2026-10-18 07:48 UTC
it can be stored on site for half a century without issue.
Oh yeah. These issues are so mild that after your “half a century”, we need to dig everything back up, reseal it and find a new place. Playing a thousand years’ worth of musical chairs with radioactive waste may sound fun to you - until one day, the music stops and you can’t find a chair.
Replies (1)
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@Rakonat@lemmy.world 2026-10-18 07:54
Most nuclear waste is below background radiation in ten years. High level nuclear waste, when taking the mean by volume, is 100 years. The stuff that lasts ‘thousands and thousands of years’ is plutonium which is the primary thing that can be recycled and reprocessed into fuel and neutron sources, to say nothing of all the ways nuclear waste has been used over the last half century in medical research and technology to save lives. So no, this theoretical situations where we have mountains of nuclear waste sitting around killing anyone that gets close is not realistic and just a strawman.