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Comment by korantu | Hacker News Reader

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This is not very practical answer.

France got waste reprocessing to the extent where decades of electricity provided to Paris only leave several glass slabs of waste behind [1].

France has solution to the problem [2], where the rest of the world choses to ignore it while championing solutions that are not really helping.

So, France got the answer.

[1] https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...

[2] Decarbonization in 10 years: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYp2uVFVcAEWAoW?format=jpg&name=...

To be fair, France still don't fully know what to do with radioactive waste.

We're kinda good at recycling it (so, indeed not the horrifying process your [1] describes), but the final non reusable waste is in fact just stored where it's produced, waiting for better ideas on what to do with it, so it's not exactly ideal. There are a dozen of publicly funded current research projets on that, so let's cross fingers. Overall, I'd say that our policies are pretty solid to get us towards a good solution in the best possible shape, but I wouldn't say that France got the answer yet.

(Also, old plants deconstruction is a planned problem with currently no planned solutions.)

You have to store high-level waste for hundreds or thousands of years before it's safe.

Heavy metal wastes never become safe. A dump site for cadmium or chromium or lead or arsenic waste will be exactly as hostile to life around it in ten thousand years as it is today. The only way for it to "become safe" over time is for it to leak into the environment and distribute the damage over time. In practice, the "solution" for heavy metal industrial waste is to store it where it's produced and ignore it. Usually in huge open pits, which are just great for the environment around them /s.

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