The fear of waste has always struck me as illogical for a couple of reasons: First, uranium is not some mythic dark magic demon that we conjure from a hellish

The fear of waste has always struck me as illogical for a couple of reasons: First, uranium is not some mythic dark magic demon that we conjure from a hellish fairy land in another dimension. It's a naturally-occurring rock that we intentionally dig up because it's useful. Another comment mentions lead, mercury, etc. as being even more terrifying, but again, these are natural elements that we mine for various uses. They're not new. They've always been here. Most of the fear is just superstition. Secondly, fear seems to be predicated on the idea that we need to dump all the stuff, we need to find a single place to concentrate it all when we dump it, and we need to leave it there for thousands of years. Of course no one wants that next door. But why try to find a place to dump all this lead/mercury/uranium while we're still digging up and refining more? Why not find ways to use it? We used to take just the kerosene and dump most of the rest of the oil because we just didn't know what to do with it. Turns out gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel did have uses after all. We also didn't know what to do with heavy oils, oil sands, etc., but we've found ways to process them into something useful. If we do need to dump some (perhaps because we don't yet have the technology to filter out impurities), why not just put it back where we got it, or scatter it around the way that it is found naturally, or better still just tuck it away for a few decades until it becomes useful? Because it won't be a problem for a million years or 10,000 years or hundreds of years. It will soon be a valuable resource. With nuclear waste it's especially odd. That is by definition mass that naturally produces energy, and we're most worried about how to get rid of the stuff that will produce energy for a long time...while we are simultaneously worried about how we're going to produce enough energy to meet the demands of the future. Yet people are suggesting that we launch it all into space! How different would our world be if we had launched all the gasoline and diesel into space before we knew what to do with it?