Let’s say ancient Rome 2,000 years ago made and stored a substance that kills everyone exposed to it, would we expect that substance to still be intact and unblemished right now?
The point is why do any of this when solar and wind are cheaper and have none of these issues? It doesn’t matter what we say here, money always wins and that is why nuclear will be left behind no matter how many astorturfers always show up.
Scenario 1: a hypothetical societal collapse happens and scientific knowledge and written language are somehow lost. A handful of people explore a dangerous area and are swiftly killed by radiation from tampering with a storage facility.
Scenario 2: millions die from climate-related catastrophes and ecological collapse leads to famines that kill millions more.
We know we're facing scenario two as a distinct possibility, or we'd be happily burning coal until we can't find any more. The first scenario relies on several assumptions, none of which are honestly likely at this stage of human society. And it unlikely to have an effect on nearly as many people.
Fuel reprocessing is a thing, modern reactors deplete the fuel much more thoroughly, and there isn't even that much of it. All of the spent fuel France has used since the 1970s fits in a small fraction of their basketball-court sized storage facility.
Its facile to dismiss the negative of creating waste that has to be managed for thousands of years based on a sense of urgency for solving immediate problems. Thats payday loan mentality, not statecraft.
> Scenario 1: a hypothetical societal collapse happens and scientific knowledge and written language are somehow lost. A handful of people explore a dangerous area and are swiftly killed by radiation from tampering with a storage facility.
Society collapses and the remaining primitive population is decimated or eradicated because of unmanaged waste entering the ecosystem.
> Scenario 2: millions die from climate-related catastrophes and ecological collapse leads to famines that kill millions more.
You think society collapses to the extent that we can no longer manage the nuclear waste, and millions of people don’t die? Millions of people die in both scenarios, but in one they are greater risk of nuclear waste exposure.
> We know we're facing scenario two as a distinct possibility, or we'd be happily burning coal until we can't find any more.
What is your plan to get China et al to stop burning coal, by the way?
> Fuel reprocessing is a thing, modern reactors deplete the fuel much more thoroughly, and there isn't even that much of it. All of the spent fuel France has used since the 1970s fits in a small fraction of their basketball-court sized storage facility.
I can roll over my payday loan on a miminum wage paycheck, what could go wrong?
In nuclear waste, isotopes with very short half-lives, say a few days or even a few weeks, are not the major concern. They will decay to negligible amounts within a year or two. Isotopes with very long half-lives, more than 1000 years, are likely to be less intense.
Long-term isotopes are more complicated. They don't dose as heavily, but there are a lot more issues than just that. Plutonium for example is comparatively long-lived, but some of its decay products can be quite nasty. At the extreme end are isotopes that are so long-lived that their hazard levels are close to zero. Uranium-238, the kind left after the fissile 235 is removed, pretty well falls into this category.
There are nuclear reactor types specifically built for getting rid of high half-time traditional nuclear waste.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/destroying-nuclear-wa...