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Its hard for me to understand why these nuclear waste repositories have to operate safely for 10,000 years. That's a heavy bar to meet. In 200 years we will lik
by cheerlessbog 7y ago
Its hard for me to understand why these nuclear waste repositories have to operate safely for 10,000 years. That's a heavy bar to meet. In 200 years we will likely have technology that would solve the next 1000 years with ease. If the concern is that technological progress may cease, and we bequeath a radioactive hole on a developmentally regressed world - well, climate change is your best bet for achieving that. Let's compromise on the 10,000 years to try to avoid it.
- 08-15 7y agoThe dangerous fission products have a half life of about 30 years, so they need confinement for maybe 500 years. Concrete can do that easily. But when the fake environmentalists discovered nuclear power as their new cause around 1980, and realized that The Waste Issue[TM] is their killer argument, they noticed that they had to blow up the time scale. So for political reasons, it was decided that other components, such as plutonium with a half life of 24000 years, are even more harmful. And just like that, a manageable 500-year-problem became an insurmountable million-year-problem that requires the invention of a new religion, and artists coming up with fields of spikey structures, and geologists to come up with formations stable forever, and lots more of careers to be made managing a problem that doesn't exist.