I'm my current view, nuclear waste can be sequestered and stored effecting only a tiny fraction of the planet while greenhouse gases effect the whole planet.
That question can be answered be asking yourself how society would look if the government was efficient, logical, morale and free of corruption. In other words, its an interesting philosophical question, but not one that has any relevance to reality. Unfortunately most people, no how nominally "intelligent" they are, insist that the world exists as they wish it would, rather than it actually does. In reality, mistakes happen, incompetence happens, corruption happens, and unforeseen circumstances happen - all of which render nuclear waste (and facilities that produce nuclear power) much riskier and more dangerous than they would be in an ideal world. Unfortunately, this bit of undeniable objective reality is extremely unpopular (and offensive) to technocrats and others who worship blindly at the altar of human society and technology.
Here in Germany, we still have not found where to put nuclear waste long-term, and there is no solution in sight.
Even if one day we find one, how do we communicate the potential dangers of nuclear waste to a civilization that is supposed to understand what we're communicating in 30000, 50000 years? With a fancy unicode symbol, like U+2622?
We have no idea what people 3000 years ago were trying to tell us with their fancy symbols.
Nuclear energy is the analogy of tech debt that can never be paid back, ever.
The reason why the "waste" is dangerous is that there's a lot of energy in it - energy that can still be extracted at a later date. It might very easily be very valuable in the future.
Germany is really sad case, where they stopped using nuclear and replaced it with "clean coal". Terrible thing for the planet.
The Greens talk about nuclear waste and Fukushima, and meanwhile German green-washed coal plants and cheating diesel engines put crazy things in the air.
Problem: "no known human civilization has ever endured for so long, and no geologic formation of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository has yet been discovered that has been stable for so long a period" [0]
The problem isn't the "sticking into the ground" part.
It's the finding of that place that will stay geologically inactive, uncivilized, and not near water sources for the next 100000 years. And then taking that bet.
It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me".
Plastic stuck into the ground is not radioactive. Plastic stuck into the ground also degrades in a fraction of a fraction of the half-life of Plutonium.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...
Possibly, but unless there is other realistic low-carbon energy source (and it seems there isn't - hydro is already built everywhere where it can be, and solar and wind are intermittent with large-scale storage being unsolved problem) there won't be any people born after you.
I have 2 points here. 1) The half life is longer than recorded history so this isn't really fair. We've seen humans continually advance. Sure, there has been setbacks and some regressions but we haven't ever come even close at reverting back to the stone or even bronze age. That is highly unlikely and if that were to happen we'd probably have bigger problems. 2) Not all waste is equal. A good rule of thumb is that high energy waste is short lived and long lived waste is low energy. Why? Because high energy waste is shedding particles much faster than low energy. Simply if you use a bucket to remove the water from your swimming pool you'll finish a lot faster than you would if you used a tea cup.
> no geologic formation of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository has yet been discovered that has been stable for so long a period
This is false and I'm not sure where you got this information from. We chose the location for the Seed Vault (and the GitHub vault) for similar reasons. There's plenty of other locations as well, several within the US. As for the bet, I'm betting on generations of PhD holding geologists to make that decision over really anyone else. As long as what they say doesn't set off any bullshit alarms I don't see why they shouldn't be believed. They are in fact the experts in the subject matter and just rejecting their work with no real evidence is rather arrogant and surprising to see on HN. I believe them for the same reason I believe climate scientists. I've read their work, seems reasonable, I've talked to them and they seem reasonable and passionate and well studied. How arrogant would I need to be to tell them they are wrong. My expertise lies in other fields.
I'd also suggest reading what actual plans are and understanding the scale of the waste problem. I find that many people over estimate the scale by many orders of magnitude. [0]
> It's literally like saying "Fuck other people who are born after me".
I'd say that not taking care of climate is saying "Fuck other people who are born after me." You're letting perfection get in the way of progress. We can say similar things about strip mining and rare earth materials. The things we'd need to develop battery storage to make renewables a feasible path forward. We can't wait for a miracle in battery storage. We needed to act 20 years ago. So now we have to make compromises. And as we drag our feet we are still polluting with coal and oil. To me that is the real "fuck you" to future generations. That we got so caught up in perfection that we let high pollution levels continue right on while we prayed for a miracle.
What we need to do is evaluate the risks from all the current options. Fossil fuels, renewables and nuclear energy and come up with a balanced strategy. There are people dying right now from radioneucleotides released from fossil fuels, or just ambient radioactivity. It's a matter of relative risk.
For similar reasons note that coal burning power plants add WAY more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants.
So humans don't create radiation, they just mine it, concentrate it, extract energy from it, and then dispose of it. So we are just moving it around, not creating additional radiation.
Imagine we extract uranium from ocean water, the radiation levels in the ocean would go from low, to even lower. If we take the nuclear waste and distribute it across the ocean the radiation levels would (at worst) raise to the levels we started with.
Based on what I've read all the scientists that are experts in relevant fields say that dealing with nuclear waste is a political problem, not a scientific one. There are multiple reasonable solutions. My favorite it making giant spikes out of a mix of radioactive material and glass. Covering the spike with steel and dropping it where the ocean is deep, near a subduction zone, and the sedimentation rate is higher than the leakage rate. By the time the spike hits the ocean floor it's going fast enough to bury itself deeply, the sediment fills in behind and will keep getting deeper, and the spikes will get sucked beneath the continental plate and not bother anyone ever again.
Yes that means higher concentrations of those decay products to deal with in the short term, but these mostly have quite short half lives in the grand scheme of things, in the order of years or decades.
The environmental impacts of nuclear energy are often grossly overestimated, this is why so many environmentalists are advocating for nuclear energy.
So sure if you mine uranium and concentrate it, you get a high peak source, but you are literally removing radiation from one place, and moving it to another.
So if you concentrate uranium out of ocean water and them spread the radioactive waste back into the ocean (at the same concentration) you are actually benefiting the ocean.
You can hold fresh nuclear fuel in your hand and be fine. Once it goes in the reactor to be fissioned, you'd get a fatal radiation dose in seconds if you stood next to it unshielded.