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Comment by worik | Hacker News Reader

Storing waste is too expensive to contemplate.

Wherever it is put the high level waste (not much in quantity but...) is deadly and a silent killer for over a hundred thousand years. This is geologically significant time period, and we can make bets, but have no guarantee of any place on Earth being stable on those time scales.

So it must be monitored.

For a hundred thousand years

That would be us making future generations pay for the cost of our current consumptions. I do not think they will think kindly of us.

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On time scales of centuries or millennia there are only three outcomes for humanity:

- Extinction - We don't need to care about it, because there are no descendants.

- Advancement - We will be able to handle the problem better as our technology improves.

- Stagnation/regression - We don't need to care about it. Our descendants will have to worry about dysentery, crop failures and regional warfare. Some magic rocks that kill people will end up as curios in warded laden boxes after first adventurous monk opens sarcophagus and succumbs to curse.

"is deadly and a silent killer for over a hundred thousand years... We no guarantee of any place on Earth being stable on those time scales."

The geological pixel - smallest possible measurable period - is 50,000 years. Nuclear waste is 2 pixels.

Everest is a 50 million years old. The chalk that makes up white cliffs of dover is 130 million years old. There are layers of bedrock over a billion years old.

So yes, we are making a bet in the sence that when I go putside I make a bet that an asteroid won't fall on my head.

I'm pretty sure they'd rather deal with a bit of entombed nuclear waste buried deep in the ground instead of a dead, polluted and depleted planet.

Another way of avoiding a "dead depleted planet" is to not kill and deplete the one we have

Leaving piles of toxic waste - either nuclear or some other nefarious thing you are implying - is due to greed.

Can we deal with our greed?

Or build fast reactors, which can use most of that waste for fuel. The long-term radioactivity comes from transuranics, which fast neutrons fission quite well.

What's left is just fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, and they'll be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in 300 years. Most of the radioactivity will be gone in the first few decades, since the decline is exponential.

Russia has a couple fast reactors in operation right now, and various startups are attempting new designs.

But you already have to take care of a nuclear waste depot, nevermind the nasty chemical stuff that never degrades and has to be stored forever.

It does not really matter how big the caverns are where you store the waste so any additional nuclear material stored is basically free.

Nuclear waste eventually will be used as fuel

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