Eelongate

> Why is it better to unbundle them?

Better... for who? I don't know if it's better for either business or society, but it's better for me because I walk to the grocery store and never take my car. If the price of parking is unbundled from the price of food, then I don't have to pay for something I'm not using.

The threat of terrorism is massively overblown across the board, not just with respect to nuclear waste. The means to make conventional explosives are widely available, yet outside of a handful of conflict zones it is rarely done. Americans can buy gunpowder at walmart, yet how many pipebomb attacks have you heard of? A handful, but not many. Not many considering the country has hundreds of millions of people with ready access to the means to make them.

The incidence rate of people inclined to terrorism is vanishingly low. And when you start talking about plots that require numerous people to cooperate, rather than a single lonewolf nut, there is even less to worry about. The more people a plot requires, the less likely it is to actually happen. Coordinated attacks against nuclear power plants or waste disposal facilities are fantasy.

For a tree to be an effective long-term sequestered of carbon, you have to ensure the tree never burns or decays. Obviously this can be done; you can sink it in anaerobic water or bury it deep in a mineshaft... but just letting forests grow wild doesn't get the job done anymore. Not since the end of the Carboniferous era. New forests don't make new coal deposits, that's a thing of the past.

Trees are still great though, for innumerable other reasons.

It already is, they're still using Nb-Sn superconductors for ITER. The whole project is a manifestation of the sunk costs fallacy.

The article is crackpot nonsense:

> But many systems exist and persist far from equilibrium. Perhaps the most glaring example is life itself. We’re kept out of equilibrium by our metabolism, which converts matter into energy.

Our metabolisms convert matter into energy? Lmao I think not, our metabolisms are chemical processes, not nuclear. Making and breaking chemical bonds is NOT converting matter into energy. The author is nuts, I thought Quanta was better than this but I guess they're on my shitlist now.