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Nuclear power is almost always brought up as a low carbon alternative to fossil fuels to power our civilization. Some even quote how cheap nuclear power is comp

Nuclear power is almost always brought up as a low carbon alternative to fossil fuels to power our civilization. Some even quote how cheap nuclear power is compared to fossil fuel based power. But, those advocating for nuclear power almost always discount the cost involved in dealing with this radioactive trash. To put it in another way, by switching on nuclear power, instead of handing out next generation a warmed/messed up planet with dangerous levels of green house gases, we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. Even if not supplying all of our energy from Wind and solar, it is crime of our irresponsible generation to not invest in solar panels in sunny places like Florida, Texas, Middle East, southern India, Southeast Asia etc. Use the safe option first, and wait for nuclear option to mature until we get a better grip on what to do with its dangerous trash. Florida even actively prevents businesses from engaging in roof top solar panels. If that is not a facepalm moment of stupidity, I don’t know what is.

onlydeadheroes 7y ago
> Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. I suppose that when you watch your children die from climate change, then you will know.
- Brometheus 7y ago
  … or radioactivity.
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    That's not how it works. The waste has to be dealt with, but its not immediately harmful to the general population. Its a problem that has to be addressed in the long term, but climate change is a problem that has to be addressed in the short term. And by the short term I mean the past. In other words, radioactive waste isn't a "your children" problem, it's several generations removed if a solution hasn't been found by then. Climate change is indeed a "your children" problem, if you're old enough to die in the next couple of decades. Otherwise it's a You problem.
    - arkitaip 7y ago
      So basically, let's just offload the nuclear waste problem to future generations. That's exactly the same line of thinking that caused climate change.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Out of all the problems we're offloading to future generation, this is by far one of the smallest. It's a tiny amount of tightly controlled substance that can be reprocessed further to reduce both its volume and half-life - we know how, just this stupid FUD doesn't let us build the actual reactors to do that.
      - scrollaway 7y ago
        I'm not denying it's offloading a problem, but it's not the same scale of problem and the resolution needed is on a far longer time scale as well. You simply can't compare a worldwide, global, catastrophic change in climate, causing millions to die, species to go instinct, and trillions of dollars in damages to... this. What exactly is your reasoning in making them equal?
  - realusername 7y ago
    You can safely store radioactive waste but there's no method of storage for the CO2 we put in the air, that's the big difference.
    - merb 7y ago
      can you name any? btw. putting it somewhere and forgetting about it is definitiv not an option.
      - ben_w 7y ago
        Why isn’t it an option? There are plenty of places where it’s implausible for any future civilisation to reach without knowing what radiation is any why such waste is best left undisturbed.
      - realusername 7y ago
        You can use part of it as fuel, it's just does not economically make sense to do so right now. And what's wrong with storing it exactly?
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Put it in a sealed container and drop it in an abandoned mine, or even a pool. Keep an armed detail protecting it from getting stolen. There, done. If you're talking about storing the waste long-term, on the order of "more than any country existed on the planet", then this is a problem only because the irrational fear of nuclear doesn't let us build reactors that could further reprocess the fuel. (And if civilization collapsed now, then all you have to do is to burn the paper maps on which the storage location is marked, and nobody will find the waste before it decays to background radiation levels. If we fuck up civilization now, then the few remaining survivors will be stuck for a couple thousand years with medieval-era technology on a thoroughly broken planet. It's extremely unlikely someone would stumble upon the ruins radioactive waste storage plant. The planet is very large, the amount of nuclear waste is ridiculously tiny.)
        Xylakant 7y ago
  - r00fus 7y ago
    You mean the many times of radioactive material that’s aerosolized by coal burning? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
- imtringued 7y ago
  Wouldn't the parents die first?
Recurecur 7y ago
>To put it in another way, by switching on nuclear power, instead of handing out next generation a warmed/messed up planet with dangerous levels of green house gases, we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. Next-gen molten salt plants have much better usage of the nuclear material. Current light water reactors only use about 2% of the possible energy from the material. One consequence of this better efficiency is the waste is only dangerous for hundreds, instead of tens of thousands, of years. The long term consequences of nuclear waste are clearly less bad than the short term consequences of burning fossil fuels, which are estimated to kill hundreds of thousands of people world wide per year. That's entirely aside from climate change... People are just typically ill-informed and incapable of making rational decisions about relative risk. (BTW nuclear will also be one of the cheapest energy sources going forward, and is the only reliable 24/7 source of carbon-free energy.)
roenxi 7y ago
They talk about 'great stockpiles' then quote a figure of 22,000 m3 of high-level waste. 22,000 m3 of material is a tiny volume. Speaking from a bulk material moving perspective, that is maybe 12 hours work with a big excavator. Speaking as a mining engineer, in an active mine site you'd need to take special precautions to make sure a 22,000 m3 stockpile didn't get lost. If you don't put it in a designated spot, you're not going to be able to find it again. We aren't talking a big pile of dirt here. At volumes that small, if someone irresponsibly dumped it in the middle of the Sahara with a thick layer of rubble over the top it would be unlikely to be found and cause anyone any measurable harm. Literally the only reason anyone cares is because the volumes are so small we could reasonably achieve 0 net impact. You try achieving that with lead mining, coal mining, rare earth mining for renewables, etc, etc. The volumes of material involved would overwhelm any attempt. So people don't bother talking about it. Only for nuclear fuel does it start to matter. We already churn out larger volumes of nastier substances as part of our industrial supply chain. postscript the other good reason to talk about it the volumes are so small that if it doesn't get attention the aforementioned oops-we-lost-it problem will crop up. I mean, wow. 22 kcm of material. Going to need special markings just to distinguish it from a roll in the turf.
- lnsru 7y ago
  22 piles 10x10x10 meter size would perfectly fit into decommissioned nuclear plant. These building are build to survive earthquakes, thunderstorms and small plane crashes for hundred years. It’s insane they are not used for storing the waste. Germans are dismantling them wasting huge fortune: https://m.dw.com/en/germanys-atomic-phaseout-how-to-dismantle-a-nuclear-power-plant/a-47823766 https://m.dw.com/en/germanys-atomic-phaseout-how-to-dismantl... It’s crazy mismanagement of resources: initially expensive and extremely durable structure is build, used, then dismantled wasting millions and then another extremely durable and insanely expensive structure is build to store the waste. Sounds craze to me. I used to play in the woods as child, there were 200 years old military structures. Nobody were maintaining them, rain, snow did their job, but they were intact. I don’t understand how we can’t reuse nuclear power plant buildings as storage for the next 200 years.
- antpls 7y ago
  Sure 22 000m3 isn't that big, but the rate could increase sharply (currently new 34 000m3 of high and intermediate waste produced per year according to the article). The question is : should we invest and build 10 times more nuclear reactors for future energy needs ? Build 10 times more reactors in the world, multiply per 50 years of operation and now you have 17 000 000 cube meters of high level waste. Renewable energies introduced long-term thinking about impacts. The nuclear waste story only tells us we cannot scale the current nuclear technology, but we can still moderately use this tech for the next century to transition to more renewable methods.
realusername 7y ago
> Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. In science it's better to have a known problem (radioactive waste), than hundreds of thousands of unknown problems (global warming). > Florida even actively prevents businesses from engaging in roof top solar panels Roof top solar panel is one of the worst way to generate energy, you just add the inefficiency of low scale on top of the inefficiencies of solar panels. Just about everything is better than that. And then additionally, you can build all the solar and wind energy you want, you still need a constant energy to support it anyway.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  Not even in science alone; climate-wise having 22km3 of solid material is much preferable over the 30 gigatonnes (!) of CO2 emissions that are just vented into the air nowadays. (and that's just co2, the source [1] I found with a second of googling mentions 60 gigatonnes total) [1] https://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/trends-in-global-co2-and-total-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2018-report https://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/trends-in-global-co2-and-...
  - llukas 7y ago
    Actually, that is 0.000022 km3 of solid material.
kortilla 7y ago
Nuclear waste and global warming aren’t even nearly the same category of problem. An entire area the size of Nevada being uninhabitable for thousands of years (which is worse than the worst case nuclear waste scenarios) is not as bad as our current course of climate change. Build all of the solar you want, it’s not a solution for base-load supply. There are cases already (see Hawaii) where solar power is saturated yet they still burn carbon fuels at night. Energy storage does not exist in any meaningful way for solar and every opinion like yours is tacit approval to keep destroying the planet. If that’s not a facepalm moment of stupidity, I don’t know what is.
keymone 7y ago
> instead of handing out next generation a warmed/messed up planet with dangerous levels of green house gases, we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground Without actual numbers this just sounds like FUD. How much nuclear waste is produced? How much volume is it? Why is it so bad that we keep it under ground? How does that compare to costs of other power sources? So far it looks like nuclear is by far cheapest and cleanest least deadly source of power and only irrational phobias are in the way of adopting it in planetary scale and developing even better reactors and more efficient waste management procedures.
yholio 7y ago
> we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. Seriously, we are pondering if a completely inert mass of nuclear waste sitting a mile inside the crust where it can harm nothing and from where there is no incentive to dug it up, is a better option than 6 orders of magnitude more CO2 dumped in the atomoshpere, bringing the climate to Jurasic levels, wiping off a large part of the biological diversity of Earth and threatening our very existence on the planet? Nuclear power is not without it's problems. It's capital intensive, it's politically risky therefore expensive, it can, when managed badly, lead to (typically, tolerable) contamination and harm to people. Of those problems, the handling of waste is the easiest to solve: just put them somewhere where they can't harm anyone.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Well, there actually are good incentives to dig it up (or to not bury it in the first place) as current reactors are horrendously inefficient, leaving 95%+ of usable energy in the fuel, that more modern reactors should be able to use. Not to mention potentially usable metals & isotopes due to all the transmutations going on in the fuel.
- soVeryTired 7y ago
  > Nuclear power is not without it's problems. It's capital intensive, it's politically risky therefore expensive, it can, when managed badly, lead to (typically, tolerable) contamination and harm to people. When managed badly it can make an area the size of Europe uninhabitable, as Chernobyl might have done. You shouldn't discount that!
  - orwin 7y ago
    > When managed badly it can make an area the size of Europe uninhabitable Citation needed > as Chernobyl might have done No. If you take all the waste in Chernobyl as well as all the fuel, and dissiminate all around Europe equally, it will sightly increase the natural radioactivity, and in some place this increas would be laughably negligeable (Wales, Brittany, probably others). Also, you should be aware than risk =/= danger, so even if your argument were true, it would not be receivable in any non-political debate. Plus the pressurized water reactors reduce the risk so much than even the Tsunami the provocked Fukushima would probably just paralize the reactors sightly. But the FUD spread by anti-nuclear activists, uniformed people and media killed more than all the nuclear incident in the last 60 years. And i'm not counting the social exclusion cost or even the abortions caused by all the bull.
nickik 7y ago
> discount the cost involved in dealing with this radioactive trash That is 100% wrong. In fact in the US for example the money to handle radioactive waste was collected almost from the beginning. The Government HAS a huge fund, that is owned by nuclear power utilites, this fund can be used by the government to solve the problem. Unfortunatly, anti-nuclear people have made any progress on nuclear waste managment impossible, but this is not, and never has been about money. > we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. That is also nonsense. In no way of estimation, radioactive waste is close to as dangerous as climate change. Handling of radioactive waste is not that difficult and in the future it, once nuclear power is more standard, those things can be used as nuclear fuel again. You are not handing down useless stuff, but a well controlled resource. > Use the safe option first, and wait for nuclear option to mature until we get a better grip on what to do with its dangerous trash. Nuclear waste has not been a technical issue for decades. Its a purley political problem. First of all, the amount of nuclear waste is wastly over-estimated. The danger from civilian nuclear waste is wastle over-estimated as well. And more importantly, if we actually had a large nuclear industry, this 'waste' would actually be quite useful and most of it should never be disposed in a permanent way.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> To put it in another way, by switching on nuclear power, instead of handing out next generation a warmed/messed up planet with dangerous levels of green house gases, we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. You probably didn't intend it this way, but this reads as a powerful argument for switching to nuclear, at least if you realize how much "a warmed/messed up planet" we're talking about, vs. how extremely small a "pile of dangerous radioactive waste".
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Once upon a time someone posted the amount of nuclear waste generated in a person's lifetime assuming 1st world electricity usage. It was like a golfball or apple or something like that. I ran the numbers for volume and multiplied by 7 billion people it came out to be like 1-3 of the worlds largest container ships worth of waste. That's basically nothing. We can find a place for that. Edit: I invite anyone who doesn't think that's basically nothing to run numbers for the waste products of other energy sources.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tokai 7y ago
The fly ash from coal is radioactive. But we just blast stuff that in to the atmosphere for all of us to breath. I would rather deal with some irradiated slags.

onlydeadheroes 7y ago

> Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. I suppose that when you watch your children die from climate change, then you will know.

Brometheus 7y ago
… or radioactivity.
- scrollaway 7y ago
  That's not how it works. The waste has to be dealt with, but its not immediately harmful to the general population. Its a problem that has to be addressed in the long term, but climate change is a problem that has to be addressed in the short term. And by the short term I mean the past. In other words, radioactive waste isn't a "your children" problem, it's several generations removed if a solution hasn't been found by then. Climate change is indeed a "your children" problem, if you're old enough to die in the next couple of decades. Otherwise it's a You problem.
  - arkitaip 7y ago
    So basically, let's just offload the nuclear waste problem to future generations. That's exactly the same line of thinking that caused climate change.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Out of all the problems we're offloading to future generation, this is by far one of the smallest. It's a tiny amount of tightly controlled substance that can be reprocessed further to reduce both its volume and half-life - we know how, just this stupid FUD doesn't let us build the actual reactors to do that.
    - scrollaway 7y ago
      I'm not denying it's offloading a problem, but it's not the same scale of problem and the resolution needed is on a far longer time scale as well. You simply can't compare a worldwide, global, catastrophic change in climate, causing millions to die, species to go instinct, and trillions of dollars in damages to... this. What exactly is your reasoning in making them equal?
- realusername 7y ago
  You can safely store radioactive waste but there's no method of storage for the CO2 we put in the air, that's the big difference.
  - merb 7y ago
    can you name any? btw. putting it somewhere and forgetting about it is definitiv not an option.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Why isn’t it an option? There are plenty of places where it’s implausible for any future civilisation to reach without knowing what radiation is any why such waste is best left undisturbed.
    - realusername 7y ago
      You can use part of it as fuel, it's just does not economically make sense to do so right now. And what's wrong with storing it exactly?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Put it in a sealed container and drop it in an abandoned mine, or even a pool. Keep an armed detail protecting it from getting stolen. There, done. If you're talking about storing the waste long-term, on the order of "more than any country existed on the planet", then this is a problem only because the irrational fear of nuclear doesn't let us build reactors that could further reprocess the fuel. (And if civilization collapsed now, then all you have to do is to burn the paper maps on which the storage location is marked, and nobody will find the waste before it decays to background radiation levels. If we fuck up civilization now, then the few remaining survivors will be stuck for a couple thousand years with medieval-era technology on a thoroughly broken planet. It's extremely unlikely someone would stumble upon the ruins radioactive waste storage plant. The planet is very large, the amount of nuclear waste is ridiculously tiny.)
      - Xylakant 7y ago
- r00fus 7y ago
  You mean the many times of radioactive material that’s aerosolized by coal burning? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
imtringued 7y ago
Wouldn't the parents die first?

Recurecur 7y ago

>To put it in another way, by switching on nuclear power, instead of handing out next generation a warmed/messed up planet with dangerous levels of green house gases, we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. Next-gen molten salt plants have much better usage of the nuclear material. Current light water reactors only use about 2% of the possible energy from the material. One consequence of this better efficiency is the waste is only dangerous for hundreds, instead of tens of thousands, of years. The long term consequences of nuclear waste are clearly less bad than the short term consequences of burning fossil fuels, which are estimated to kill hundreds of thousands of people world wide per year. That's entirely aside from climate change... People are just typically ill-informed and incapable of making rational decisions about relative risk. (BTW nuclear will also be one of the cheapest energy sources going forward, and is the only reliable 24/7 source of carbon-free energy.)

roenxi 7y ago

They talk about 'great stockpiles' then quote a figure of 22,000 m3 of high-level waste. 22,000 m3 of material is a tiny volume. Speaking from a bulk material moving perspective, that is maybe 12 hours work with a big excavator. Speaking as a mining engineer, in an active mine site you'd need to take special precautions to make sure a 22,000 m3 stockpile didn't get lost. If you don't put it in a designated spot, you're not going to be able to find it again. We aren't talking a big pile of dirt here. At volumes that small, if someone irresponsibly dumped it in the middle of the Sahara with a thick layer of rubble over the top it would be unlikely to be found and cause anyone any measurable harm. Literally the only reason anyone cares is because the volumes are so small we could reasonably achieve 0 net impact. You try achieving that with lead mining, coal mining, rare earth mining for renewables, etc, etc. The volumes of material involved would overwhelm any attempt. So people don't bother talking about it. Only for nuclear fuel does it start to matter. We already churn out larger volumes of nastier substances as part of our industrial supply chain. postscript the other good reason to talk about it the volumes are so small that if it doesn't get attention the aforementioned oops-we-lost-it problem will crop up. I mean, wow. 22 kcm of material. Going to need special markings just to distinguish it from a roll in the turf.

lnsru 7y ago
22 piles 10x10x10 meter size would perfectly fit into decommissioned nuclear plant. These building are build to survive earthquakes, thunderstorms and small plane crashes for hundred years. It’s insane they are not used for storing the waste. Germans are dismantling them wasting huge fortune: https://m.dw.com/en/germanys-atomic-phaseout-how-to-dismantle-a-nuclear-power-plant/a-47823766 https://m.dw.com/en/germanys-atomic-phaseout-how-to-dismantl... It’s crazy mismanagement of resources: initially expensive and extremely durable structure is build, used, then dismantled wasting millions and then another extremely durable and insanely expensive structure is build to store the waste. Sounds craze to me. I used to play in the woods as child, there were 200 years old military structures. Nobody were maintaining them, rain, snow did their job, but they were intact. I don’t understand how we can’t reuse nuclear power plant buildings as storage for the next 200 years.
antpls 7y ago
Sure 22 000m3 isn't that big, but the rate could increase sharply (currently new 34 000m3 of high and intermediate waste produced per year according to the article). The question is : should we invest and build 10 times more nuclear reactors for future energy needs ? Build 10 times more reactors in the world, multiply per 50 years of operation and now you have 17 000 000 cube meters of high level waste. Renewable energies introduced long-term thinking about impacts. The nuclear waste story only tells us we cannot scale the current nuclear technology, but we can still moderately use this tech for the next century to transition to more renewable methods.

realusername 7y ago

> Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. In science it's better to have a known problem (radioactive waste), than hundreds of thousands of unknown problems (global warming). > Florida even actively prevents businesses from engaging in roof top solar panels Roof top solar panel is one of the worst way to generate energy, you just add the inefficiency of low scale on top of the inefficiencies of solar panels. Just about everything is better than that. And then additionally, you can build all the solar and wind energy you want, you still need a constant energy to support it anyway.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
Not even in science alone; climate-wise having 22km3 of solid material is much preferable over the 30 gigatonnes (!) of CO2 emissions that are just vented into the air nowadays. (and that's just co2, the source [1] I found with a second of googling mentions 60 gigatonnes total) [1] https://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/trends-in-global-co2-and-total-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2018-report https://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/trends-in-global-co2-and-...
- llukas 7y ago
  Actually, that is 0.000022 km3 of solid material.

kortilla 7y ago

Nuclear waste and global warming aren’t even nearly the same category of problem. An entire area the size of Nevada being uninhabitable for thousands of years (which is worse than the worst case nuclear waste scenarios) is not as bad as our current course of climate change. Build all of the solar you want, it’s not a solution for base-load supply. There are cases already (see Hawaii) where solar power is saturated yet they still burn carbon fuels at night. Energy storage does not exist in any meaningful way for solar and every opinion like yours is tacit approval to keep destroying the planet. If that’s not a facepalm moment of stupidity, I don’t know what is.

keymone 7y ago

> instead of handing out next generation a warmed/messed up planet with dangerous levels of green house gases, we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground Without actual numbers this just sounds like FUD. How much nuclear waste is produced? How much volume is it? Why is it so bad that we keep it under ground? How does that compare to costs of other power sources? So far it looks like nuclear is by far cheapest and cleanest least deadly source of power and only irrational phobias are in the way of adopting it in planetary scale and developing even better reactors and more efficient waste management procedures.

yholio 7y ago

> we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. Seriously, we are pondering if a completely inert mass of nuclear waste sitting a mile inside the crust where it can harm nothing and from where there is no incentive to dug it up, is a better option than 6 orders of magnitude more CO2 dumped in the atomoshpere, bringing the climate to Jurasic levels, wiping off a large part of the biological diversity of Earth and threatening our very existence on the planet? Nuclear power is not without it's problems. It's capital intensive, it's politically risky therefore expensive, it can, when managed badly, lead to (typically, tolerable) contamination and harm to people. Of those problems, the handling of waste is the easiest to solve: just put them somewhere where they can't harm anyone.

m4rtink 7y ago
Well, there actually are good incentives to dig it up (or to not bury it in the first place) as current reactors are horrendously inefficient, leaving 95%+ of usable energy in the fuel, that more modern reactors should be able to use. Not to mention potentially usable metals & isotopes due to all the transmutations going on in the fuel.
soVeryTired 7y ago
> Nuclear power is not without it's problems. It's capital intensive, it's politically risky therefore expensive, it can, when managed badly, lead to (typically, tolerable) contamination and harm to people. When managed badly it can make an area the size of Europe uninhabitable, as Chernobyl might have done. You shouldn't discount that!
- orwin 7y ago
  > When managed badly it can make an area the size of Europe uninhabitable Citation needed > as Chernobyl might have done No. If you take all the waste in Chernobyl as well as all the fuel, and dissiminate all around Europe equally, it will sightly increase the natural radioactivity, and in some place this increas would be laughably negligeable (Wales, Brittany, probably others). Also, you should be aware than risk =/= danger, so even if your argument were true, it would not be receivable in any non-political debate. Plus the pressurized water reactors reduce the risk so much than even the Tsunami the provocked Fukushima would probably just paralize the reactors sightly. But the FUD spread by anti-nuclear activists, uniformed people and media killed more than all the nuclear incident in the last 60 years. And i'm not counting the social exclusion cost or even the abortions caused by all the bull.

nickik 7y ago

> discount the cost involved in dealing with this radioactive trash That is 100% wrong. In fact in the US for example the money to handle radioactive waste was collected almost from the beginning. The Government HAS a huge fund, that is owned by nuclear power utilites, this fund can be used by the government to solve the problem. Unfortunatly, anti-nuclear people have made any progress on nuclear waste managment impossible, but this is not, and never has been about money. > we would be giving them a pile of dangerous radioactive waste several miles under the ground. Not sure whether it can be argued if it is really a better alternative. That is also nonsense. In no way of estimation, radioactive waste is close to as dangerous as climate change. Handling of radioactive waste is not that difficult and in the future it, once nuclear power is more standard, those things can be used as nuclear fuel again. You are not handing down useless stuff, but a well controlled resource. > Use the safe option first, and wait for nuclear option to mature until we get a better grip on what to do with its dangerous trash. Nuclear waste has not been a technical issue for decades. Its a purley political problem. First of all, the amount of nuclear waste is wastly over-estimated. The danger from civilian nuclear waste is wastle over-estimated as well. And more importantly, if we actually had a large nuclear industry, this 'waste' would actually be quite useful and most of it should never be disposed in a permanent way.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

Once upon a time someone posted the amount of nuclear waste generated in a person's lifetime assuming 1st world electricity usage. It was like a golfball or apple or something like that. I ran the numbers for volume and multiplied by 7 billion people it came out to be like 1-3 of the worlds largest container ships worth of waste. That's basically nothing. We can find a place for that. Edit: I invite anyone who doesn't think that's basically nothing to run numbers for the waste products of other energy sources.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tokai 7y ago

The fly ash from coal is radioactive. But we just blast stuff that in to the atmosphere for all of us to breath. I would rather deal with some irradiated slags.