[BoardsOfCanada]

It'd better be, since the radioactive waste will have to be stored for a million years, which is many times the age of homo sapiens.

Of course we have to hope for technical advances to convert it to a more manageable form.

[ehvatum]

> millions of years

Ridiculous. From NRC:

“ Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years (half the radioactivity will decay in 30 years). Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. High-level wastes are hazardous because they produce fatal radiation doses during short periods of direct exposure.”

Go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You see people. WEIRD!!!!

[BoardsOfCanada]

You quoted me and changed the text in the quote.

Have a look here for a source for a million years:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-stag...

[Genbox]

> Of course we have to hope for technical advances to convert it to a more manageable form

What do you mean by that? Dry-cask storage is very manageable and have been used for decades.

> radioactive waste will have to be stored for a million years

Uranium-235 is a naturally formed isotope of uranium, and it has a half-life of 703 million years. In a nuclear reactor, U-235 is split into many different fission products such as Caesium-137, Caesium-135, Zirconium-93 and many others. The longest living fission product is Iodine-129, which has a half-life of about 1.57 million years.

In essence, we have high-radiation and high half-life isotopes naturally formed everywhere on earth. Once they are mined and burnt in a fission reactor, these stable isotopes are split them into many different isotopes, which last for a shorter amount of time. It is a little bit nonsense to say we need to store it for a million years. It would be the same as saying we currently need to store U-235 for 703 million years.

It is all about concentrations and the type of radiation that is emitted. Nuclear waste is not "a problem" - it is a process. Right not it is safe, relatively cheap and somewhat efficient.

[NoPie]

The earth has stored nuclear elements for millions and billions of years. It is thought that in some places naturally occurring nuclear reactors have happened.

Of course, the civilization needs more orderly storage and disposal, and nuclear waste can be polluting but it is also the thing that is produced by completely natural processes. Some places have higher levels of radioactive radon gas produced by radioactive decay of elements deeper underground.