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Comment by tallanvor | Hacker News Reader

Hanford was primarily a weapons research and production facility. It's biggest claim to fame is that it produced the plutonium used in Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

The problems there aren't due to the normal radioactive waste produced in nuclear power plants, rather it's due to the various materials used in weapons production and general nuclear research being mixed together in waste tanks.

While the waste from operating nuclear power plants certainly isn't minimal, these days we can at least store it safely. Of course, as Fukushima showed, us, there have been very bad assumptions made about the types of disasters nuclear power plants might face.

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> these days we can at least store it safely

Did the folks creating the containers in the article believe themselves to be creating unsafe storage? I doubt it. Our current situation is no different. We think it's safe because we haven't seen it break, when we do see it break it will be in an unexpected way, probably ahead of the time we thought it'd break.

In that time, it was thought that rapidly building a nuclear deterrent against the soviets was important enough that the environment could be sacrificed. You can see this effect throughout the defense industry throughout the cold war, probably most viscerally in the example of the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado.

They did not worry about whether it could be stored safely long term, because that was not their mandate. And, because Hanford had some of the first [large scale] reactors ever built, they did not know much about what the requirements of long-term safety and storage would even be.

80 years later, we know a lot more, and have a different set of expectations for how to store and handle nuclear waste.

It's fair to be skeptical, but not fair to condemn them based on past mistakes which have been specifically addressed. It would be like saying modern cars must be unsafe, because cars from the 1940s don't have seatbelts or airbags. It doesn't follow.

You could also say "well, we know about some safety issues, but what about the ones we don't know about yet?" but that attitude extends to all of science and engineering as well. We have to proceed with caution, but proceed nonetheless.

80 years later, knowing what we know now, the Hanford site should be managed better. The fact that it hasn't been cleaned up by now is probably the sort of problem that OP is referring to.

Yep. The safety of nuclear depends of governments 50-100+ years in the future continuing to maintain and provide for the upkeep of the facilities. If they won't even do it now how the hell can we expect them to do it continuously for 100+ years?

It's absolutely insane to me that people on this site can be so distrustful of government when it comes to things like privacy/encryption/etc, and so trustful for things like continuing to provide funding for maintenance of nuclear facilities, especially given current governments have proven themselves undeserving of trust in either regard.

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