Just Post

All that shit costs money. Just toss the waste wherever and wait for public funds to appear, amiright?

That's similar to what's done with a lot of mine wastes, which are just as harmful, if not more.

Millions of tonnes of metal-rich tailings are held back at a given mine by their engineered dams. The only thing stopping a 'tee hee whoops' is routine inspection and maintenance, even in post-closure

Edit: sorry, I thought you were arguing they dontast that long. My brain skipped the "only" at the beginning.

The image you linked literally says they last 100+ years. Sure, they need to be checked on to make sure nothing is going wrong, but when is that not the case with hazardous material storage?

It really isn't burning coal etc. Will kill way more people and do way more damage than just having this sit around chilling

Even the amount of radiation is lower, as coal power plants output quite a bit of radioactive material

Very much so. Anything that gets too hot has to be interred.

Computers run on magic runes written in gold.

Even weirder when you think about cpus. "Here's a rock we filled with lightning and tricked into thinking."

People could live near Chernobyl on day one.

I get what point you're trying to make but it still is kind of ironic you're using a very distinctly communist failure which happened due to the communist power structure every step of the way as the example here.

They've been talking about that since I was in primary school in the 1980s.

The problem is the weak railroad and interstate infrastructure. There are too many derailments and crumbling bridges to transport such 'hot' materials safely. There's also the danger of hijacking and making of dirty bombs.

Power generation is all about thermal differential.

If the differential is too low, then your power generation either doesn't work or is incredibly inefficient.

Spent fuel is not radioactive enough to produce a large enough thermal differential to run steam turbines. In some cases it can be reprocessed through some expensive means and then used again. However, the key word here is expensive. It's considerably more economical to use new fuel than it is to reprocess old fuel.

Breeding reactors are a thing but their economic viability is questionable.

The casks are continuously recertified for as long as the material needs to be held. Radioactive material decays into non radioactive elements over the course of its half life. This is not kicking the can down the road.

The nuclear energy industry is the safest industry anyone has ever worked in, and it is intentionally so. Please go watch any number of resources on this fact.

Welcome to the world of mining. Metal leaching/acid rock drainage (ML/ARD) is a big issue associated with waste rock, and the solution is often an engineered cover that limits oxygen and water ingress (as these react with sulphur, lowering pH and releasing bound metals in the form of leachate). These covers often use geomembranes that have lifespans of 25 years... Yet you have 300 million tons of ML/ARD waste rock entombed by them.

Look up the Giant Mine - that one will make your head spin.