[sevenzero]

Because nuclear energy is only popular in certain circles. No, nuclear waste is not a solved issue. Given Russia was very happily attacking Zaporizhzhia they aren't as safe as you might want to believe. Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak. Fuck nuclear power.

[Manuel_D]

Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.

The fact that Zaporizhia was on the front lines of one of the biggest armed conflicts in recent memory and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?

[fileeditview]

> Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.

It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..

At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.

Probably it's not in your lifetime or in your area so you don't have to care about it. It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.

I am not even categorically against nuclear power, but ignoring the actual risks is just BAD.

[Manuel_D]

> It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..

No, it's sweeping something under solid rock.

> At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.

Lots of places have no seismic activity. Earthquakes don't happen everywhere.

And even if they do, the waste is still buried under 500 meters of rock. Under what scenario does this waste somehow make its way out?

[Mawr]

> It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.

Because risk is relative, and not as you seem to think, absolute and binary.

The risks are being dismissed because they're so tiny, that they're irrelevant. You may as well start planning your life around the assumption you'll win the lottery.

That's why nuclear waste storage is such a common fear mongering tactic, it exploits the human liability of not understanding long-term statistics very well.

Even solar power is more dangerous due to people falling off roofs and such. Same with wind power. And don't get me started on dams. When those fail, people die.

And that's renewables. We're stil mostly burning fossil fuels and dumping the waste products into the atmosphere we all breathe.

Yes, we are literally, as we speak, doing that.

And you're talking about the massive problem of storing some barrels of solid waste.

You're off base in your perception of risk by several orders of magnitude.

[fileeditview]

First of all I never said these things you claim. I literally said "ignoring these risks is BAD", not that they are absolutely too great or whatever. That must be evaluated per case.

However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.

Yes other things can also be dangerous or deadly. But when a dam breaks people die. What doesn't happen is that the region is unusable for eternity afterwards. So nuclear disasters are a very special case.

[simoncion]

> However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.

The only "recent" one I can think of is Fukushima Daiichi, a little more than fifteen years ago. That one definitely had a couple-dozen injuries at and around the time of the disaster and maybe one death four years later. Compare that to the tens of thousands killed and many thousands injured because of the tsunami and earthquake that damaged the fission plant.

What other ones do you consider to be recent? Do make sure to mention the year in which they happened as well as reasonable guesses at the death and injury numbers for each incident.

(I'll refrain from more than a brief mention of the century+-long ongoing disaster that is fossil-fuel-fired [0] power generation.)

[simoncion]

> ...and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?

It is, yes. As was the performance of the Fukushima [0] reactors after getting hit with seismic forces notably outside their design tolerances... and -well- pretty much every commercially-operated fission power plant ever, other than the known-to-be-very-dangerous-to-everyone-even-at-the-time one the Soviets were running at Chernobyl.

[0] Consider that the destruction of the power plant caused maybe one death years later and definitely caused a couple dozen injuries, whereas the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed that plant killed tens of thousands of people and injured many thousands more.

[Mashimo]

> Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.

But Germany did not do it. They on purpose put it in a salt mine close to the east Germany border and now we have to dig it up again, because ground water is seeping in.

A few weeks ago there were rumors that it's not possible to dig it up and we might have to flood it. It's such a cluster fuck.

Finland did it well though.

[sevenzero]

Its not a solved issue. The plant still is in a state of emergency. It just shows that these plants are easy targets.

[gambiting]

>>Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak.

Isn't highly radioactive waste vitrified(turned into glass)? How is it leaking, exactly?

And isn't the entire point of storing it inside salt that it's self sealing - even if there is a leak it won't go anywhere.

[Mashimo]

German scientist had a list with possible locations for the "endlager" final location. But politicians did not listen and on purpose chose a location not on the list, but one that was close too east Germany to mess with them. They overruled the scientist.

Until we clean it up and find a new endlager I think Germany should not build new nuclear reactor. Just not a good track record. Oh and before that we just dumped it into the north see.

[sevenzero]

Leakage due to water infiltration. Its about 120.000 barrels stored in "Asse II" that were produced between 1967 and 1978. The contaminated water is reaching ground water which already got positively tested for caesium-137 and plutonium.

[cess11]

2008: https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long...

2024: https://www.neimagazine.com/decommissioning-waste-management...

2026: https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/robotic-arms-...

Here's a timeline as PDF: https://www.folkkampanjen.se/pdf_asse.pdf

Pricing in these things into nuclear energy production makes it quite unpalatable compared to simpler engineering, in my opinion.

Who knows what will come of chinese fusion research, perhaps they'll figure it out and change my mind.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260101160855.h...

[Gud]

Nobody is arguing we should store nuclear waste haphazardly in barrels.

[cess11]

Right, nobody is arguing for the negative consequences we've had from nuclear reactors, except perhaps atom bombs, but they happened anyway.

I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste. Can you name some that you find trustworthy enough?

[gambiting]

>>I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste

I know zero politicians I'd trust with deciding where to build wind farms either, it says more about politicians than the type of energy generation. These kinds of things should be decided following comprehensive research on several locations, which you know - is generally how it's done, example given by OP notwithstanding.