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As long as nuclear energy is treated as PICK_ANY(obsolete, uneconomical, systemically dangerous) it leaves me with zero hope for humanity. Nuclear is way more

As long as nuclear energy is treated as PICK_ANY(obsolete, uneconomical, systemically dangerous) it leaves me with zero hope for humanity. Nuclear is way more than technology, it's Prometheus' fire. It may burn the unprepared but it is incomparable to anything else we possess. That factor million more energy per gram than chemical reactions should be enough for us to treat it as literally unlocking the next level of human development. This petty discussion on whether it is sustainable, dirty, expensive or dangerous is simply mind-boggling. Yes, it requires a much deeper "readiness" to utilise by our civilization than any other energy source, but the long-term benefit should be what it is held up against.

newacct583 5y ago
> treat it as literally unlocking the next level of human development That was literally the way it was thought about a three quarters of a century ago. It... didn't work out. It's just not there. It's fine. It's safe enough. But it's outrageously expensive relative to other equally advantageous sources, and all the magic technologies needed to "fix" that are always a decade away.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  No longer true. New reactors coming that are way, way less expensive. If we can stop thinking in terms of a quarter century ago, we can finally get to that future we used to imagine.
  - newacct583 5y ago
    > New reactors coming that are way, way less expensive. They've been "coming" since the 1960's. Start yelling about building stuff when they've arrived.
    - cplusplusfellow 5y ago
      > prevent building things by any measure possible > yawn when we say we can build new things and to wake you up when we have them These actions aren’t compatible with progress.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      I’ll refer you to my sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29057596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29057596): > Gotta love anti-nuclear folks. They work to hinder nuclear development and then point to the lack of nuclear progress as “evidence” that nuclear is a pipe dream.
    - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
      https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210912-why-china-is-developing-a-game-changing-thorium-fuelled-nuclear-reactor https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210912-why-china-... https://thoriumbaby.com/china-sees-thorium-breakthrough-in-gobi-desert/ https://thoriumbaby.com/china-sees-thorium-breakthrough-in-g... https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/updates/ https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/updates/
  - quonn 5y ago
    I read exactly the same on HN 10 years ago.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Yes, and the countries that actually make these reactors in quantity such as South Korea, China, have made many at reasonable prices.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      Gotta love anti-nuclear folks. They work to hinder nuclear development and then point to the lack of nuclear progress as “evidence” that nuclear is a pipe dream.
      - newacct583 5y ago
        Stop with the conspiracy theories. There are no "anti-nuclear folks" in this thread. It's a bunch of people looking at a balance sheet and trying to decide on how to prioritize energy spending. And nuclear doesn't fit. Maybe it will. But it doesn't. It's not there. If you have $100M to spend on non-carbon electricity right now you build a wind farm, not a reactor. That's the problem you have to fix. Make something people want, basically.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > It... didn't work out It did work out. The only reason we don’t have more of it is because of anti-nuclear FUD campaigns. > It's just not there. It's fine. It's safe enough. But it's outrageously expensive relative to other equally advantageous sources, It’s disingenuous to compare unreliable energy sources with reliable energy sources and claim the two are equally advantageous. We can make renewable energy reliable at significant cost, so we must compare that cost with nuclear. Moreover, the price projections for SMRs handily beat out fossil fuels and reliability-adjusted figures for renewables. > and all the magic technologies needed to "fix" that are always a decade away. This is rich considering (1) we know what the “fix” is and it’s not magic (mass produce nuclear reactors i.e., SMRs) and (2) the plan for reliable, economic renewable energy is “pray for an unknown miracle breakthrough in storage” as though that will be discovered and scaled in less than a decade…
- vimy 5y ago
  It’s only expensive because of excessive safety guidelines which are the result of fearmongering.
go_elmo 5y ago
While I agree with you regarding the political dimension, the technical, especially regarding safety may not be underestimated regarding cost implications. But the right political setting could imply cheap, mass produced plants, e.g. SMR's. The problem is that were too late, would take several decades to scale up to where we we should be already...
- vlovich123 5y ago
  I'm not sure I follow this. Nuclear power is significantly less deadly than coal and that's just talking about accidents in power generation. If you include general death by radiation pollution, that difference grows more disparate (coal energy production emits an enormous amount of radiation into the atmosphere as pollution).
  - go_elmo 5y ago
    Almost. Youre right & I agree - I meant the dev cost to guarantee spill freedom etc which causes billions in costs for development.
  - Gwypaas 5y ago
    Why compare against coal? It's all about to be phased out simply due to the cost of the steam side, which nuclear shares. Compare against wind and pv.
    - evgen 5y ago
      Will do. Nuclear energy is 10x less deadly than rooftop solar per Twh and 4x less deadly than wind. Solar kills! Maybe we need to mount a campaign to shut down this deadly and dangerous form of energy generation. I will start working on the posters and clickbait web site, you gather the activists to organize a protest.
    - vlovich123 5y ago
      China is shifting their entire coal production to nuclear. America is shutting down nuclear and replacing it with? Coal. Wind and PV cannot handle the load requirements so you end up having to build coal anyway. I’m not against wind and PV. I’m just realistic about where the energy mixture has to look like to actually accomplish the goal of sustainable energy production. The earth can’t handle us dithering yet more on this argument.
LatteLazy 5y ago
The first person to build a safe, economic, waste free reactor will be a billionaire. But so far that hasn't happened.
- theli0nheart 5y ago
  And it never will if people who are afraid of it remain in charge.
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    Maybe. But until we have that first plant, it's too early to go for mass implimentiion. I wish Musk would take a shot at it. He's the only engineer/financier/crazy-person who I think could make an impact. Government's clearly aren't interested and no one else can get the cash together.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      As he’s said numerous times, solar is fusion at a distance and solar combined with batteries is the future, both of which can be safely recycled and manufactured rapidly at scale. Tesla’s entire business is selling batteries to store clean energy for later use (either in vehicles or stationary storage), and enough sunlight hits the earth every 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. Lithium is abundant in the world’s crust, and there are no proliferation risks. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34396787/elon-musk-sun-power-civilization/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34396787/elon-musk... (Elon Musk Says the Sun Can Power All of Civilization. Of Course He's Right.) “That free fusion reactor in the sky conveniently converts ~4 million tons of mass into energy every second. We just need to catch an extremely tiny amount of it to power all of civilization.” — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 16, 2020
      - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
        I don't disagree that there is abundant solar opportunity at the planet-level, but it's unrealistic to build infrastructure to funnel energy from eligible deserts to the rest of North America. Here where the sky is cloudy as much as it is sunny, and clear even less, and where it snows, solar works but isn't reasonable to replace all power needs at an individual, county or state level. The logistics involved are much more complex than, say, having a few nuclear reactors in the state. Which work regardless of the weather.
lostmyoldone 5y ago
If it is Prometheus' fire, we are not ready to handle that fire yet. When one of the core concerns of using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale. This is only one example of why we are not ready yet. Nuclear (fission) technology is not the problem, we are the problem. Looking at the recent history of political leadership all over the world, and the baffling level of support even the most immature of policies have, it's clear we have a ways to go. Most people doesn't even seem to realize that as a species we've only just emerged, we're so young. Toddlers on any timescale but the most naïve and short sighted.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  I'm unclear about what your point is. Are you saying that Nuclear power production is somehow linked to nuclear arms production?
  - throwaway898989 5y ago
    are you saying that nuclear power related accidents like chernobyl don't happen?
    - vlovich123 5y ago
      That seems like a little bit of a non sequitur to the topic in this particular thread chain. Anyway, yes of course they happen. They happen in every power producing industry. It's hard to find good numbers of course as there's going to be some amount of error, but here's one [1]. The point isn't that in that report nuclear has fewer deaths than wind and solar as I'm sure that will cause an emotional reaction. The point is that it's so low and comparable. Even if it was 10x worse it would be worth the tradeoff of replacing coal. Nuclear is our only choice for replacing industrial scale use of coal and oil. It's unfortunate that that's the case, but those are the facts on the ground currently and there's no sign of that ever changing. The way Wind and Solar generate energy are wholly incompatible with high temperature industrial uses where coal and natural gas are used let alone the problems of variability (batteries help, but there are limits and batter manufacturing at scale brings its own challenges). If you're comparing Nuclear to Wind and Solar power generation, you're comparing power sources that don't compete. Nuclear is about replacing the worst problems coal and oil present us and staving off global warming. It's an extremely critical and underdeveloped resource and only gets safer and better with time. It would be erroneous to state any risk in a vacuum - you have to compare it with what's happening today. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Kon5ole 5y ago
Earth gets hit by 170 000 TW of sunshine every hour. That's more than the yearly global consumption of energy. If we could capture only 1% of that, we'd have 80 times more than we need, from just the sunshine reaching earth. This makes the photovoltaic cell and related technologies more interesting than nuclear to me. A way more abundant energy source with none of the downsides of nuclear is clearly within our reach. It's not even unknown technology, we just haven't made the infrastructure to capture it yet. Nuclear seems to me to be similar to Coal in that we may think it's a good idea now, only to discover later on that it actually killed us due to things we didn't think about. Or didn't want to think about. They are also similar in that we who get the benefits today are leaving the problems with it to future generations.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Listing large numbers and then saying "if only we could get this small percentage" doesn't make for a solid business plan, and it doesn't make a solid energy plan either. We're talking about insane amounts of land, for one thing, and ignoring distribution for another. Plus "80x more than we need" assumes a fixed level of need forever, humanity capped off, the book of progress written and closed.
  - Kon5ole 5y ago
    It sure isn't a business plan, you're right! :D But knowing the potential is a first step, wouldn't you agree? You don't build the mine before the geologists have determined that there is indeed gold to be found, so to speak. Distribution is not as big a problem I think, since you can have small installations everywhere, combined with larger installations where possible. Storage is a problem, but we know of several solutions that could be developed. As for land, the land already wasted to man-made lakes for hydroelectricity more than covers it 100-fold if my roughly estimated math is correct (assuming ~30MW per km2 from newer solar installations and based on a list of man-made lakes on wikipedia). Floating solar is already a thing, it works. How about a hydroelectric dam-duo where solar panels on the artificial lakes pump the water back to the upper reservoir when there's lots of sun? Energy and storage combined! Elon Musk - are you listening? ;-) Solar can also easily be installed on buildings or in deserts, so I don't think large amounts of any valuable land would be needed. As a whole it seems totally feasible to me, at least as a big part of the puzzle, much bigger than it is today.
nimbius 5y ago
>the long-term benefit should be what it is held up against. how about the long term risk? we havent even figured out how to deal with plastics in the ocean and in our bodies let alone responsibly harness the atom. we're talking about a waste product that does not cease to create a danger for hundreds of years at minimum. Reactor 4 at chernobyl is predicted to be "safe" in 20,000 years and before you say thats an exception id like to remind you that ALL high level nuclear waste has a cooldown of tens of thousands of years and it is routinely generated in the pursuit of the electron today. The Roman empire only lasted 1500 years. these nuclear byproducts last so long that modern scholars cannot unilaterally agree on a simple means of warning the future inhabitants of whatever society exists, let alone passing on any tips or tricks for processing or salvaging these lethal artifacts. we are talking about a waste product that outlives not only written but spoken language and dozens if not hundreds of civilizations and the stalwart of the atom --the United States-- still couldnt even manage to get Yucca mouuntain together as a disposal ground after two decades. nuclear isotopes do not have a rate of return. they do not care about profit or equity or economies and will without remoerse kill you all if you forget them. waste is currently stored in large pools at your local nuclear plant that require constant cooling. once these sites are inoperable they will require the care of generations for millennia before with a clear conscience you can say 'nuclear power was worth it'. that the atom will be taught as a religion is less far fetched a premise to a Fallout game when you realize in 12,000 years the only means of conveying the lethality of our hubris will be as such.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  This is anti-science fear mongering for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, we need to consider the risks of NOT investing in nuclear, which are that we continue to burn fossil fuels while we pray for a solution for the renewable storage problem. This is a civilization-ending risk by which the worst nuclear disaster pales in comparison. > we havent even figured out how to deal with plastics in the ocean and in our bodies let alone responsibly harness the atom. Plastics are a problem because billions of people throw their trash haphazardly into the environment. As long as we don’t do that with nuclear waste, we’re fine. Yes, nuclear waste takes a long time to decay, but the risk is inversely correlated with the time it takes to decay. Something with a long half-life by definition emits low rates of radiation. Moreover, nuclear waste is very dense, so we can easily manage a lot of it (and we already have to manage some of it anyway). Lastly, we already have the answer for managing nuclear waste—deep geologic storage.

newacct583 5y ago

> treat it as literally unlocking the next level of human development That was literally the way it was thought about a three quarters of a century ago. It... didn't work out. It's just not there. It's fine. It's safe enough. But it's outrageously expensive relative to other equally advantageous sources, and all the magic technologies needed to "fix" that are always a decade away.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
No longer true. New reactors coming that are way, way less expensive. If we can stop thinking in terms of a quarter century ago, we can finally get to that future we used to imagine.
- newacct583 5y ago
  > New reactors coming that are way, way less expensive. They've been "coming" since the 1960's. Start yelling about building stuff when they've arrived.
  - cplusplusfellow 5y ago
    > prevent building things by any measure possible > yawn when we say we can build new things and to wake you up when we have them These actions aren’t compatible with progress.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I’ll refer you to my sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29057596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29057596): > Gotta love anti-nuclear folks. They work to hinder nuclear development and then point to the lack of nuclear progress as “evidence” that nuclear is a pipe dream.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210912-why-china-is-developing-a-game-changing-thorium-fuelled-nuclear-reactor https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210912-why-china-... https://thoriumbaby.com/china-sees-thorium-breakthrough-in-gobi-desert/ https://thoriumbaby.com/china-sees-thorium-breakthrough-in-g... https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/updates/ https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/updates/
- quonn 5y ago
  I read exactly the same on HN 10 years ago.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Yes, and the countries that actually make these reactors in quantity such as South Korea, China, have made many at reasonable prices.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    Gotta love anti-nuclear folks. They work to hinder nuclear development and then point to the lack of nuclear progress as “evidence” that nuclear is a pipe dream.
    - newacct583 5y ago
      Stop with the conspiracy theories. There are no "anti-nuclear folks" in this thread. It's a bunch of people looking at a balance sheet and trying to decide on how to prioritize energy spending. And nuclear doesn't fit. Maybe it will. But it doesn't. It's not there. If you have $100M to spend on non-carbon electricity right now you build a wind farm, not a reactor. That's the problem you have to fix. Make something people want, basically.
throwaway894345 5y ago
> It... didn't work out It did work out. The only reason we don’t have more of it is because of anti-nuclear FUD campaigns. > It's just not there. It's fine. It's safe enough. But it's outrageously expensive relative to other equally advantageous sources, It’s disingenuous to compare unreliable energy sources with reliable energy sources and claim the two are equally advantageous. We can make renewable energy reliable at significant cost, so we must compare that cost with nuclear. Moreover, the price projections for SMRs handily beat out fossil fuels and reliability-adjusted figures for renewables. > and all the magic technologies needed to "fix" that are always a decade away. This is rich considering (1) we know what the “fix” is and it’s not magic (mass produce nuclear reactors i.e., SMRs) and (2) the plan for reliable, economic renewable energy is “pray for an unknown miracle breakthrough in storage” as though that will be discovered and scaled in less than a decade…
vimy 5y ago
It’s only expensive because of excessive safety guidelines which are the result of fearmongering.

go_elmo 5y ago

While I agree with you regarding the political dimension, the technical, especially regarding safety may not be underestimated regarding cost implications. But the right political setting could imply cheap, mass produced plants, e.g. SMR's. The problem is that were too late, would take several decades to scale up to where we we should be already...

vlovich123 5y ago
I'm not sure I follow this. Nuclear power is significantly less deadly than coal and that's just talking about accidents in power generation. If you include general death by radiation pollution, that difference grows more disparate (coal energy production emits an enormous amount of radiation into the atmosphere as pollution).
- go_elmo 5y ago
  Almost. Youre right & I agree - I meant the dev cost to guarantee spill freedom etc which causes billions in costs for development.
- Gwypaas 5y ago
  Why compare against coal? It's all about to be phased out simply due to the cost of the steam side, which nuclear shares. Compare against wind and pv.
  - evgen 5y ago
    Will do. Nuclear energy is 10x less deadly than rooftop solar per Twh and 4x less deadly than wind. Solar kills! Maybe we need to mount a campaign to shut down this deadly and dangerous form of energy generation. I will start working on the posters and clickbait web site, you gather the activists to organize a protest.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    China is shifting their entire coal production to nuclear. America is shutting down nuclear and replacing it with? Coal. Wind and PV cannot handle the load requirements so you end up having to build coal anyway. I’m not against wind and PV. I’m just realistic about where the energy mixture has to look like to actually accomplish the goal of sustainable energy production. The earth can’t handle us dithering yet more on this argument.

LatteLazy 5y ago

The first person to build a safe, economic, waste free reactor will be a billionaire. But so far that hasn't happened.

theli0nheart 5y ago
And it never will if people who are afraid of it remain in charge.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  Maybe. But until we have that first plant, it's too early to go for mass implimentiion. I wish Musk would take a shot at it. He's the only engineer/financier/crazy-person who I think could make an impact. Government's clearly aren't interested and no one else can get the cash together.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    As he’s said numerous times, solar is fusion at a distance and solar combined with batteries is the future, both of which can be safely recycled and manufactured rapidly at scale. Tesla’s entire business is selling batteries to store clean energy for later use (either in vehicles or stationary storage), and enough sunlight hits the earth every 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. Lithium is abundant in the world’s crust, and there are no proliferation risks. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34396787/elon-musk-sun-power-civilization/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34396787/elon-musk... (Elon Musk Says the Sun Can Power All of Civilization. Of Course He's Right.) “That free fusion reactor in the sky conveniently converts ~4 million tons of mass into energy every second. We just need to catch an extremely tiny amount of it to power all of civilization.” — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 16, 2020
    - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
      I don't disagree that there is abundant solar opportunity at the planet-level, but it's unrealistic to build infrastructure to funnel energy from eligible deserts to the rest of North America. Here where the sky is cloudy as much as it is sunny, and clear even less, and where it snows, solar works but isn't reasonable to replace all power needs at an individual, county or state level. The logistics involved are much more complex than, say, having a few nuclear reactors in the state. Which work regardless of the weather.

lostmyoldone 5y ago

If it is Prometheus' fire, we are not ready to handle that fire yet. When one of the core concerns of using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale. This is only one example of why we are not ready yet. Nuclear (fission) technology is not the problem, we are the problem. Looking at the recent history of political leadership all over the world, and the baffling level of support even the most immature of policies have, it's clear we have a ways to go. Most people doesn't even seem to realize that as a species we've only just emerged, we're so young. Toddlers on any timescale but the most naïve and short sighted.

vlovich123 5y ago
I'm unclear about what your point is. Are you saying that Nuclear power production is somehow linked to nuclear arms production?
- throwaway898989 5y ago
  are you saying that nuclear power related accidents like chernobyl don't happen?
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    That seems like a little bit of a non sequitur to the topic in this particular thread chain. Anyway, yes of course they happen. They happen in every power producing industry. It's hard to find good numbers of course as there's going to be some amount of error, but here's one [1]. The point isn't that in that report nuclear has fewer deaths than wind and solar as I'm sure that will cause an emotional reaction. The point is that it's so low and comparable. Even if it was 10x worse it would be worth the tradeoff of replacing coal. Nuclear is our only choice for replacing industrial scale use of coal and oil. It's unfortunate that that's the case, but those are the facts on the ground currently and there's no sign of that ever changing. The way Wind and Solar generate energy are wholly incompatible with high temperature industrial uses where coal and natural gas are used let alone the problems of variability (batteries help, but there are limits and batter manufacturing at scale brings its own challenges). If you're comparing Nuclear to Wind and Solar power generation, you're comparing power sources that don't compete. Nuclear is about replacing the worst problems coal and oil present us and staving off global warming. It's an extremely critical and underdeveloped resource and only gets safer and better with time. It would be erroneous to state any risk in a vacuum - you have to compare it with what's happening today. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

Kon5ole 5y ago

Earth gets hit by 170 000 TW of sunshine every hour. That's more than the yearly global consumption of energy. If we could capture only 1% of that, we'd have 80 times more than we need, from just the sunshine reaching earth. This makes the photovoltaic cell and related technologies more interesting than nuclear to me. A way more abundant energy source with none of the downsides of nuclear is clearly within our reach. It's not even unknown technology, we just haven't made the infrastructure to capture it yet. Nuclear seems to me to be similar to Coal in that we may think it's a good idea now, only to discover later on that it actually killed us due to things we didn't think about. Or didn't want to think about. They are also similar in that we who get the benefits today are leaving the problems with it to future generations.

nitrogen 5y ago
Listing large numbers and then saying "if only we could get this small percentage" doesn't make for a solid business plan, and it doesn't make a solid energy plan either. We're talking about insane amounts of land, for one thing, and ignoring distribution for another. Plus "80x more than we need" assumes a fixed level of need forever, humanity capped off, the book of progress written and closed.
- Kon5ole 5y ago
  It sure isn't a business plan, you're right! :D But knowing the potential is a first step, wouldn't you agree? You don't build the mine before the geologists have determined that there is indeed gold to be found, so to speak. Distribution is not as big a problem I think, since you can have small installations everywhere, combined with larger installations where possible. Storage is a problem, but we know of several solutions that could be developed. As for land, the land already wasted to man-made lakes for hydroelectricity more than covers it 100-fold if my roughly estimated math is correct (assuming ~30MW per km2 from newer solar installations and based on a list of man-made lakes on wikipedia). Floating solar is already a thing, it works. How about a hydroelectric dam-duo where solar panels on the artificial lakes pump the water back to the upper reservoir when there's lots of sun? Energy and storage combined! Elon Musk - are you listening? ;-) Solar can also easily be installed on buildings or in deserts, so I don't think large amounts of any valuable land would be needed. As a whole it seems totally feasible to me, at least as a big part of the puzzle, much bigger than it is today.

nimbius 5y ago

>the long-term benefit should be what it is held up against. how about the long term risk? we havent even figured out how to deal with plastics in the ocean and in our bodies let alone responsibly harness the atom. we're talking about a waste product that does not cease to create a danger for hundreds of years at minimum. Reactor 4 at chernobyl is predicted to be "safe" in 20,000 years and before you say thats an exception id like to remind you that ALL high level nuclear waste has a cooldown of tens of thousands of years and it is routinely generated in the pursuit of the electron today. The Roman empire only lasted 1500 years. these nuclear byproducts last so long that modern scholars cannot unilaterally agree on a simple means of warning the future inhabitants of whatever society exists, let alone passing on any tips or tricks for processing or salvaging these lethal artifacts. we are talking about a waste product that outlives not only written but spoken language and dozens if not hundreds of civilizations and the stalwart of the atom --the United States-- still couldnt even manage to get Yucca mouuntain together as a disposal ground after two decades. nuclear isotopes do not have a rate of return. they do not care about profit or equity or economies and will without remoerse kill you all if you forget them. waste is currently stored in large pools at your local nuclear plant that require constant cooling. once these sites are inoperable they will require the care of generations for millennia before with a clear conscience you can say 'nuclear power was worth it'. that the atom will be taught as a religion is less far fetched a premise to a Fallout game when you realize in 12,000 years the only means of conveying the lethality of our hubris will be as such.

throwaway894345 5y ago
This is anti-science fear mongering for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, we need to consider the risks of NOT investing in nuclear, which are that we continue to burn fossil fuels while we pray for a solution for the renewable storage problem. This is a civilization-ending risk by which the worst nuclear disaster pales in comparison. > we havent even figured out how to deal with plastics in the ocean and in our bodies let alone responsibly harness the atom. Plastics are a problem because billions of people throw their trash haphazardly into the environment. As long as we don’t do that with nuclear waste, we’re fine. Yes, nuclear waste takes a long time to decay, but the risk is inversely correlated with the time it takes to decay. Something with a long half-life by definition emits low rates of radiation. Moreover, nuclear waste is very dense, so we can easily manage a lot of it (and we already have to manage some of it anyway). Lastly, we already have the answer for managing nuclear waste—deep geologic storage.