3 ms·

You can easily store waste underground, the democrats wouldnt allow it in arizona.

• periheli0n 5y ago
  Storing nuclear waste safely underground requires having a rock formation that is geologically stable over 100,000+ years. Not easy to find. Otherwise the waste will eventually enter ground water and from there inevitably the food chain.
  • cameldrv 5y ago
    For the sake of argument, suppose it leaks after only 1000 years. The radioactivity will have diminished dramatically, although it will be quite a bit higher than background. It's possible that it would contaminate the local water table somewhere in the middle of the desert. This assumes that the people 1000 years from now won't be much more technologically sophisticated than us and figure out a better way to deal with it in the meantime. If that's true, and there are humans, but something terrible has happened in the meantime, my guess is that they would much rather some aquifer in the middle of nowhere be polluted than have massive global ecosystem devastation due to pumping CO2 into the air. In general, the risks from nuclear power are not something to dismiss, but they pale in comparison to the risks of currently acceptable alternatives. Even the very fact that radioactivity decays over some time scale seems to be used against nuclear -- if you pollute the groundwater with cadmium or lead or some other heavy metal, it literally never goes away, so we just accept the risk since no containment can last forever. If fission products decay after 100,000 years though, we have to guarantee containment for that length of time.