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Notes -
The whole nuclear waste discussion is immensely frustrating to me. Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers. The part that most scares people about radioactive substances is that they can cause injury and death by just being present in their vicinity. However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination. Compare this to detecting chemical contamination, where one could run hundreds of tests and still miss the presence of a lethally toxic substance. Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways. The only reason we even have this discussion with nuclear power is because the physical amount of high level waste is tiny and because it's one of the only energy sources where most of the waste it produces stays neatly contained in a single building.
I don't want to be needlessly antagonistic, but the nuclear waste argument needs to die and whenever anyone brings it up in a discussion I also die a little inside.
I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.
Yes, that is the entire problem! And sure, we can detect it - but that doesn't stop the river that could have supplied entire communities with life turning into a source of cancer instead.
I am an environmentalist who does actually care about this issue. You're right, that is a big problem - but I'm not particularly moved by claims of hypocrisy when I have actively protested against this kind of thing in the past.
If my descendants in a thousand years' time haven't figured out some futuristic technological solution to disposing of nuclear waste, then fuck 'em. Presumably they're going through some horrible Max Max/Dark Ages thing to have regressed so far, and a bunch of radiation deep underground in the desert is the least of their problems. This is just papier-mache moral grandstanding, hence your need to resort to snark - it's much more reasonable to care about giving clean, reliable power (bracketing the cost question) to your actual immediate descendants than to prioritize some hypothetical 3035 descendant who finds themselves building a hut in whatever godforsaken place we put a waste dump in.
I'd feel ashamed if I ever said that about my descendants. I think this might be a case of differing moral frameworks - I really can't relate to this perspective.
What snark?
"Bracketing the cost question" lmao. If you don't care about the cost of the power produced then there's no point even talking about the viability of different energy sources at all. Assuming I misunderstood what you meant here... If nuclear power actually did provide clean, cheap power that was too cheap to meter then there would actually be a real discussion to have here but it doesn't! It has failed to do so for decades, and I see no signs that this will change in the near future. What we actually get is power that is more expensive than fossil fuels or renewables and creates a huge waste problem on top of that. My government's chief scientific body recently produced a report on the relative cost of different energy sources, and nuclear ended up being roughly twice as expensive as solar/wind (https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/News/2025/July/2024-25-GenCost-Final-Report).
My descendants in 1000 years will presumably have as little to do with my values, culture, genes, and life as I do to my many ancestors from the year 1025. Yeah, I care somewhat about these hypothetical people, but not so much that I would sacrifice real gains for my children and grandchildren because someday, in a scenario of civilizational collapse where they're all fucked anyway, one of them might go out into the Nevada desert and drink from a stream that has nuclear waste runoff in it. The reality is, either we keep going along the trajectory of technological progress, or life for our descendants will be so much worse that nuclear waste will be the least of their troubles, and I'm happy to judge them for failing the project of human civilization.
You are implying that the person you're responding to doesn't care about the world he bequeaths to his descendants. Come on, man, you knew exactly what you were saying when you wrote that sentence.
I am happy to have you here for the debate on cost, because that's the debate that actually matters - even if I disagree with your position, seeing you argue that will be productive and we can learn new things. I'm saying that the long-term waste storage argument is an irrelevant distraction from the cost argument.
I am actually incredibly similar to my ancestors from a thousand years ago - they lived in a different country and spoke a different language, but there are a lot of things we have in common.
Except that nuclear waste runoff won't be limited to that stream. What bodies of water will that stream feed into? What ecosystems will draw upon that river for water? A single stream being rendered unusable would be a perfectly acceptable price to pay for cheap, relatively clean nuclear power - but that's not the price actually being paid, nor is it what we're getting for that price. A single stream feeds into the broader ecosystem and harms there will spread in ways that cause immense damage to the fabric of life in the future. That radioactive water will reach aquifers and groundwater supplies, it will reach the ocean, it will reach the atmosphere as it passes through the water cycle and becomes rain. Nature will adapt, for sure, but humans don't evolve nearly as quickly as wolves or bacteria - and the evolution of radiation resistance via natural selection would involve incredible amounts of human suffering and pain.
I don't think that qualifies as snark - not caring about the fate of the Earth is a fairly common position among a lot of rationalist circles, especially ones who believe we will colonise space or discover AGI in short order.
Sure, here's the debate: Barring a dramatic increase in EROEI, nuclear power is uncompetitive with solar and other renewables. While it is the appropriate solution for some limited circumstances (nuclear submarines, having a colonial empire that lets you get effectively free uranium, etc), it is no way an actual answer to the energy crisis rapidly approaching the world.
Far from being an irrelevant distraction from the argument, nuclear waste and the proper safekeeping/disposal of it is one of the bigger contributors to the EROEI problems of nuclear power. When the final accounting is done, the costs of that storage could leave nuclear power with a negative EROEI - we would have been better off simply not doing it at all save for the generation of certain medically and scientifically useful isotopes.
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