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Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
(blog.ucsusa.org)
this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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The nice thing about nuclear waste is that it kind of just sorts itself out too. I half suspect not knowing what to do with it and kicking the can down the road is sort of the whole point. Nominally it's pretty easy to deal with nuclear waste, you seal it up somewhere and leave it to not be radioactive any more. The problem is it takes a long time, and we don't really know how to communicate to anyone 1000 years in the future "there's nuclear waste here, stay the fuck away". Making sure it's an active topic for discussion kind of keeps it at the forefront and means it's not forgotten about.
Except that is hardly unique to nuclear waste. A wide variety of industrial processes produce high grade chemical waste, especially electronics like computers, solar panels, and inverters. This is just as deadly as any nuclear waste, and if stumbled upon will kill just as quickly in a hundred years, a thousand years, million years, or a billion years.
There is however a well established solution to this problem, and that is making sure the government knows what and where it is as well as that someone it monitoring and securing the site. The actual chemical makeup of the stuff that kills you doesn’t actually matter all that much compared to makeing sure it stays where it’s supposed to be.
You uh... want to give a single example of solar panel manufacturing waste that is as deadly as nuclear waste in a thousand years?
Humanity has never built anything that has intentionally lasted 10,000 years, much less 250,000.
It's the height of arrogance to think your society will last a thousand times longer than any in the history of the world.
You don't know what those cave people were thinking when they drew those pictures.