How do we communicate to civilisations in the present how bad the emissions from goal and gas plants are? https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/wh...

Because we appear to have no sense of proportion, or trade-offs.

Is this a serious concern? That there will be some kind of civilization in 10000 years that:

1) has lost all records of current generations

2) doesn't know about nuclear waste disposal sites and radioactivity

3) is still advanced enough to dig several hundred meters into hard rock

4) for no discernible reason digs up the entire waste disposal site and then what? contaminates their excavation crew?

> How do we communicate to civilisations in the future what we did in that mountain?

The more dangerous stuff burns itself out quickly (short half-life), and the longer-lasting stuff is not very dangerous given the type of radiation it is and can be blocked quite easily

So, probably bury it deep enough with little external sign that it's actually there, and if it is actually discovered it won't be that big of a deal:

> The main concern associated with spent nuclear fuel – radioactivity – diminishes with time.

> About 40 years after it's done making power, the heat and radioactivity of the fuel bundle will have fallen by over 99%.

* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148416881180674

> About three containers are needed to store the quantity of fuel that is removed each 12-24 months; the space taken up by even a 60 year plant life is less than is needed for a Wal-Mart even without any efforts to efficiently stack the containers.

* https://atomicinsights.com/time-for-plan-b-yucca-mountain-pr...

How do we communicate with civilizations in the future to not eat the fish and mollusks out of the rivers. You know, the ones that are currently being contaminated with mercury and other forever chemicals from both coal ash and rare earth tailing?

Please, let us know your plan.

P.S. This is not a hypothetical problem, like the demands you are making of nuclear. This is a current and ongoing one. Your green energy isn't as green as you claim it is, please tell us your solution.

Maybe we should be more concerned about ensuring that there is an advanced civilization to worry about in 10,000 years. We can start by making sure humanity is well situated with energy supplies for the next few centuries, and nuclear is part of the answer to that step.

Besides, nuclear fuel dumps are few and far between, and easily avoided once identified. I'm touched that you care so much about a few individual lives 10,000 years from now, but we've got millions if not billions of lives to worry about in this century.

This is for the most part not a realistic practical issue. Either the civilizations in the future are continuations of our current civilization and have records or they're advanced enough to have the ability to detect radiation thus making the issue moot or they've regressed enough to lose that knowledge and people stumbling into a radioactive waste storage facility is the least of our concerns.

Current thinking is not to mark the place. Why attract attention to it? Any future civilization capable of finding that it's interesting and digging down through a mile or more of hard rock and concrete probably knows about radioactivity.

We talk about humans, is guaranteed that they will lick the warm shiny stones behind a huge "don't lick this" banner.

But they will learn eventually after a couple of deaths, as we did every single time. We are trying to solve the wrong problem here; Is the population what counts.