4 ms·

We already have dozens (hundreds?) of contaminated sites worldwide e.g. in Russia, China, the US, Japan, ... It's not a problem exclusive to Germany, in general

We already have dozens (hundreds?) of contaminated sites worldwide e.g. in Russia, China, the US, Japan, ... It's not a problem exclusive to Germany, in general most countries seem to be unable to come up with a viable long-term strategy for nuclear waste disposal. Maybe it's possible to dispose of nuclear fuel in a responsible way, but my hopes that this will happen are very low judging by all the nasty things we did to the environment in the last century. Overall I'm pretty confident that in a few centuries (or even decades) people will see all of these strategies as really foolish (burying radioactive waste across hundreds of sites around the globe, dumping billions of tons of waste into the oceans, polluting the atmosphere, ...).

_n_b_ 5y ago
> Overall I'm pretty confident that in a few centuries (or even decades) people will see all of these strategies as really foolish (burying radioactive waste across hundreds of sites around the globe, dumping billions of tons of waste into the oceans, polluting the atmosphere, ...). I have my own biases, but I am fairly confident that people of the future will come to a much different conclusion. Every form of power generation has byproducts and waste. Many of these (even for renewables) are nasty, toxic substances. Nuclear seems to have one of the best ratios of waste to electric production of any form of power generation, including very low lifetime CO2 generation. I would hope the future people of earth are far more aghast that people kept doing things like burning coal (and then dumping the fly ash in places that contaminate groundwater) instead of building alternate sources of baseload generation.