<p>Maybe you can describe how many degrees of global warming are you trying to compare that massive meltdown.</p>

<p>There are several nuclear waste, like the following:
Xe133, I131, Cs134, Cs137, Te132, Sr89, Sr90, Ba140, Zr95, Mo99, Ru103, Ru106, Ce141, Ce144, Np239, Pu238, Pu239, Pu240, Pu241, Cm242</p>

<p>Some isotopes have a short life, so they don't matter, while others might have a half life of millions of years. In fact, uranium is so stable that you can still find it in the Earth crust.</p>

<p>But usually, the most dangerous for health are the ones that are between some days and some years of half life, like I131 (8 days of half life), Sr90 (28.78 years) and Cs137 (30 years).</p>

<p>Maybe you can give a look to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Chernobyl case</a> in order to get more info.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-10T02:35:22.590Z
Thanks. I did not understand how harmless elements with really long half-lives (let us say 100k years) are.
posfan12
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-09T13:07:33.207Z
2018-05-10T15:42:25.843Z
2018-05-10T15:42:25.843Z
Santiago
<p>What is (roughly) the half-life of the materials used/generated in a nuclear plant, if that plant goes into meltdown? Could the world bounce back from global warming in a shorter time period than that half-life? Even in a worst-case scenario, could full-scale global warming be a better outcome than a cascading series of nuclear power plant failures (due initially to a natural event such as an earthquake, or to deliberate attack, war, etc.)?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-08T22:27:41.063Z
I think this is much to vague to get a good answer.   How many nuclear plants and what type of fuel matters.  Also what kind of meltdown.    There's a series of nuclear waste products some with shorter half lives than others.   Most of the risk of nuclear meltdowns is gone within a few decades (most not all) the peak risk, gone in a few weeks to months.   Decades is a shorter time-frame than global warming which can last a century, a few centuries or perhaps longer depending on a few factors.
userLTK
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-08T23:19:42.180Z
Okay, I misunderstood the time spans involved. I thought nuclear materials/waste had much longer (100s of thousands of years) half lives. Conversely, I thought global warming and sea level rise (but not all their effects, such as extinction of species) might reverse themselves in _less_ time than that.
posfan12
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-09T00:13:42.147Z
There's nuclear waste with that long a time period too.    People can visit Chernobyl for example, it's just not a good idea to live there, and plant and animal life is thriving there because the danger is mostly gone.  Safe nuclear waste storage can be on the scale of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, or so too, so there's no easy answer.  There's dozens of different isotopes that need to be taken in consideration, each with a different half life.
userLTK
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-09T04:53:27.940Z
@posfan12: There's an important point here that you seem to have missed, which is that the intensity of radiation produced by a particular isotope is inversely proportional to the half life.  For instance, U-238 has a half-life of something over 4 billion years, K-40 is over a billion, so for practical purposes they aren't really radioactive at all.
jamesqf
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-09T10:16:33.470Z
Not to mention different radionuclides having different magnitude and type of adverse health effects. Or nuclear winter type effects.
Communisty
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-10T02:36:18.520Z
@userLTK The melted mass (the "elephant's foot") left over at Chernobyl could also explode if it comes into contact with groundwater, which could hurt the wildlife all over again.
posfan12
<climate-change>
Global warming versus nuclear half-lives
posfan12
# Global warming versus nuclear half-lives

(Asked by: username_0 on 2018-05-08)

What is (roughly) the half-life of the materials used/generated in a nuclear plant, if that plant goes into meltdown? Could the world bounce back from global warming in a shorter time period than that half-life? Even in a worst-case scenario, could full-scale global warming be a better outcome than a cascading series of nuclear power plant failures (due initially to a natural event such as an earthquake, or to deliberate attack, war, etc.)?

**Tags:** climate-change

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: I think this is much to vague to get a good answer.   How many nuclear plants and what type of fuel matters.  Also what kind of meltdown.    There's a series of nuclear waste products some with shorter half lives than others.   Most of the risk of nuclear meltdowns is gone within a few decades (most not all) the peak risk, gone in a few weeks to months.   Decades is a shorter time-frame than global warming which can last a century, a few centuries or perhaps longer depending on a few factors.  
> **username_0**: Okay, I misunderstood the time spans involved. I thought nuclear materials/waste had much longer (100s of thousands of years) half lives. Conversely, I thought global warming and sea level rise (but not all their effects, such as extinction of species) might reverse themselves in _less_ time than that.  
> **username_1**: There's nuclear waste with that long a time period too.    People can visit Chernobyl for example, it's just not a good idea to live there, and plant and animal life is thriving there because the danger is mostly gone.  Safe nuclear waste storage can be on the scale of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, or so too, so there's no easy answer.  There's dozens of different isotopes that need to be taken in consideration, each with a different half life.  
> **username_2**: @username_0: There's an important point here that you seem to have missed, which is that the intensity of radiation produced by a particular isotope is inversely proportional to the half life.  For instance, U-238 has a half-life of something over 4 billion years, K-40 is over a billion, so for practical purposes they aren't really radioactive at all.  
> **username_3**: Not to mention different radionuclides having different magnitude and type of adverse health effects. Or nuclear winter type effects.  
> **username_0**: @username_1 The melted mass (the "elephant's foot") left over at Chernobyl could also explode if it comes into contact with groundwater, which could hurt the wildlife all over again.  

---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_4 on 2018-05-09. Score: 2 | Accepted answer

Maybe you can describe how many degrees of global warming are you trying to compare that massive meltdown.

There are several nuclear waste, like the following:
Xe133, I131, Cs134, Cs137, Te132, Sr89, Sr90, Ba140, Zr95, Mo99, Ru103, Ru106, Ce141, Ce144, Np239, Pu238, Pu239, Pu240, Pu241, Cm242

Some isotopes have a short life, so they don't matter, while others might have a half life of millions of years. In fact, uranium is so stable that you can still find it in the Earth crust.

But usually, the most dangerous for health are the ones that are between some days and some years of half life, like I131 (8 days of half life), Sr90 (28.78 years) and Cs137 (30 years).

Maybe you can give a look to [Chernobyl case](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster) in order to get more info.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Thanks. I did not understand how harmless elements with really long half-lives (let us say 100k years) are.  

---

