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Comment by jasonvorhe | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps because of "been there, done that", a couple of catastrophes and the afaik still unsolved issue of storing the waste for a couple of thousand years.

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For all practical intents and purposes, nuclear waste is a solved problem. About 96% of spent nuclear fuel is recycled [0] and of the remainder, there's so little high level waste that so far most countries haven't found it cost effective to even build long-term storage facilities yet [1]: there's only one worldwide. There are ongoing projects to build more though, and the general approach is deep geological burial.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#High-level_w...

First thing: it's not being recycled. It's being reprocessed. A very expensive process which not everybody does. The US doesn't even have a plant for it and there isn't even a plan to do it because it makes no sense at all since you still need fresh fuel (which is cheaper) and can mix MOX to it and you end up with even more less radioactive waste you still have to store on site.

So no not 96% of spend fuel is recycled. It's 96% of the reprocessed fuel is being reprocessed.

And no, the main amount of the waste is still radioactive for generations and needs to be kept safe and watched over for a very long time. The reason almost all countries haven't been able to find a hole deep enough is nothing to be proud of. This stuff is and remains to be dangerous. It will fall to generations to keep it safe. No matter what and just think about it. Just a decade ago nobody would have taken you seriously if you'd say that Donald Trump would become the president of the USA. We don't know what will happen in the next decade or century. Meanwhile this dangerous dirt is out there. Most of the times on site.

Those "ongoing projects" are a wide understatement. Germany has been looking for decades and the one they've found turned out to be not so good after all because water started leaking into it only a few decades later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

And that's just nature issues. Human issues didn't come into play....yet.

Waste is far from being a "solved problem" and it will remain so as long as this lie is being kept alive by the radioactive Astro-Turf.

perhaps both of these are pretty non-issues

I'm from Poland - Chernobyl was not as bad as it looked I dont know about Fukushima much

storing the waste? lol it's so small amount and the planet is gigantic. Meanwhile coal, smog cancer, oil and wars behind it, saudi arabia killing people; yemeni genocide happening now - '2021 holocaust' as I could even call it

all above is much better than small amount of radioactive trash

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