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by elevaet 1521 days ago
And hope that in 1000 years it is still being managed properly, the water table hasn't changed and caused it to poison the groundwater, no one has used it to make a dirty bomb... etc.

I don't think we can be so cavalier about nuclear waste, it's a heavy responsibility to push off to the future.

1 comments

I take issue with this kind of argument, because it implies that because we don't know everything that can happen in the future, we should not use nuclear power. We already know the costs of producing energy with coal and oil: thousands of deaths every year, potentially billion of deaths in the medium-term.

Like most things, this decision is about trade-offs. No, we have not figured out how to process nuclear waste in 1000 years. But if that's our major problem in 1000 years, we have succeeded in our most important challenge right now.