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Comment by 6d6b73 | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear power seems cleaner, but when you take under consideration things like waste fuel storage it simply does not make much sense.. Yes, it's a great short term solution, but what if in 500 years there is nobody to take care of all of the spent fuel, and clean up all of the nuclear power plant sites?

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In 500 years the fuel will have decayed to near-harmlessness. It'd still be a toxic heavy metal, so you don't want to eat it, but simply standing next to it isn't going to kill you.

There's also the little detail that we're using the least efficient fuel cycle imaginable. More efficient ones, e.g. involving breeder reactors, wouldn't produce nearly as much waste.

What if just one of the almost 500 power plants goes into a meltdown after a disaster/asteroid strike/pandemic . How long will it take for the fuel to become harmless? 20k years?

Compare how many people are killed, let alone animals per unit of energy produced with Wind as compared to Nuclear. Wind is far more deadly to humans (from accidents) & animals than the public is lead to believe. Nuclear despite its accidents is far less lethal towards the environment around it.

Wind is only a third as deadly as coal apparently, which isn't too great in my book: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-eag...

Also: http://firsttoknow.com/in-october-2013-two-engineers-became-...

however, the article is saying "coal is the biggest killer in U.S. energy at 15,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced, while nuclear is the least at zero. Wind energy kills a mere 100 people or so per trillion kWhrs, "

I don't claim that nuclear is not safe in a short term, especially when we can fully control it. But in a long term it is dangerous to the planet as a whole, not only to humanity.

We could build breeder reactors and burn up >90% of the stuff we call "waste".

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