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Comment by alwaysnow | Hacker News Reader

When you consider the whole life cycle of nuclear, you have to take into account the next few hundred thousand years as the waste loses its radioactivity. Who knows how many natural disasters, and therefore deaths, will happen based on nuclear waste that is currently stored in insecure, leaky above-ground containers. If you consider deaths per year of risk, there's no way that nuclear energy is as safe as solar.

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Something that's usually missed about nuclear waste is that the most radioactive wastes have the shortest half lives so burn themselves out quickly. The waste that lasts for thousands of years is far less radioactive. For example, in a uranium mine, you don't even care about the dose you get from uranium (~4 billion year half life), but you do care about the fission products with far shorter half lives. Your point stands though.

But some of these have medium half-lives have decay sequence through many materials with very short half-life. So even a small amount of decay from the medium-life material can then release a lot of radiation; enough that the original material is extremely dangerous.

"Who knows how many natural disasters, and therefore deaths, will happen based on nuclear waste that is currently stored in insecure, leaky above-ground containers."

Maybe we could, you know, not store radioactive waste above-ground?

> Who knows how many natural disasters, and therefore deaths, will happen based on nuclear waste that is currently stored in insecure, leaky above-ground containers.

I do.

The number is zero.

Any disasters that occur due to that are artificial disasters, not natural ones, even if a natural disaster is also part of the chain of causality.

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