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Comment by fileeditview | Hacker News Reader

> Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.

It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..

At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.

Probably it's not in your lifetime or in your area so you don't have to care about it. It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.

I am not even categorically against nuclear power, but ignoring the actual risks is just BAD.

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> It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..

No, it's sweeping something under solid rock.

> At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.

Lots of places have no seismic activity. Earthquakes don't happen everywhere.

And even if they do, the waste is still buried under 500 meters of rock. Under what scenario does this waste somehow make its way out?

> It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.

Because risk is relative, and not as you seem to think, absolute and binary.

The risks are being dismissed because they're so tiny, that they're irrelevant. You may as well start planning your life around the assumption you'll win the lottery.

That's why nuclear waste storage is such a common fear mongering tactic, it exploits the human liability of not understanding long-term statistics very well.

Even solar power is more dangerous due to people falling off roofs and such. Same with wind power. And don't get me started on dams. When those fail, people die.

And that's renewables. We're stil mostly burning fossil fuels and dumping the waste products into the atmosphere we all breathe.

Yes, we are literally, as we speak, doing that.

And you're talking about the massive problem of storing some barrels of solid waste.

You're off base in your perception of risk by several orders of magnitude.

First of all I never said these things you claim. I literally said "ignoring these risks is BAD", not that they are absolutely too great or whatever. That must be evaluated per case.

However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.

Yes other things can also be dangerous or deadly. But when a dam breaks people die. What doesn't happen is that the region is unusable for eternity afterwards. So nuclear disasters are a very special case.

> However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.

The only "recent" one I can think of is Fukushima Daiichi, a little more than fifteen years ago. That one definitely had a couple-dozen injuries at and around the time of the disaster and maybe one death four years later. Compare that to the tens of thousands killed and many thousands injured because of the tsunami and earthquake that damaged the fission plant.

What other ones do you consider to be recent? Do make sure to mention the year in which they happened as well as reasonable guesses at the death and injury numbers for each incident.

(I'll refrain from more than a brief mention of the century+-long ongoing disaster that is fossil-fuel-fired [0] power generation.)

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