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In the extreme, the have been politicians and other leaders who came in and decided to undo decisions of their predecessors for petty reasons. A memorable examp

In the extreme, the have been politicians and other leaders who came in and decided to undo decisions of their predecessors for petty reasons. A memorable example being the US' 45th President. If this high cost is in the long run cheaper than relying on 10+ generations to do the right thing, it's probably a worthwhile cost.

HPsquared 3y ago
Generations 1 through 9 don't really need to do anything. Generation 10 will have a bit of work to do, but much less work than it takes to deal with it now. The really radioactive components of the waste (the fission products) decay away after a few hundred years.
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  by the time we get to generation 10....all documents are lost, technology is obsoleted, no living engineer know how this works.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    And now you are proving my original argument. If society collapses to a point where engineers can't handle some well contained radioactive waste then you have far bigger problems then nuclear waste. The idea that our primary worry should be that maybe in 300 years countries will be unable to handle this simple technical task that the US figured out in 1960s is bananas. We are not talking about active nuclear weapons that detonate if you touch them wrong. We are talking about dry casks that might maybe start to leak a little in a few 100 years. Even in the worst of bad cases you have to come up with quite a story to figure out how anybody actually dies from this, let alone many people. Spending billions of $ now so in 300 years maybe somebody might be saved is laughable when we know that we can save people by putting up 100$ concrete railing for bike lanes right now. Let alone the 100s of other things that could be done with billions.
    - smaudet 3y ago
      "The idea that our primary worry should be that maybe in 300 years countries will be unable to handle this simple technical task that the US figured out in 1960s is bananas." I suggest you open a history book. It is quite likely the same countries that exist today do not exist in the future and the same knowledge does not either. Furthermore it is not necessarily about being unable to understand some physics and processes but instead that language and knowledge quickly "deteriorates" over time, e.g. the langauge today is vastly different than even 100 years ago - technical terms and the like shift the fastest, cultural ones the slowest, but they do all become obscured by time. Even a more advanced civilization may encounter challenges that have no logical correlation with the task of keeping spent fuel safe, e.g. intential security measures such as encryption/obfuscation/code rot/reliance on no-longer manufactured tools. Anyways there is another objection you are fundamentally missing is that the timeframes are possibly un-sustainable in terms of time per acres. Sure you have storage for 100 years in dry casks (maybe some parking lot) but then must wait 100000 years. So you must store 1000 more times the fuel for it to be truly sustainable, digging giant holes in the ground is def not sustainable. Maybe parking lots are, but then you need to be sure your mountain of nuclear waste is stable (harder to do).
      - panick21_ 3y ago
        The most likely scenario is that at some point next 300 years we figure out advanced fission or fusion and if we do so burning that waste up isn't that big a deal. If the danger were a nuclear explosion destroying a city, then you would have point. But its not, the danger is maybe a slightly leaking cask could maybe lead to slightly higher cancer rates in a certain area. > So you must store 1000 more times the fuel for it to be truly sustainable Instead of one 1 football field it might be 1000 over the next 10000 years. Yeah horrible, we can't possible spare 1000 football fields full of parking lots.
        smaudet 3y ago
        Yeah, it is pretty terrible. For one reactor, you would have a point. For many reactors, it is x1000 time cost.
panick21_ 3y ago
You make the wrong assumption that managing the geological storage and all the operations around it will be irrelevant and give those 10+ generations no work. This isn't really the case. They will still have to do many of the same things, like monitoring, security and so on.

HPsquared 3y ago

Generations 1 through 9 don't really need to do anything. Generation 10 will have a bit of work to do, but much less work than it takes to deal with it now. The really radioactive components of the waste (the fission products) decay away after a few hundred years.

j16sdiz 3y ago
by the time we get to generation 10....all documents are lost, technology is obsoleted, no living engineer know how this works.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  And now you are proving my original argument. If society collapses to a point where engineers can't handle some well contained radioactive waste then you have far bigger problems then nuclear waste. The idea that our primary worry should be that maybe in 300 years countries will be unable to handle this simple technical task that the US figured out in 1960s is bananas. We are not talking about active nuclear weapons that detonate if you touch them wrong. We are talking about dry casks that might maybe start to leak a little in a few 100 years. Even in the worst of bad cases you have to come up with quite a story to figure out how anybody actually dies from this, let alone many people. Spending billions of $ now so in 300 years maybe somebody might be saved is laughable when we know that we can save people by putting up 100$ concrete railing for bike lanes right now. Let alone the 100s of other things that could be done with billions.
  - smaudet 3y ago
    "The idea that our primary worry should be that maybe in 300 years countries will be unable to handle this simple technical task that the US figured out in 1960s is bananas." I suggest you open a history book. It is quite likely the same countries that exist today do not exist in the future and the same knowledge does not either. Furthermore it is not necessarily about being unable to understand some physics and processes but instead that language and knowledge quickly "deteriorates" over time, e.g. the langauge today is vastly different than even 100 years ago - technical terms and the like shift the fastest, cultural ones the slowest, but they do all become obscured by time. Even a more advanced civilization may encounter challenges that have no logical correlation with the task of keeping spent fuel safe, e.g. intential security measures such as encryption/obfuscation/code rot/reliance on no-longer manufactured tools. Anyways there is another objection you are fundamentally missing is that the timeframes are possibly un-sustainable in terms of time per acres. Sure you have storage for 100 years in dry casks (maybe some parking lot) but then must wait 100000 years. So you must store 1000 more times the fuel for it to be truly sustainable, digging giant holes in the ground is def not sustainable. Maybe parking lots are, but then you need to be sure your mountain of nuclear waste is stable (harder to do).
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      The most likely scenario is that at some point next 300 years we figure out advanced fission or fusion and if we do so burning that waste up isn't that big a deal. If the danger were a nuclear explosion destroying a city, then you would have point. But its not, the danger is maybe a slightly leaking cask could maybe lead to slightly higher cancer rates in a certain area. > So you must store 1000 more times the fuel for it to be truly sustainable Instead of one 1 football field it might be 1000 over the next 10000 years. Yeah horrible, we can't possible spare 1000 football fields full of parking lots.
      - smaudet 3y ago
        Yeah, it is pretty terrible. For one reactor, you would have a point. For many reactors, it is x1000 time cost.

panick21_ 3y ago

You make the wrong assumption that managing the geological storage and all the operations around it will be irrelevant and give those 10+ generations no work. This isn't really the case. They will still have to do many of the same things, like monitoring, security and so on.