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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Why does nuclear waste require remembering on a different scale because it lasts for 100,000 years, but chemical waste which lasts literally forever does not?

It seems like a long but definite timespan leaves open the possibility of a solution so people see a goal to strive for. Mercury and arsenic and a million other things have to solution so we just dump them into the atmosphere or whatever.

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Made me wonder what people think about the naturally occurring radioactive sites in nature.

I don't think there are any naturally occurring sites whose radioactivity comes anywhere close to that of high-level nuclear waste.

They have discovered naturally occurring nuclear reactions in rock formations. There is also the issue of radio active radon gas. My point is more that radiation hazards exist naturally on earth. A carefully constructed handful of man made ones doesn't feel like it changes the risk profile all that much.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-nuclear-r...

There are natural nuclear reactors in Africa¹, though they fizzled out 2 billion years ago.

Fortunately high radiation nuclear materials burns out pretty quickly. The stuff that is active very long term also has very low levels of radiation.

¹ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/natures-nucl...

Radon leaking into buildings has killed many orders of magnitude more people than nuclear accidents and nuclear weapons combined, no matter how liberal your estimates.

That's only because radon is way more common.

That's kind of the point.

I don't get the point. It's quite reasonable to treat a pervasive, small risk differently from a rare, large risk. You're far more likely to die from sunlight than from botulism, but we treat the latter far more carefully. That's only to be expected, since the risk from exposure is far higher for botulism.

What I'm pointing out is different behavior when dealing with substances that have similar risks. If I had a basement, I'd much prefer to have naturally occurring radon in it than either high-level nuclear waste or toxic chemical waste, if somehow that was my choice.

Optimism says that both hazardous chemicals and spent nuclear fuel are problems that have solutions. In the case of chemical waste, we will eventually have entirely closed chemical cycles just like life. That is not enough of course: we must also try to avoid them ending up in the wrong places in the wrong form, and when they inevitably sometimes do, find ways to clean that up or obviate their effects.

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