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Comment by jay_kyburz | Hacker News Reader

In other words, fuck it, future generations can clean up our mess.

How about instead, we use only what we can produce without waste.

What mess? The waste is being kept in manned facilities and will likely be repurposed in the next 20 years as fuel for a new generation of nuclear reactors. The first commercial nuclear power plant was in 1956. If you think about it, we are dealing with the 'mess' of the previous generation. And we are doing fine.

No, we're not dealing with it at all. We are just keeping it around because we don't really have a solution. The stuff that was stored decades ago lies mostly untouched, and if it has been touched it is usually because the containment failed and there have been leaks.

The earth is 1 trillion km^3 in volume. I don't get your problem with using 0.00000000003% (that 1000 year estimate of waste from earlier in the thread) of that to store nuclear waste so that we can stop pumping 32.5 billion tons of CO2 into the air every year.

The problem is that it is a false choice. There are other alternatives over 'let's make some nuclear waste for the next 50 generations to clean up'.

There's no such thing as "produce without waste".

What you're proposing is the equivalent of wanting to eat only such things that don't cause you to have to take a dump.

Taking a dump fertilises things to eat.

"energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another."

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