[bell-cot]

> When it comes to the nuclear waste issue, for instance ...

Nuclear waste issues are 99.9% present-day political/ideological. Huge portions of the Earth are uninhabitable due to climate and/or geology. Lead, mercury, arsenic, and other naturally-occurring poisons contaminate large areas. Volcanoes spew CO2 and toxic gasses by the megaton.

Vs. when is the last time you heard someone get excited over toxic waste left behind by the Roman Empire?

[fc417fc802]

I agree with your lead (the issue is 99% political) but man does that last bit demand a rebuttal. Waste left behind by the roman empire isn't even remotely comparable to long term radioactive material. I suggest having a look through the wikipedia list of orphan source incidents to get an idea of what happens when people unknowingly come across radioactive material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...

[bell-cot]

That's an interesting list - but the injury & death rates are several orders of magnitude below even lightning strikes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_injury#Epidemiology

Also, PaulHoule's original comment said "in 20,000 years". Cobalt 60 (for example) has a half-life of 5 1/4 years - so there really won't be any of it left by then.

[fc417fc802]

What's the rate conditioned on being near an incident though? And these are small, isolated incidents. How does what we see extrapolate to large scale nuclear waste storage, a state that failed a few hundred years ago, and someone inadvertently digging it up?

No one is talking about stuffing cobalt 60 in yucca mountain (at least as far as I know).

[bell-cot]

Compared to abandoned/forgotten mines (that eventually cave in) and mega-scale chemical waste dumps/sites/spills, nuclear waste sites - especially ones that'll still be seriously dangerous centuries or millennia from now - are profoundly rare.

And the tech to detect that you're digging into radioactive stuff is far simpler than the tech to detect that you're digging into some sort of chemical waste, or a failing old mine or tunnel.

If millennia-in-the-future humans care all that much about what we did with our nuclear waste, it'll either be political/ideological, or (as PaulHoule suggested) just one more "they didn't leave it somewhere really convenient for us" deal.

[PaulHoule]

I think of the widespread heavy metal contamination in China which existed even before the modern age of manufacturing. Some might be naturally occurring but you had people like this guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_Qin_Shi_Huang

[nancyminusone]

>when is the last time you heard someone get excited over toxic waste left behind by the Roman Empire?

For archeologists, pretty much every time.