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You bury the storage deep underground in an area with no natural resources, and put no sign over it. Security through obscurity: why would some future civilizat
by Manuel_D 5y ago
You bury the storage deep underground in an area with no natural resources, and put no sign over it. Security through obscurity: why would some future civilization dig hundreds of meters deep, for no conceivable reason?
I'll concede that if there's some sort of civilization collapse and records of waste repositories are lost, and if some future civilization decides to dig in the area of a waste repository, and if said civilization lacks knowledge of radiation poisoning, then unfortunately yes said future civilization will be harmed.
But how does the extremely remote possibility of all these hypotheticals occurring stack up against the certain harm caused by fossil fuel pollution and climate change?
- periheli0n 5y agoThe risk is not through digging, it's through geological processes happening over 100 k years that break up the storage site.
- Manuel_D 5y agoAnd in the event of a container breach, how does uranium make it through hundreds of meters of rock to get back onto the surface? And if the waste is in a subduction zone, those geological processes are brining the waste deeper into the ground. People seem to be under the impression that even one gram of waste escaping is going to cause irreparable harm. Do people not realize that we've detonated hundreds of nuclear warheads in the atmosphere (and many more underground)? Do people not realize that the UK and Soviet Union simply dumped their nuclear waste into the ocean [1]? Yet we're worried about waste buried deep into bedrock? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...