The waste isn't even that bad. There's not that much of it and we have extremely safe storage solutions. We way over engineered the safety by orders of magnitude. Nuclear waste storage facilities can take a direct missile hit and still be safe.
Humans are simply terrible at long-term safety. How often do we have to experience that until we say: while it might be theoretically possible to store this stuff securely for thousands of years, apparently, we are just unable to do it, be it because of incompetence, greed, or both.
He says while we carbon swaths of our planet out of habitability at current technological/economic levels because the available solutions are good and not perfect.
Do you see the irony in trying to fix a problem caused by persistent, universal short term and selfish thinking with a solution which relies on no one thinking like this in the future anymore?
Sometimes it is good to tradeoff solving a known short term problem, by taking on a solution with a uncertain long term issue.
If the world had continued to adopt nuclear power unabated, it is likely that climate change would not be a problem, and millions of cases of cancer not occurred.
This is not to say it is now time to adopt nuclear carte blanche, but to demonstrate that your way of thinking is not without issue either.
We better get good at it. There are many dangerous chemicals used in all kinds of industry that we need to store forever because they will always be harmful to human health. Lead, mercury, cadmium, and other toxic elements will never break down.
I’d rather us try and almost always successful store harmful waste than spew all of it directly into the air, killing millions of people. Over a million people die every year from carbon emissions from things like gas and coal power plants and vehicles
You'd think if that were the case, you'd at least know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who's cause of death was coal fired power plant emissions.
You're characterising it wrong. Epidemiologists estimate the days of lost life across a population due to environmental exposures.
If you add all those up they aren't equivalent to number of lives lost.
People who are exposed to radiation typically do not die of acute radiation poisoning. They die of cancers years later. People who are exposed to coal plant pollution also die of cancers and all sorts of pulmonary diseases.
You do probably know someone, and almost definitely know someone who knows someone, whose death was due to chronic coal fired power plant emissions. The fact that that's not what's on the death certificate doesn't mean it's not what happened.
I think people also heavily underestimate what 1000s of years means. This type of storage has to survive 3x as long as the Egyptian pyramids. The problem is not just technological. At those timespans you can’t assume the country you live in - or the language you speak - to still exist.
An interesting example of bad waste management in the 70's.
But hardly an argument for how safe nuclear energy can be. You wouldn't judge the safety of aviation based on the Wright brothers plane.
Also note that one of the problems on that mine is not only the radioactive waste, but also mercury, lead, arsenic, and other product not coming from nuclear facilities. That kind of waste is dangerous for basically ever compared to the radioactive atoms. Yet nobody talk about it.
Nuclear energy is not the only industry producing nuclear waste. You've got also significant radioactive waste produced by the medical, research, defence, mining, and other industries. And so we need safe waste storage regardless of the existence of nuclear power plants.
