[aab0]

To continue the mortgage example, you could also just not buy a house and put that money into a stock index...

The land may not be usable for another few hundred years, but what is the opportunity cost of all that upfront remediation? It's big. That's capital that can be invested in other things.

Some land in the middle of nowhere is not really that valuable. The productivity of such rural land is low. This is why no one has bought up that land and remediated it in the first place.

> How much would that cost? Would that be more or less than the cost of refugee programs and border management and social programs for the unemployed immigrants?

That 65sqm could be anywhere; there's tons of un-mined land in Europe. It's a whole continent. There is no necessary connection to remediation. If you can't make such a 'diaspora city' work economically on unmined land, you can't make it work on mined land either.

[ChuckMcM]

It's a fair point that the cost computation is imprecise. My question was more to the one of whether or not someone in France was thinking about it in those sorts of terms. Or put another way, would France lease it to me for 900 years for 1 euro with the provision that I ensure that nobody is endangered by inadvertently going into the area?