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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

What, really, is the impact of a compromised nuclear casket in a remote, unpopulated area above ground? What is the impact buried just 100 feet deep in an unpopulated area? Someone would have to excavate the uranium and either spend loads of time around it or move it to a populated area.

Water contamination from naturally occurring uranium is a bigger risk than nuclear waste (uranium, like lead, can cause heavy metal poisoning independent of radioactivity). Chemical waste from non-nuclear industries are far more hazardous than nuclear waste, yet the latter is for some reason an enormously larger concern. If you're worried about generational risk, there are plenty of things an order of magnitude more concerning than nuclear waste.

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Thing is that maybe in 300 years someone wants to develop that land and the documents that say to not do that there are in an old version of .docx in an obsolete storage form buried under layers of bureaucracy. That’s how someone ends up living on the casket growing a massive thyroid.

Same reason that makes us not write code that only the author can understand (when working in a team), we need to plan ahead in the same way. We can’t rely on the future solving our current problems or even understanding them fully.

Or somebody spends 100$ on a Geiger counter ...

Nuclear waste will not simply be lost. The only way it gets lost if society literally collapses.

And if that happens the small amount of nuclear waste is the least important problem anybody will have.

Nuclear waste has been lost multiple times throughout history and has killed people. Kind of amazing someone could think it cannot happen.

https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/overview-of-the-cns-gl...

We are talking about spent nuclear fuel casks from civilian nuclear. Not medical isotopes that fell of a truck. We are mostly talking about many meters long fuel casks. They might get rerouted on a train once but they are rarely lost and even if they are, even during transport they are packaged to be save for a considerable amount of time.

And I couldn't find a clear indication of how many people died from civilian nuclear waste. The article you linked does not really give much information and I'm not gone read the whole report.

Every study shows that that nuclear energy has the lowest death per person. People are more likely to die during construction then anything else.

That report includes radiation sources which are much more radioactive and much smaller than nuclear waste from power plants. Small radioactive sources can be easily lost or stolen due to their size. Nuclear waste from a power plant is larger being mostly fuel rods or irradiated containers and is stored and transported in large containers that are not easily lost or stolen. Making an argument based on that report also covers arguing against the use of radioactive materials in healthcare and industry since that is where most of the small losable isotopes are employed.

That was nuclear waste from medical instruments, not 12 foot high concrete cinders of nuclear power plant waste: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage#/media/File...

If anything, this example serves to prove that we have an irrationally heightened fear over nuclear power's waste: we have had incidents with medical radioisotopes, but yet that doesn't get nearly as much press as the supposed "waste problem" with nuclear power.

Options:

1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else.

2. You just build a house on the ground (without digging). Nothing bad happens.

3. Civilization collapses, nobody cares about the abandoned casks.

There is a fourth option. Nuclear waste can be used in dirty bombs and poisons as well. So waste sites should be somewhat secure.

So in the analogy it would be as if we left a stockpile of guns and ammo. I don’t think leaving a bunch of loaded guns around is a responsible way to hand the future to our children, especially since we can’t know what the future political situations will be.

But we did leave a stockpile of weapons and ammo. It's a minor inconvenience.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_bomb_disposal_i...

It’s a minor inconvenience in Europe because of the political stability of the region. However, it has been stable for only a relatively short period of time, with no guarantees for the future.

So let me reframe the question. Do you think it would be a good idea to store spent nuclear waste in present day Iraq or Syria?

Proliferation is the biggest hazard, I think. Proliferation of the fissile material remains a problem for much longer than the radiation from the fission products (which is only a few hundred years).

The best way is to burn up these actinides in a suitable reactor.

It'd be easier to just mine naturally occurring uranium. Are terrorists somehow going to successfully excavate a mile deep into bedrock in Finland, without anyone noticing?

Again, we do have big stockpiles of guns and ammo. We have bunkers full of artillery shells, missiles, and weapons. Where's the outrage over the dozens (hundreds?) of munitions stockpiles militaries have strewn across the globe? Again the question is, what risk does nuclear pose that we don't already navigate with other more mundane materials?

You can make poisons without nuclear materials just fine. Keep in mind, that regular heavy metals also don't go away.

The nuclear material in casks is not _that_ dangerous because of its long half-life. So dirty bombs made from it would not result in a significant loss of life. They'll just result in a very expensive cleanup of the affected areas.

>1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else.

The radioactive symbol (trefoil) was invented in 1946. In 2007 a new supplementary symbol was created. Sure it still includes a trefoil, but it's smaller.

Now just imagine the symbols we used today, what we think is obvious might not be obvious in 100 years, 1000 years, 10000 years, much less in 100000 years.

These are time spans that aren't imaginable to us. Creating a symbol that's intelligible throughout that time is a task we dont know we can do.

Can you decipher the symbols in Göbleki Tepe reliably? There are some hypotheses around these. But if they're warning you about something that warning is hard to decipher, much less obvious. And this is only 10000 years ago.

We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years. Even without that, you could give the information visually in cartoon form.

>We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Only because we found like one stone hundreds of years ago, if that was not the case we probably could not have done it.

>Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years.

[Citation needed] This seems like quite an assumption.

Anyhow, the situation he sketched was that some random guy develops a fields with cylinders 300 years from now, how reasonable is it that he somehow understand the language or goes through the effort to translate it? I would wager pretty slim, I can barely understand text in my own language from 100 years ago.

I think the best thing we can do is bury all the nuclear waste. And to avoid any future generation excavating it, mark it's location, and to stand the test of time, build a massive stone pyramid on top of it. In 5000 years people will be able to figure that out.

Surely nobody would dig under a 10ky-old massive stone pyramid out of curiosity.

> This seems like quite an assumption.

The issue with hieroglyphics is that we only had a relatively small sample. If full books remain, it's going to be much easier to recover meaning from scratch. It's very close to what we already do with LLMs.

What books last 10000 years? What writing is performed today on a medium that will last that long? No one is carving into clay any more

The one in text files. Data is already extremely cheap and there are many horders and archivists. I would bet that if advanced civilisation still exists in 10,000 years, they'll have an archived version of Wikipedia from around this century.

(And probably quite a few weirdos will still keep replicating the bible)

We have no way to know, either way, what humanity will look like 10k years from now.

We might have disassembled every planet within a few thousand light years to englobe each corresponding star within a Dyson swarm.

We might have suffered a cataclysm that almost wiped us out, and have only just returned to the equivalent of the early industrial age, and the occasional remaining patch of carved rock writing from our time is as unreadable to those living in that new world as 𐘃𐘅𐘈𐘊 𐘌 𐘍𐘎𐘑 𐘖 𐘗𐘂𐘆𐘋𐘐 𐘇𐘆 𐘊 𐘑𐘉𐘂𐘆𐘊 𐘇𐘆𐘋 𐘐 𐘇𐘆𐘑𐘐𐘅𐘋 𐘐 𐘏𐘏𐘈𐘊𐘑 𐘉𐘂 𐘏𐘏𐘈 𐘊𐘏 𐘏𐘐 𐘐𐘅𐘊𐘍𐘈 𐘇 𐘆𐘑 𐘐𐘅𐘊 𐘍𐘈𐘇𐘆𐘑𐘐 is to us.

We could only read Egyptian hieroglyphics several centuries after several tombs had been raided by early grave robbers. They would make a killing on a magical stone with funny pictures.

> The radioactive symbol (trefoil) was invented in 1946. In 2007 a new supplementary symbol was created. Sure it still includes a trefoil, but it's smaller.

ISO 21482:

> On February 15, 2007, two groups—the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)—jointly announced the adoption of a new ionizing radiation warning symbol to supplement the traditional trefoil symbol. The new symbol, to be used on sealed radiation sources, is aimed at alerting anyone, anywhere to the danger of being close to a strong source of ionizing radiation.[12] It depicts, on a red background, a black trefoil with waves of radiation streaming from it, along with a black skull and crossbones, and a running figure with an arrow pointing away from the scene. The radiating trefoil suggests the presence of radiation, while the red background and the skull and crossbones warn of danger. The figure running away from the scene is meant to suggest taking action to avoid the labeled material. The new symbol is not intended to be generally visible, but rather to appear on internal components of devices that house radiation sources so that if anybody attempts to disassemble such devices they will see an explicit warning not to proceed any further.[13][14]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol#Ionizing_radiati...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_21482

First, people that far in the future will still know about the previous civilizations. So it's highly unlikely that they'll forget all the languages.

Sure, every random Zakjsnd, Joe and Yelaldto won't know English, but archeologists certainly will. And they'll be able to read it.

But even if we suppose that a nearby supernova explosion resulted in a burst of magic rays that somehow wiped all memories, people will either:

1. Know what radiation is, and they'll test casks for it.

2. They won't be doing digging down for at least tens of meters.

You really need a very unlikely confluence of factors: a very developed, but still pre-technological civilization, that is somehow interested in digging way down (why?) in that particular spot.

I'm pretty sure that pre-Curie Europeans did a lot of digging tens of meters in the ground.

If that knowledge somehow gets lost, which over such a long timeline seems almost likely, people will die from radiation poisoning without knowing what hit them.

> I'm pretty sure that pre-Curie Europeans did a lot of digging tens of meters in the ground.

In pre-industrial era? Not really. There was more digging after the steam engine invention, as suddenly people started looking for coal and ore. But that's what, 400 years out of 10000+ years of European culture?

1. You start digging, and you find these huge mysterious concrete cylinders with a funny symbols. These must clearly have been gift to their God(s) given the amount of work they put in. We should recover them, open them up and have buses of school kids admire them up close

If you have buses, then you also likely know about radioactivity. And the archeological lab will quickly identify the casks.

And if it's a pre-historic society, then why would you be digging 30 meters below ground anyway?

Why would a pre-historic society go to the trouble of dragging large stones 150 miles or more ? (Stonehenge)

Mankind has gone to great lengths to admire the death, and digging a 30 meter hole is definitely achievable given other prehistoric monuments.

Sure. And what are the chances that a Stonehenge-like monument would be located exactly on the site of nuclear waste disposal?

For this to happen, such monuments have to be commonplace. Which would require a technological civilization. Then see above.

You can not just go around and develop land today. First you need to take a survey, soil samples, water quality control, and then during digging and construction there are all kind of different dangerous. Most countries in EU still have a bunch of bombs in the ground left over from world war 2, and they will be there until someone finds them and disarms them. Soil and water contamination from industry is anyone guess, and protected archeological finds are only more likely to be found in 300 years than it is today. There will never be a .docx file to tell you that a specific land was the dumping ground for lead by-products in 19th century.

Land developers are not allowed, nor will ever be allowed to just assume that some land has never been used before. Too much of history is undocumented, and what is documented is not reliable.

I think the argument is clearly trite, .docx seems like a joke, and very more likely within the hundreds to thousands of years, people probably won’t even speak Finnish there anymore.

I find the argument that they will need to speak Finish to be boring. Why should they in hundreds to thousands of years need to read an ancient document to figure out whats below the ground. It is not a realistic problem.

You don’t know that, all you can do is try your best TODAY to avoid issues in the future.

It seems very clear to me that if we all follow the rules of traffic we can safely go 90+ since I’m a pretty good driver, everyone else must be too. Yet the speed limit is much lower and people crash all the time anyway.

It’s evident to me that if I order a coffee, it’ll be hot, but the lid says “caution hot”.

It’s obvious that if I see that the floor is wet and the surface is slippery, I shouldn’t run if I’m trying to avoid slipping, yet we have those yellow signs everywhere.

Just because you think something is below YOU, super smart HN user, it doesn’t mean it keeps the average idiot safe in the future.

Frankly I don’t even understand why the poster above you says it’s unrealistic. Is it because humans won’t be around?

It not about how smart future people will be, or how we can eliminate every danger possible for future man. It is that we even today we do not reference old documents to figure out what is safe and was is not.

As an example, humanity has documented ocean dangers for centuries. Everything from human created dangers like shipwrecks to natural occurring shallows and strong currents. Captains that want to avoid those dangers could read those, learning every language from ancient Greek to Latin to dutch, scouring the many archives that exist to figure out what is down below. No one does this (except for archeologists). Captains use modern maps, sonar and satellites, neither which require knowledge of ancient Greek.

Maps and their information about dangers are perishable with a fairly short lifespan. Making a map with the intention of it lasting hundred of thousands of years is an impossible task. Any danger, be that natural like cliffs or unnatural like mine shafts, can not be made into a map that will last hundred of thousands of years. Such maps will need to be maintained or rediscovered. Every single garbage dump, every industrial area, every zone or place where humans has done something to the environment will have to be maintained in updated maps for as long as those places remain dangerous to humans.

And why aren't we raising the same objection to the vastly greater quantities of non-nuclear industrial waste that will never decay into safer isotopes? Again, the question is, what is the heightened risk specific to nuclear waste that warrants so much more attention?

> a remote, unpopulated area above ground?

European countries and other denser ones may want to know where it finds those.. and as if we are not in a big change that will start a lot of instability, conflicts and migration.

Yea, isn't coal ash way worst regardless of how "green" they capture the emissions. They always seem to leek into other water sources and do way more.

How did we get this way?

It's so tiresome that nuclear proponents pretend the only alternative to nuclear is coal.

His point is that other technologies are not held to the same standard. And that is still true.

Even above ground nuclear storage is far better waste management then virtually anything else, including wind and solar.

The likely hood of people dying from old wind and solar projects is quite a bit higher then people dying from nuclear waste.

The difference between the two scenario's is quite obvious. In coal ash it's highly diluted, in nuclear waste it's highly concentrated.

Being highly concentrated is exactly what makes it easy store and protect people from any impacts.

Every input into the nuclear reactor is just coming out the other side in a very controlled way. There is no dispersal of anything into the environment (except potentially heat).

The lifecycle of materials is handled way better then any other form of energy.

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