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Comment by FourthProtocol | Hacker News Reader

Indeed so. I've been following nuclear in Germany ever since those railroad protests when they tried to transport nuclear waste from somewhere to somewhere else which I thought was crazy (the protests).

The part I felt had merit is that none of Europe's lofty solutions to safely storing/disposing of the waste output ever came to anything. I believe until this day that industry is still trying to work out how to dig 30km down to safely store the waste underground.

That said I haven't kept up to date on any progress or better solutions.

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Onkalo in Finland is not 30km deep, which none have achieved anywhere.

But Onkalo is one of the few actually built long term nuclear waste storage locations anywhere.

It is for domestic nuclear waste only. There is no desire to become the international dumping ground for nuclear waste.

Tbh I believe the waste should be reprosessed as fuel and burnt in reactors instead of burial.

But non-proliferation things make that impossible.

These geological repositories are such political bullshit theater. Its fucking sad.

The are actually more expensive then simply developing the reactors to burn up that fuel.

Its just crazy that we live in this world.

The US collected money from nuclear plants for 50 years for disposal, and had plenty of money to develop waste burning reactors. And yet that money is totally unused. While politicians dead-lock on this idiotic Yucca Mountain project.

Its beyond sad the state we are in.

After more than 50 years of nuclear power plants in use we can say that there is no nuclear waste problem. The ‘waste’ has been stored above ground for decades and nothing has happened. It’s clearly safe. We should just keep doing what we’re doing. No need to dig expensive holes.

While I believe this is the most safe option right now - some candidate dumping grounds have failed spectacularly (the Asse), this of course only works as long we are vigilant and also pay the upkeep for storage locations for many millenia. Both from environmental and safety concerns.

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