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Comment by elago | Hacker News Reader

The site of every airplane crash doesn't become an inhabitable danger lasting for multiple lifetimes.

Some try - here in NZ the foam used by emergency crews at airports has been found to be toxic (ages ago) but kept being used, poisoning large areas. The issue came to light for some people as their farm animals started suffering a range of strange ailments and dying.

https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/350886/firefighting-...

Neither do nuclear power plant meltdowns. Fukushima is habitable, Chernobyl is habitable. Most of the concerns around nuclear waste are almost entirely limited to military use. Storing spent fuel rods is a generally solved problem. Most nuclear waste when generating energy can be re-used in other contexts as well... military use creates the nasty by-products that can't be reused.

Could you explain what you mean by habitable? Is that in that you can walk around with relative safety in certain places, or that you can safely live their again?

I'd guess the latter. The way half-life works, the stuff that's dangerous to you as you walk around quickly decays and stops being dangerous.

The problem is with long half-life (and thus low-radioactivity) elements that sit on the trees, get mixed with soil, and thus eventually end up in ground water and local food chain. You might be able to walk around a disaster site safely in relatively short time after the event, but I wouldn't try growing anything there.

>Chernobyl is habitable

"Even today, radiation levels are so high that the workers responsible for rebuilding the sarcophagus are only allowed to work five hours a day for one month before taking 15 days of rest. Ukrainian officials estimated the area would not be safe for human life again for another 20,000 years" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster citing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#cite_note-T...

Even Fukushima, which released most of its radiation out to sea, still has 370 square kilometers of exclusion zone.. 90,000 acres of still-uninhabitable land..

http://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/portal-english/en03-08....

What about the CO2 production of airplanes? And about the aviation fuel production sites? Fracking to get it out from the ground? Have you ever seen what the oil industry done in Africa? Are ignorant or on purpose leaving out crucial details in the comparison?

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