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The Natural Philosopher[_2_]

Java Jive wrote:
On 23 Sep 2009 14:40:29 GMT, (Richard Tobin)
wrote:
If you're going to be pedantic, eventually your calculation will
result in less than one atom left, so sooner or later every atom will
have decayed. A mole of atoms - say 3 grams of tritium - has 6x10^23
or about 2^80 atoms, so after about 80 half lives - about a thousand
years in the tritium case - there will really be none left.

True enough. 9/10 sir?

Of course, in practice, many dangerous radioactive substances have
sufficiently long half-lives that they will continue to be a danger for
far longer than we can foresee the future.

Which of course is the real point ...

And of course, if there weren't such elements *already present in the
earths crust*, we wouldn't be able to use nuclear power.

Which is, of course, the real point..

In essence, all we are doing is scarping dangerous stuff out of the
ground, concentrating it, and bringing it under human control, rather
than leaving it lying around the place.