands have that underground storage, either. France dumped nuclear waste from all Western Europe from the 1960s up until 1983.
Because it's cheaper. So, not really much underground storage in most of Western Europe. Or at least it so seems. Perhaps Finland? But, they are just 5 million people. There's more people in Barcelona than in Finland, I would say. So those nice suomis can do with a fraction of the energy other countries need= an easier problem to solve.
Should the number of NPPs increase, that hyped and so often ficticional underground storage would be quickly overwhelmed. To build these things is not easy, nor fast, nor cheap, to stand up for more time than the pyramids, avoiding leaks by the way. So, as the US paper about ocean disposal states, more ocean disposal will be the "solution". French government didn't cease to authorize dumpings because they were nice guys, but because they were compelled. Now the matter for the nuclear industry is consider we all live in Nemo mode to try and be allowed to do it again.
Because it's cheaper. Unfortunately it looks many many people is really Nemo-alike. Politicians know it well.
If you prefer to live near a NPP, please feel free to do so. So what? Like half a million people living in Bilbo didn't think the same. And there was Altos Hornos de Bizkaia there at that time. In company of Babcock-Wilcox and a whole lot of steel heavy industries. Don't think this is like all of Spain, olives and wine and flamenco, as you guiris usually think. We have the biggest part of Spain's heavy industries here. In Franco's time industries were allowed to dump
anything into the ground, into the water and into the air. So we know well all types of shitty industrial waste here. Yet we prefer non-radioactive shitty waste. Or even better: no shitty waste at all.
So, you can give me your opinion and I can give you the opinion of 2.5 million basques. That guy Ryan? At least he's remembered. The other three? Sic transit gloria mundi.
Those living next to the nuclear power plant do not get sick? Ask the people from Fukushima. BTW, try to calculate what percent of your country would become inhabitable, for how many time, should that reactor go bonkers. Lets say you are right and problem is solved just by waiting 200 years to get back home. No doubt that would be really an incredibly good bargain. Just saying. Not to mention what it would do to the economy of the country.
Nico, I usually listen what you say with a maximum of attention, but I have to say, now your tires are slipping.