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A retrospective analysis of the benefits of nuclear power avoids accounting for one of the major consequences: the nuclear waste, which remains harmful/deadly

by geph2021 5y ago

A retrospective analysis of the benefits of nuclear power avoids accounting for one of the major consequences: the nuclear waste, which remains harmful/deadly for thousands of years.

wiz21c 5y ago
And so is CO2...
pigeonhole123 5y ago
Lead and mercury spewed out by coal plants ends up in the ocean and is also deadly for very long. I'd rather have poisonous metals in storage than floating around and accumulating in the food chain.
qball 5y ago
>which remains harmful/deadly for thousands of years. Which it has in common with things like acid mine drainage and waste from a bunch of other industrial processes. Of course, solving the former "just" requires employing a small army of personnel to make sure that the effluent is getting cleared from those mines properly, maintaining tailings ponds (and fixing them when they leak), and (since this is the perennial hypothetical for nuclear waste disposal) understanding that a bunch of people from the hypothetical neo-Stone Age civilizations are going to die once that goes away because they're necessarily going to be incapable of chemical analysis of water downstream. Perhaps it's unfortunate for most of humanity that storing waste in on-site casks is an effective enough solution; if the waste was more dangerous, we'd have dealt with it already. Instead, we can just leave it sitting there and tilt at windmills. I'd rather have an exploded reactor and evacuated surrounding area every 50 years than I would an uninhabitable planet. But maybe that's just my obsolete 1970s/80s optimism showing through; modern humanity is much happier with the historically-compatible "use unreliable sources of power and disconnect the poor quarter at night" strategy.
DrBazza 5y ago
Sadly coal miners are exposed to more radioactive material. Nuclear waste is either or. Either we survive as a species and know where it’s buried in that 10,000 year container deep underground where everyone knows. Or we fail as a species and lose the technology to dig that deep ever again.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  And it doesn't stop after the coal is mined, either. Coal ash and tailings are quite toxic.

A retrospective analysis of the benefits of nuclear power avoids accounting for one of the major consequences: the nuclear waste, which remains harmful/deadly for thousands of years.

wiz21c 5y ago

And so is CO2...

pigeonhole123 5y ago

Lead and mercury spewed out by coal plants ends up in the ocean and is also deadly for very long. I'd rather have poisonous metals in storage than floating around and accumulating in the food chain.

qball 5y ago

>which remains harmful/deadly for thousands of years. Which it has in common with things like acid mine drainage and waste from a bunch of other industrial processes. Of course, solving the former "just" requires employing a small army of personnel to make sure that the effluent is getting cleared from those mines properly, maintaining tailings ponds (and fixing them when they leak), and (since this is the perennial hypothetical for nuclear waste disposal) understanding that a bunch of people from the hypothetical neo-Stone Age civilizations are going to die once that goes away because they're necessarily going to be incapable of chemical analysis of water downstream. Perhaps it's unfortunate for most of humanity that storing waste in on-site casks is an effective enough solution; if the waste was more dangerous, we'd have dealt with it already. Instead, we can just leave it sitting there and tilt at windmills. I'd rather have an exploded reactor and evacuated surrounding area every 50 years than I would an uninhabitable planet. But maybe that's just my obsolete 1970s/80s optimism showing through; modern humanity is much happier with the historically-compatible "use unreliable sources of power and disconnect the poor quarter at night" strategy.

DrBazza 5y ago

Sadly coal miners are exposed to more radioactive material. Nuclear waste is either or. Either we survive as a species and know where it’s buried in that 10,000 year container deep underground where everyone knows. Or we fail as a species and lose the technology to dig that deep ever again.

duskwuff 5y ago
And it doesn't stop after the coal is mined, either. Coal ash and tailings are quite toxic.