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Comment by Eupolemos | Hacker News Reader

It's minor now.

But if it turns out that we'll need an active (as in "needs manpower") care-taking of this waste for several thousands of years, we get into the compounded interests area.

Also, there's the immediate (last 50 years) issues such as barrels of waste being treated in silly manners; e.g. thrown into the ocean near the coast and shot to pieces by air-planes if they surface...

Politicians and corporations will do anything to save money, if they think they'll get away with it. That makes nuclear waste much more dangerous than it should be.

It's not a problem, we'll have clean fusion in 20 years :D /s

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You are literally just quoting the most recent John Oliver episode.

There's an interesting rebuttal to his episode here that is worth reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/08/24/please-jo...

(1) We have to keep something dangerous deep underground in some remote places, and if something goes wrong, it may leak out and contaminate dozens of kilometers around the spot. Dozens of kilometers.

(2) Every coastal towns, cities, estuaries, and natural preserves will be wiped out within a thousand years. Across the globe. Including entire nations. (Well, to be fair, they will cease to be nations long before that.)

There's really no comparison.

For arguments regarding (2), see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_global_wa...

> A study in 2015 found that assuming cumulative fossil fuel emissions of 10 000 gigatonnes of carbon, the Antarctic Ice Sheet could melt completely over the following millennia, contributing 58 m to global sea-level rise, and 30 m within the first 1000 years.

The waste mismanagement is not unique to nuclear. Check out this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal#Love_Canal_disaster

Out of all wastes to be mismanaged, higher radiation would probably be the easiest to detect - simple detectors are widely available commercially.

Yes, we need ways to store, or recycle - there are ways to do that too - nuclear waste, but that doesn't seem to be an intractable problem, and I don't think this is the main hindrance to the wider spread of the nuclear energetic. Irrational fears of "radiation" and political issues seem to be more prominent there.

> But if it turns out that we'll need an active (as in "needs manpower") care-taking of this waste for several thousands of years

We don't. Dig a shaft half a mile deep in bedrock in a tectonically stable area, and anything you put there will be safe for the next million years.

But that's kind of expensive, so we keep dumping the shit in the ocean or in shallow graves in the backyard.

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