9 ms·

> “Yes maybe ever couple 100 years you might have to move it, who cares. If your society isn't capable managing nuclear waste then nobody will care anymore anyw

• Manuel_D 3y ago
  What, really, is the impact of a compromised nuclear casket in a remote, unpopulated area above ground? What is the impact buried just 100 feet deep in an unpopulated area? Someone would have to excavate the uranium and either spend loads of time around it or move it to a populated area. Water contamination from naturally occurring uranium is a bigger risk than nuclear waste (uranium, like lead, can cause heavy metal poisoning independent of radioactivity). Chemical waste from non-nuclear industries are far more hazardous than nuclear waste, yet the latter is for some reason an enormously larger concern. If you're worried about generational risk, there are plenty of things an order of magnitude more concerning than nuclear waste.
  • w-ll 3y ago
    Yea, isn't coal ash way worst regardless of how "green" they capture the emissions. They always seem to leek into other water sources and do way more. How did we get this way?
    • KennyBlanken 3y ago
      It's so tiresome that nuclear proponents pretend the only alternative to nuclear is coal.
      • panick21_ 3y ago
        His point is that other technologies are not held to the same standard. And that is still true. Even above ground nuclear storage is far better waste management then virtually anything else, including wind and solar. The likely hood of people dying from old wind and solar projects is quite a bit higher then people dying from nuclear waste.
        • cinntaile 3y ago
          The difference between the two scenario's is quite obvious. In coal ash it's highly diluted, in nuclear waste it's highly concentrated.
          • panick21_ 3y ago
            Being highly concentrated is exactly what makes it easy store and protect people from any impacts. Every input into the nuclear reactor is just coming out the other side in a very controlled way. There is no dispersal of anything into the environment (except potentially heat). The lifecycle of materials is handled way better then any other form of energy.
  • culopatin 3y ago
    Thing is that maybe in 300 years someone wants to develop that land and the documents that say to not do that there are in an old version of .docx in an obsolete storage form buried under layers of bureaucracy. That’s how someone ends up living on the casket growing a massive thyroid. Same reason that makes us not write code that only the author can understand (when working in a team), we need to plan ahead in the same way. We can’t rely on the future solving our current problems or even understanding them fully.
    • panick21_ 3y ago
      Or somebody spends 100$ on a Geiger counter ... Nuclear waste will not simply be lost. The only way it gets lost if society literally collapses. And if that happens the small amount of nuclear waste is the least important problem anybody will have.
      • tstrimple 3y ago
        Nuclear waste has been lost multiple times throughout history and has killed people. Kind of amazing someone could think it cannot happen. https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/overview-of-the-cns-global-incidents-and-trafficking-database/#report https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/overview-of-the-cns-gl...
        • panick21_ 3y ago
          We are talking about spent nuclear fuel casks from civilian nuclear. Not medical isotopes that fell of a truck. We are mostly talking about many meters long fuel casks. They might get rerouted on a train once but they are rarely lost and even if they are, even during transport they are packaged to be save for a considerable amount of time. And I couldn't find a clear indication of how many people died from civilian nuclear waste. The article you linked does not really give much information and I'm not gone read the whole report. Every study shows that that nuclear energy has the lowest death per person. People are more likely to die during construction then anything else.
        • throwuwu 3y ago
  • throwbadubadu 3y ago
    > a remote, unpopulated area above ground? European countries and other denser ones may want to know where it finds those.. and as if we are not in a big change that will start a lot of instability, conflicts and migration.
• panick21_ 3y ago
  Actually it is the right way to plan centuries ahead. Taking a reasonable look at the risk and making an assessment. The actual risk of nuclear waste is incredibly small. You point would make sense if it was a nuclear weapon that could just randomly go off or something like that. However with civilian nuclear waste you really have to come up with pretty unlikely stuff for it to ever harm anybody. And you a tinfoil hat to come up with some scenario where it hurts a large number of people. And those risks are incredibly easy to detect should they ever happen. So again, unless you have total government collapse this simply isn't an issue. And if you have anarchy in Finland the least problem anybody will care about is a few leaking casks of nuclear waste that might happen. This is like worrying about bad air quality for your great grant children while your house is on fire. There are about 1000 ways I could think of to improve the lives of people in 200 years that have a far better way to spend billions of $ then burying nuclear waste. The more likely case is that people in 200 years will look back and say 'people back then already had all the fundamental research why were they so shit at using fission and fusion. What the fuck were they thinking'
  • chmod775 3y ago
    > However with civilian nuclear waste you really have to come up with pretty unlikely stuff for it to ever harm anybody. Germany will be glad to hear that. They can continue using Asse II instead of needlessly spending billions clearing it out.
    • panick21_ 3y ago
      Germany did exactly the stupid thing they shouldn't have done. Instead of easily managing the waste above ground they threw it into a mine. You are literally making my point for me. Burring low level nuclear waste in Asse II would have been fine. Managing the high level nuclear waste above ground would have been preferable. Germany would have saved a lot of money and trouble if they had simply managed their high level nuclear waste above ground. PS: I'm sick of the argument that 'somebody did something stupid with nuclear waste 50 years ago therefore it disproves everything'. The reality is in terms of safety there were 1000s of things happening in the 70s that damaged far more people then some nuclear waste management. Even totally unattended Asse II death count would likely be 0 or very close to 0. In all of nuclear history a almost vanishingly small amount of people have died from civilian nuclear waste, maybe its actually 0. And more people will actually die from building these big hole to dump nuclear waste in then would actually have died if this was was managed above ground.
• oatmeal1 3y ago
  What do the 'dummies' have to do exactly? Just not touch containers marked as "nuclear waste?" And can you imagine the good outcomes that can be produced with 1 billion Euros today? Why spend money on something that will maybe prevent a problem centuries from now when we have such great available investments we can make today?
  • j16sdiz 3y ago
    Have thief/wild life/earthquakes/floods/some rare natural disasters, and forget to go back and check if the container is intact.
    • panick21_ 3y ago
      A thief is mostly just scifi nonsense. Most Earthquakes would damage the casks. Unless its right on the fault line this at best causes some damages that would have to be repaired. This is incredibly unlikely to ever happen in most of the world. Also burring the casks is more likely to cause issues in case of a major unexpected earth quake. This is one of those maybe ever few 100 years somebody has to move the casks. Floods are pretty predictable in where they happen, don't put the nuclear waste there. And if somebody put them there in error, somebody at some point might have to slightly move them. If countries figure out to not put something away from a flood prawn area, why do you think they can build a major geologically save location that can hold up for 100k years? > some rare natural disasters I guess if a vulcano happens and damages cask people might have bigger issues. And again, simply not really relevant for the waste majority of places. Once you are at maybe some unknown super disaster might happen then the whole logic with the deep geostorage also doesn't hold up anymore. Finding a location above ground that is reasonably safe for 100 years is far, far, far, far, far easier and cheaper then building a geological storage that can last 100k years. > forget to go back and check if the container is intact Ok, then some light radiation might leak in a area that is likely far away from human population. Maybe not fantastic but also not some major problem that is worth spending billions of $ fixing. And again, if a government can't manage to get a guy every year to do a quick check, then your country has far bigger problems. Also this monitoring can be done by a private person with a Geiger counter even if a country has collapse into anarchy, and people would avoid that location.
• pyuser583 3y ago
  The right way to plan centuries ahead is to trust future generations. We don’t beed to treat the grownups on 2200 like children. They will probably have better science than we do, and will have had centuries of experience. If there’s a benefit to the nuclear waste, let them have it.
• adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  Sadly, the actually-plausible generational risks don't get anywhere near this care. A breached nuclear cask in the very specific case that civilisation has collapsed and lost all knowledge of nuclear material and signage is a limited local event. Low impact on a societal level (admittedly high on the guy with the hand tools cutting into it) and low probability. Climate change is a probability-1 event that affects everyone. So is plastic pollution. For that matter, indeed, lack of affordable housing probably will end up with worse consequences projected into the far future than a hypothetical deep-time grave-robbing mishap. While doing a good job of handling nuclear waste is obviously extremely important, handwringing over the effect on a contrived far-future devolved society to the extent that we inhibited the one power source that could have avoided the latter 70 years of the fossil fuel boom in the first place, a boom which actually has plausible civilisation-scale effects, seems backwards. Admittedly it's now getting to the point where non-nuclear non-fossil energy may be the cheaper and scalable option (pending a mind-boggling but physically-possible amount of storage) so maybe the moment for a nuclear-based energy system has passed. I don't really buy it and still think only nuclear is likely to deliver the energy needed over the next 100 years, including decarbonisation of heating, industry, transport and also possibly environmental remediation. In any case, assuming human civilisation retains knowledge of the 20th and 21st centuries, they're going to be wondering what the hell we were thinking between the 1950s and the 2050s when we had nuclear energy in our hands and nearly destroyed the biosphere anyway by choice (and that "nearly" is only there because this assumes enough of it survives for someone to be looking back in the first place).