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Comment by throwawayqqq11 | Hacker News Reader

They could extend the project and build a final depot for radioactive waste. Jobs for the next hundred thousand years.

Gosh, i hate the trend for NE. When will the public realize, that its the side effects of our waste products (like CO2) that cause us all the trouble? Or that we are depending on yet another finite resource?

Why not a project for fully renewable energy sources and storage with less delicate waste? Why letting big monopolistic coropratios externalize the cost of waste management to the public so NE appears affordable/profitable?

Its just short sighted, imo, to put it nicely.

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Nuclear waste is dangerous.

Coal ash, tailings, hydrocarbon extraction byproducts; those are also dangerous. Look at cancer rates near refinery areas in Louisiana or Houston -- you might imagine a nuclear bomb went off in those areas based on the cancer rates.

Nuclear waste has the unique property that it is very easily detected. This is actually a good thing! It means we can isolate it, test for isolation, and stay away. The other upside is that there is less of it. Contrast that with something like the Kingston fly ash spill. There is not enough U-235 on earth to spill that much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly.... That is a single event (with a death toll similar to Chernobyl!) The picture for semiconductor manufacturing or battery manufacturing is not perfect either.

Short sighted? Removing a zero carbon clean energy source from the table when decarbonization is urgently needed -- that is short sighted.

"Clean" is the short sighted part, because waste does not only revolve around carbon. "Sustainable" is the only long term solution.

Your points seem to be correct, NE waste is less and better detectable but its also as long living like PFAS but much more dangerous compared to them.

As is said "i dont like the trend", not NE per se. This upcoming NE trend fosters an illusion, that competes with the with wind/solar power transition, which might not be the final but certainly is the better solution in terms of cost/waste/risk.

We have urgent problems and theoretical, future problems. CO2 levels are an urgent problem. NE can help here. Nuclear waste is not an urgent problem today and likely will never be as urgent as climate change.

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