The fact that Zaporizhia was on the front lines of one of the biggest armed conflicts in recent memory and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?
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.
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?
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.
It is, yes. As was the performance of the Fukushima [0] reactors after getting hit with seismic forces notably outside their design tolerances... and -well- pretty much every commercially-operated fission power plant ever, other than the known-to-be-very-dangerous-to-everyone-even-at-the-time one the Soviets were running at Chernobyl.
[0] Consider that the destruction of the power plant caused maybe one death years later and definitely caused a couple dozen injuries, whereas the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed that plant killed tens of thousands of people and injured many thousands more.
But Germany did not do it. They on purpose put it in a salt mine close to the east Germany border and now we have to dig it up again, because ground water is seeping in.
A few weeks ago there were rumors that it's not possible to dig it up and we might have to flood it. It's such a cluster fuck.
Finland did it well though.
Isn't highly radioactive waste vitrified(turned into glass)? How is it leaking, exactly?
And isn't the entire point of storing it inside salt that it's self sealing - even if there is a leak it won't go anywhere.
Until we clean it up and find a new endlager I think Germany should not build new nuclear reactor. Just not a good track record. Oh and before that we just dumped it into the north see.
2024: https://www.neimagazine.com/decommissioning-waste-management...
2026: https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/robotic-arms-...
Here's a timeline as PDF: https://www.folkkampanjen.se/pdf_asse.pdf
Pricing in these things into nuclear energy production makes it quite unpalatable compared to simpler engineering, in my opinion.
Who knows what will come of chinese fusion research, perhaps they'll figure it out and change my mind.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260101160855.h...
