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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

The half life of the immense amount of chemical toxic waste produced by industry each year is essentially infinite. And yet somehow we're mostly content with chucking it in a landfill (albeit ones regulated and built to safely handle it) and calling it good. Drop the dangerous period from "infinity" to "some millions of years" and suddenly people get more worried?

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Well, the difference between chemical toxic waste is that there are accessible methods for making it non-toxic. It's just a matter of cost. For example, toxic organic and inorganic compounds can be thermally decomposed. For organics, you create elemental carbon. For inorganics (containing metal ions), you can reform the metal and collect it. Acid/base waste can be neutralized. You can't really do that for radioactive material except trying to accelerate the decay. And while chemical waste can often be handled with standard safety measures, radioactive waste is just too dangerous to work with.

I see your point. I think one needs to consider both the danger of the waste and the amount of it generated. Then try to find a good balance.

What about elemental toxins like mercury and arsenic?

Just collect and store. They can be purified and have commercial use. Otherwise, since they came from the earth in the first place, storing it back in the earth doesn't change the amount of toxins we have in the ground.

So why is "collect and store" OK for this stuff, which lasts forever, but not OK for nuclear waste, which "only" lasts some thousands of years?

Because this stuff already existed in the ground (just not as concentrated), is not as toxic as radioactive waste, and can be recovered and reused. Nuclear waste generates new highly toxic substances that are extremely dangerous. And even after the waste has "decayed", the products are still toxic (just not radioactive) and last forever.

It suddenly becomes a solvable problem.

If something is infinite, meh, it's infinite, what you gonna do. But if it's a few million years ... whoa, we can reason about that!

Who says I'm not worried about all the "bad" things(tm)?

To be honest I'm just asking the question that while we can all say "isn't it great how safe nuclear is" we still haven't 100% figured out the waste issue. Fusion... well I'll believe it when it's powering my DeLorean.

I'm not saying you're not worried, or trying to pull one of those "but this is worse, so you must only worry about it!" things. I'm just saying that you don't need to "solve" the problem, as demonstrated by how we deal with other toxic waste. Yeah, chucking it in a landfill and calling it good isn't ideal, but it's not terrible if your landfill is reasonably well designed. Nuclear waste is a problem, but not a big one, and not big enough that the continued use of nuclear power should be gated on some sort of definitive solution.

How do I answer people who say that kind of thinking is what led to the fucking mess that is Sellafield?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31725365

Behind schedule and over budget is totally normal of UK big projects. But still, £58bn is a lot of money to fix something that's not a big problem.

Much of that high cost is because the waste is treated so delicately, while equally deadly non-nuclear waste is treated with much less care.

I imagine there have been a lot of places in your country (as with any industrialized country) that have been horribly contaminated with non-nuclear pollution, then cleaned up. While these events can certainly be used as an argument for taking more care, they're almost never used as an argument to give up on the whole idea of industry.

Nuclear waste is bad, but it doesn't seem to be on the level of "we must lock this up so securely that God Himself cannot access it" as people seem to try for.

"Infinite half-life" basically means an isotope is stable. Half life is only one piece of the radioactivity story. Knowing how isotopes decay is also important - alpha, beta decay, spontaneous fission, etc - these differences matter a great deal w.r.t. how to safely handle and store spent fuel. And we don't just "chuck it in a landfill" - here is a good place to start to learn a bit more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository.

I think you misunderstand my point. I'm saying that modern industry produces a vast amount of poisons with an infinite half life, because they're chemical poisons rather than radioactive poisons. And despite the fact that they last essentially forever, we don't worry about things like deep geological repositories, we just construct reasonably contained landfills and toss the stuff in.

"Poisons" is subjective. Practially all the stable bi-products are naturally occuring in nature and many of them have all sorts of uses [1] [2]. The chemical toxicity of spent nuclear fuel (excluding radioactivity issues) is not worse than many other industrial processes in general. Spent nuclear fuel definitely needs to be treated/handled carefully, but what you say is not a "nuclear" problem - rather it is a 21 century high-tech, industrialized society problem in general.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirconium

That's more or less my point. Nuclear waste is similar to other toxic waste in terms of the danger and long-term storage problems. Yet with one we just say "Let's be real careful about how we dispose of this" while with the other we say, "We cannot proceed with any more of this activity until we come up with an absolutely foolproof disposal method that will last longer than civilization itself."

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