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Comment by arinlen | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, we have to store it somewhere. But all US plants combined make ~5k cubic meters of nuclear waste a year.

And all those extra 5k cubic meters per year of nuclear waste needs to be stored for around a million years until they are again safe.

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If you read the article you'd see it's not "million years" but ~300.

Even if it was a million years it wouldn't matter. The US has the Nevada desert which is effectively a barren wasteland, just shove it in a bunch of containers and leave it there. They already do that for removed nuclear reactors from military vessels (which is actually so it can be seen in satellite imagery to fulfill international treaty requirements.

> Even if it was a million years it wouldn't matter.

This take is absurd. Humanity barely exists for a few thousand years and you somehow assume that it's feasible and economically justifiable to create a health and security hazard that will exist until the end of times.

And all for what? Because you want to shave off a few cents from an energy bill?

if we solve the clean energy problem, and energy becomes abundant, then that all becomes very usable land.

And if we don't we all die. Seems like an easy choice to me.

Yes it's 300 years, because of magic which somehow makes recycling feasible and let's us ignore all the parts which have lifetimes longer than 300 years. That's not a valid argument. So far nobody has managed to come up with a economically and ecologically feasible way to recycle nuclear waste. The French Le Havre site is primarily run for military reasons and multiples the amount of waste. Admittedly lower grade waste, but it still needs to be kept away from people for thousands of years.

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