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However there would be far fewer storage sites where that risk would be occurring. Compared to the number of incidents caused by the chemical and fossil fuel in
by arrosenberg 7y ago
However there would be far fewer storage sites where that risk would be occurring. Compared to the number of incidents caused by the chemical and fossil fuel industries on any time scale, and the hypothetical risk of small areas of contamination far outweighs the level of global contamination that is going on today (most of which isn't being acknowledged, let alone cleaned up).
- jacquesm 7y agoYou're going to run straight into 'NIMBY' and other political constraints for your eventually designated storage sites. I'm sure someone will find a way to argue that we should send it to the third world as long as we get to control the burial sites on account of proliferation worries. We've already done this with many other kinds of waste. In the end it isn't about the area directly affected in the near future, it is about the long term effects and those are very hard to model accurately when it comes to massive deposits of nuclear waste. Just a couple of the risks: massive terrorist target, risk of pooling, risk of large scale groundwater contamination, risk of the whole thing blowing up. These are not trivial and not all of them can be dealt with over the time-scales that the waste would still be significantly radio active. Political structures are not stable across the time-scales that you are looking at here, you might end up seriously regretting any particular site a few hundred years into the future.
- arrosenberg 7y agoYou aren't wrong, but how is that any different than the current situation with fossil fuels, chemicals, fertilizer plants, etc.? Historically, they've been put into poor and minority neighborhoods, since those groups couldn't NIMBY it, but I don't think that's going to be acceptable going forward.