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Comment by wat10000 | Hacker News Reader

The waste thing is weird. We're able to dispose of other highly toxic substances. One dangerous thing frequently mentioned about nuclear waste is that it remains dangerous for thousands of years. But many other dangerous substances remain dangerous forever. It seems like having a concrete span of time makes it scarier even though it's objectively better.

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the thing that makes nuclear waste scary (the radiation) is also something extremely helpful for public health. You can wave a cheap, widely available scanner over your milk and immediately know if it is contaminated with radioactive iodine. Anyone can do it in their own home if they are concerned. It takes extremely expensive lab equipment to detect PFAS in the same milk, even at concentrations associated with major health impact. How do you know if that dust is contaminated with arsenic trioxide? It definitely isn't as easy as if it has radioactive cobalt.

I can be confident none of the food I ate today had nuclear waste in meaningful quantities, and it is verifiable non-destructively. If something is detected, it will have a characteristic signature that should be traceable within days back to the exact time and place where it was released. Can anyone say the same thing about the thousands of other industrial waste products with similar dose-dependent impacts on human health?

We could also significantly reduce the amount needed to be stored by just tech progress and commercialising breeder reactors

Have you ever dealt with radioactive substances?

"We're able to dispose of other highly toxic subst.ances."

With this statement I don't think so, so maybe educate yourself about a topic before making objective statements?

Chemical toxic substances can be processed into non toxic. They do not radiate through the walls, they do not make other materials also toxic by having it in the same room.

Also ... the amount of radioactiv waste matters, it is not just a few barrels we have to handle. Have you at least done a search on how much radioactive waste there is? Spoiler, it is a big number and for some reasons even the most pro nuclear people don't want it buried in their backyard.

There's a single mine (Giant Mine) in Canada that is contaminated with 200k+ tons of arsenic trioxide - which will literally remain poisonous forever since the poison is a stable element not an organic compound. The current plan is to try to keep it frozen because the dust is odorless, tasteless, water soluble, and located just outside of Yellowknife. That's the weight of more than half the amount of nuclear waste ever produced on the planet, in one relatively unremarkable industrial site.

Nuclear waste can be reprocessed to reduce its volume, and the more "spicy" it is, inherently the less long lived it is. We could probably store all the nuclear waste in the world in a geologic repository on the canadian shield somewhere for the cost of actually cleaning up that one old gold mine to make it non toxic.

Most of your post is accurate, but:

> Nuclear waste can be reprocessed to reduce its volume, and the more "spicy" it is, inherently the less long lived it is.

That is only true of fission-ready amounts - that is, near-fuel-level radioactive levels that are "hot" with decay particles. Unprompted radioactive decay is the most stable process known to us currently; we base all our best clocks on it.

99.9% of nuclear waste is essentially either "slightly radioactive", or "suspected to be slightly radioactive" - and it won't change for a looong time.

>Have you at least done a search on how much radioactive waste there is?

It's very little even for the US a country that at the behest of it's fossil fuel industry bans the reuse of it's nuclear fuel.

Also if I remember well only a small share of that waste (about 3%) is long lived and veryradioactive.

No, I haven't dealt with radioactive substances beyond what's found in ordinary households. But I'm not a complete ignoramus as you imply. Have you at least done a search on how much non-radioactive waste there is? Spoiler, it is a much, much, much bigger number. I think this is another case where the relatively small number on the nuclear side makes it scarier because it's something you can actually conceive of.

No, I don't want it in my back yard. I'm not arguing that it's harmless. But it's not that big of a deal, compared to mercury, arsenic, PFAS, etc., etc.

My go-to comparison is seafood. Look up the advice on how much to eat, and it'll be, have some, but don't have too much, especially for more vulnerable populations like children and pregnant women. Why? Because pollution of the seas is so prevalent that it's bad for you to eat a lot of it. And while nobody is out there saying this is wonderful and we should pollute more, the response to this is pretty weak, and people mostly shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives. At the same time, we had people freaking the fuck out because the most sensitive instruments were able to detect a tiny bit of Fukushima contamination on the US west coast.

I don't mean to completely trivialize nuclear waste, but the concern about it is deeply out of proportion compared to how other waste is viewed. And yes, at least some of that discrepancy should be made up by being more concerned about other waste.

I apologize for my tone.

But I live in a former soviet state area with lots of chemical and radioactive waste (uran mining). Also there once was a radioactive cloud over my childhood playground. And some first and second hand stories from miners, doctors, .. and I engage with the topic since many years.

So yes, I was of the impression that you said radioactive waste is no big deal and I know that is not true.

" But it's not that big of a deal, compared to mercury, arsenic, PFAS, etc., etc."

But here let's agree to disagree. The point is anyway, do we want to produce more of it, knowing how faulty and corrupt humans can be?

Or rather reduce toxic substances where we can?

Less toxic stuff is always good. My point is just that the conversation around nuclear waste is weird and it seems like it's due to flaws in human perception, where "tens of thousands of years" feels worse than "forever," and "a 70ft cube" feels bigger than "makes an entire category of food unsafe to eat in large quantities." It's hard to have a good conversation about what kind of energy is best with this backwards thinking being so prevalent.

Miners underground get exposed to a lot dust particles and radioactive radon gas (even miners in non-uranium mines, like underground coal mining). There is a lot of uranium underground, which over time decays to radon gas.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9940829/

Coal dust and crystalline silica dust from underground mining causes long term damage to lungs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_lung_disease

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicosis

For uranium mining a lot more stricter radon monitoring and air ventilation has been implemented in recent decades.

Example of part uranium mining: https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/BfS/EN/2023/0915...

Current uranium mining: https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/orano-s-sites-a...

https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/fact-sheets/radon-...

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