[braveyellowtoad]

Love your thinking. Rather than comingle the plastics with waste, let's keep them separate at the landfill for use when future humans figure out what to do with it.

By mixing it all together we just make it much more difficult for ourselves later.

[denton-scratch]

> when future humans figure out what to do with it

I'm not keen on models that include: "Let our grandchildren solve the problem". I have grandchildren.

[pfdietz]

But sometimes just waiting and letting someone else deal with it is the right solution. For example: spent nuclear fuel.

[stevenwoo]

Finland is doing it. It's a smaller country but it's possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

[denton-scratch]

I don't agree with you. Or rather, I agree with "just waiting" - we don't have any choice about that. I don't agree with "letting someone else deal with it".

The spent waste we've already produced needs to be stored in a way that puts it beyond the possibility of access within 200,000 years. And we need to stop producing new nuclear waste. Note that modern humans have been walking the Earth for just 200,000 years; we can't hope to be able to label it with readable danger warnings. The oldest languages we can read are only a few thousand years old. And we can't just pop it into orbit - there are many thousands of tons of it, sitting around in cooling ponds.

[pfdietz]

Well, unless we become immortal, waiting long enough means letting someone else deal with problems.

Right now, the obviously (and I do mean that) best way to deal with spent nuclear fuel is (after some cooling) to stick it in dry casks and just let it sit there. It's much cheaper than the alternatives, it's quite safe, and it doesn't preclude any other solution.

But (you might say) we're leaving the cost of dealing with it to our descendants. I respond: we leave the consequences of all our actions to our descendants. For example, if we spend resources of doing something to nuclear waste, we do not do something else with those resources that might have been better for our descendants. Economics is all about tradeoffs; you can't just look at anything in isolation.

Delaying dealing with a problem also means that those who ultimately solve it can choose the solution they prefer, rather than one we impose on them. Maybe they'll want to extract plutonium. Maybe they'll want to bury the fuel unchanged. Maybe they'll want to shoot it into space. They will know better which solution is best for them.

This question is mostly orthogonal to the question of whether more waste should be made (except if you're trying to use the waste issue as a bludgeon to force the other issue.) I get the distinct impression the waste problem is being greatly overstated for rhetorical reasons.

[denton-scratch]

> stick it in dry casks and just let it sit there.

Well, yes. We have to stick it in something, and then let it sit somewhere. I'm not sure that on the surface, anywhere it can be reached by weather, anywhere close to the ocean, is a good place to let it sit.

> They will know better which solution is best for them.

Sure. So we shouldn't close off their options. That doesn't mean we don't have a problem now, that we need to solve.

[Edit] Actually, I'm not at all sure that "they will know better". It could well be that human interest in fundamental physics fades away completely in the next 5,000 years. That would leave our descendants without the tools to even understand the problem, let alone fix it, or try to exploit it.

> This question is mostly orthogonal to the question of whether more waste should be made

I don't agree. We have a problem now, of how to deal with the waste (and devastated land) we've already created; we don't have a way of dealing with it. We shouldn't make more waste until the problem is solved.

> bludgeon to force the other issue

> for rhetorical reasons

Hey, I'm taking you seriously, there's no need to suggest bad faith. Your other remarks have been pretty straight-arrow; I'm not sure why you're switching to ad-hominem now.