Even just trying to ship it elsewhere for processing gets blocked by other states and cities.
There is so much fear around this stuff, but it's usually based on the incorrect notion that radioactive wastes is both super dangerous, and lasts forever. But this is not true. The super dangerous stuff doesn't hang around that long, whilst the stuff that does isn't that dangerous.
The super-duper dangerous radioactive waste has a relatively short half-life, and volume. The vast amount of waste is fairly benign.
It's a solvable problem.
Like with any risk, there should be appropriate and proportional risk mitigation strategies put in place. Current strategies are outsized compared to the risk.
The anti-nuclear environmental movement will go down in history as one of the biggest own goals. If nuclear power had have had continued investment into engineering improvements, the world would be in a much better place WRT climate change.
Thats the thing though, its already been the titanic. People have seen the ship sink, and the promised engineering improvements didn't make up for the fact that it was not only an engineering problem but a human one. Some human somewhere is going to fail the system catastrophically, inevitably. If not an operator, then perhaps some day in the future someone else will gain control of it, or damage it, or make something happen that is out of the range of possibility with even moderately responsible engineering. Maybe its all solved now, I heard nice things about thorium reactors properties, but thats the echo of the fear of nuclear power. Be interesting to see what the generational breakdown is there.
It's not the outsized risk of lead levels people are necessarily worried about. It's the outsized risk of some health risk that gets covered up, lied about, or dismissed by those in charge. There appears to be a high correlation between nuclear accidents and government and political coverups.
The fact that the problem still exists at all is an indicator it's not actually that easy.
Wish I saved the quote, but I remember reading something to the tone of "Everybody across all lines wants healthcare. But 8 rich people disagree, so it's complicated".
That is a strange statement.
There is no place in the world geologically stable for the required period (we have no way to know)
We have no way to communicate with people about the dangers for over 100_000 years.
Those are technical problems.
The political impetus is to get future generations to pay for our current consumption
> There is no place in the world geologically stable for the required period (we have no way to know)
This can be said of anything, which is IMO a defeatist attitude. Nothing we do is guaranteed to not cause harm. Likewise, our inaction could also cause harm.
For the specific question of stable geology, past performance can help predict future performance. We can make educated guesses. If it has been stable for the last million years, it's a good be it will be stable for the next 10,000.
> We have no way to communicate with people about the dangers for over 100_000 years.
The need to communicate the dangers over vast timeframes presupposes that society has fallen into ruin, and our record keeping has been destroyed. I will argue that if that has happened, it means countless billions will have perished, and people+or lizardmen) living primitive lifestyles will have far bigger worries than and increased cancer risk.
> The political impetus is to get future generations to pay for our current consumption
We are paying for our current consumption of fossil fuels right now. How many deaths from climate change over the next 200 years are appropriate to ensure the safety of an unknown number of people thousands of years from now?
No. It is a way of loosing it and leaving it around for someone to dig it up and become very sick
Remember, it is hundreds of thousands of years
I kinda want to get this Simpson's Jersey with a 3-eyed fish as the mascot that says Hanford or something on the back of it. I was thinking it should say maybe CESIUM 137 on the back.
