[Retra]

What gives you the ability to make a prediction on the 10,000-year scale? That seems wildly inappropriate. 10,000 years ago, you'd be the person saying "We should bury our magic artifacts in a big tomb in the desert! Nobody will find out what is inside for 10,000 years, because nobody can live in the desert and the sand is too hard to travel across..."

Any you'd be completely wrong about that. Because 10,000 years is far too long for some off-the-cuff calculation to draw reliable conclusions from. It's not even clear you could put this stuff safely on the moon once you start throwing around 10,000-year timescales.

[CamperBob2]

The concern with long-term storage in places like WIPP is the possibility that future subliterate humans may access the site without being able to understand the warnings. But if we store the waste in Antarctica, that's not a realistic possibility. No one can go there without access to significant intellectual and technological resources.

And it's unreasonable to suggest that nuclear waste couldn't be safely stored on the moon. Any future civilizations who can travel to the moon will almost certainly be acquainted with nuclear physics themselves. However, launching high-level waste into space has obvious risks of its own. It will also make it hard to recycle it later, if future technologies are able to extract more power from it.

[Retra]

It's just as likely for some very literate future humans to build a city on top of it and have it seep into their ground water. Or maybe even a volcano or earthquake knocks it all out into our oceans.

It's not about other people being too stupid to handle it. It's that we're too stupid to handle it right now, so any way we handle it is liable to be a huge mistake in both unforeseen and easy-to-predict ways.

[CamperBob2]

I think you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. Nobody is going to build a city on top of anything in Antarctica. The other calamities you mention aren't going to happen either, at least not in any location chosen for this purpose.

Meanwhile, people are dying right now from fossil fuel emissions. It just doesn't look all edgy and apocalyptic on CNN the way a nuclear accident does, so you don't care.

[Retra]

I don't actually think sticking it in Antarctica is a bad idea. I'm not arguing about that. I just think your attempt at making a 10,000-year prediction about human behavior and construction is absolutely crazy.

You don't even know what people are going to do 200 years from now, let alone 10,000. Try to image how much is going to happen in that much time. How many people will have lived and died? What is the population of Earth? What is the climate like? We just wouldn't build a city out there to drill for oil? Or any reason? Extrapolate this out.

[CamperBob2]

Think about how inhospitable Antarctica is. If it didn't have breathable air, it would be like living on Mars. No one has ever lived there as far as we can tell, prior to scientific outposts established in the last 100 years or so. That's been true for millions of years and it will unquestionably be true for 10,000 more... unless of course we manage to melt all the ice by continuing to burn fossil fuels.

Again, the concern isn't about people who might build settlements to drill for oil or extract other resources. People who are doing that will be able to understand warning signs and keep themselves safe, and possibly even recycle what we've left behind. The problem is that, if our civilization falls for whatever reason, people who stumble across our disposal sites might not understand the warnings at all. Or worse, like you suggest, they might treat them like the Pyramids and try to plunder them without the slightest understanding of what they're getting into.

This will not happen in Antarctica because stupid people (as you put it) can't go there in the first place.

[astrodust]

Transport is the only problem here. If there's a way of reburning fuel, or of containing it on-site long enough that most of the most harmful radiation has subsided you'll be fine.

The shorter the half-life, the more dangerous the radiation is. Radioactive elements with long half lives are generally less damaging and it's only from prolonged exposure you're in trouble.

Polonium is notoriously toxic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...) and has a furiously short half-life. Plutonium has a half-life of about 24,000 years so the radiation is spread out over a much, much longer period of time.

You can hold a plutonium sphere and suffer no ill-effects. The same cannot be said for one of polonium, something so nasty that nanograms of the material can kill you.

So basically it's the short-lived elements you need to worry about the most. The long-lived ones are relatively harmless. The biggest concern with those is securing them from those intent on using them for harm, as refining and weaponizing nuclear waste is a concern.