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Comment by PolLambert | Hacker News Reader

New nuclear power plants are designed to be safe even when run by unsensible humans (up to 72h) Any nuclear storage has to designed to be safe and secure from the second you close it up, irrespective of what humans will be doing the next thousands of years. (except of course, deliberately opening said storage)

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CANDU reactors in Canada, I think are designed to be run by nobody at all.

They require heavy water to keep the reaction going. No heavy water, it just cools down.

If anything 'breaks' - no heavy water, no chain reaction.

I'm grossly oversimplifying, but you get the idea.

I suggest that if we actually put our minds to it, we could develop a kind of 'dumb reactor' that didn't require any kind of intervention at all, other than maintenance.

Already done and has been for a while. Here is a quick wiki article on the subject/an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small,_sealed,_transportable,_...

Plenty more can be found if you have access to read actual articles and not just wikipedia

I'm not aware that we have such storage and I'm very sure that we have not tested such storage for long-term stability.

I question the generally-accepted necessity of such storage. Yes, nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years. But chemical waste such as arsenic and mercury remain dangerous forever, but we don't take anything like those precautions when disposing of those.

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