Radioactive Waste Management Aboard A Speck - 2313 Words

Radioactive Waste Management Aboard a Speck in the Milky Way Global decision-making policies in regards to various aspects of human lives are made with, mostly, economic goals in mind. The Earth-grounded, dynamic social system that is humanity is but a single thread on the ever-evolving web of a habitable, self-sufficient planet. For millions of years, Earth has experienced the evolution of hundreds of thousands of different, complex species within the context of a universe expanding and evolving at its own cosmologically constant rate. With the arrival of introspective, neurologically advanced, financially-conscious humans haphazardly sorted into either side of superfluous dichotomies, anthropocentric worldviews displaced mankind from the context of a symbiosis-driven, global ecosystem and into a new world of treadmills, races to the bottom, and intergenerational tyranny. An exploited planet with distracted inhabitants is a recipe for disaster and one key ingredient is nuclear power. The steady rise of global energy consumption sparked a correlating increase in the need for reliable and viable sources of electricity and heat. Following the discovery that radioactive elements posses the power to release energy in abundance, a decades-long series of nuclear power-related events led to the creation of the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant in the 1950s. Soon after, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was founded and military nuclear power programs were instated. The swift