Look here’s what you want to consider. The waste needs to be stored safely and responsibly for not a decade, not a century but for thousands of years.
We can’t manage shit that needs a few years of care unless it continues to make profits right now. It’s a fucking joke.
So your local government is recommending a nuclear waste dump, as mine is.
Here’s basic maths to know if your getting screwed or if they’ll be doing all the coolest activities shown in the nice diagrams with big solid containers and a scientists in lab coats monitoring for issues for eternity. People will definitely be there working and maintaining 50 and 500 and 5,000 years after the initial political announcement, right?
Anything needing maintenance for decades either needs to be politically important, like government spending on educational institutions or hospitals. What’s that you say? Your hospital buildings are decaying. Oh umm let’s chat further.
Ok so back to the maths. This thing needs its own stewardship funding.
Let’s say it costs a mere $20million a year to maintain. To be honest I don’t know the cost, insert X. So what your going to want is a simple endowment, setup in a nice 10,000 year organisation that’s free from corruption, that’ll reliably generate your needed $20M in funds a year. What’s that, the government haven’t announced support for a new corruption free, science institute that is funded upfront to run for eternity? I sure you just missed it.
So your looking for an endowment that will reliable generate your $20M a year, or whatever figure, ongoingly, forever. Luckily this can be achieved, you just need to think of this like the interest to be earned from a big term deposit.
With say a need for a say 2% guaranteed yield, nice and conservative, you’ll need around $1 Billion to be setup in a waste stewardship endowment institute thing.
And here’s where you can expose all the BS. I’ve seen no announcements for anything close to these funds, for these types of facilities. All that seems to be budgeted for is intial job creation construction as well as a couple of political cycles of funding.
These are mud map numbers, but hopefully they illustrate the grift involved in most of these initiatives when they are not taking straight on long long long term stewardship and how that’ll be funded 50, 500, 5000 years from now. Hell we can’t even think in those sort of long timeframes.
> Look here’s what you want to consider. The waste needs to be stored safely and responsibly for not a decade, not a century but for thousands of years.
I find that people making this argument always always fail to engage with at least three important considerations.
1) As a consequence of how physics works, the more dangerous a radioisotope, the shorter the period for which it is dangerous. The most radioactive substances decay in years or decades, not millennia. Anti-nuclear activists routinely engage in a form of equivocation in which they juxtapose dangerous but short lived substances (e.g. Strontium-90 has a half life of a few decades) with long-lived but low-danger substances like Uranium (with a half life of billions of years), pretending that every form of radioactive waste is as dangerous as the most dangerous form for as long as the longest-lived form survives.
2) Anti-nuclear activists routinely ignore the possibility of reprocessing nuclear waste into more nuclear fuel. They pretend that our only option is to store this fuel indefinitely. They also use this epistemic void where reprocessing should be to argue that we don't have enough nuclear fuel on Earth to sustain civilization. We do, and we do by several orders of magnitude if we remember that nuclear "waste" can be turned into new fuel.
3) Anti-nuclear activists routinely ignore how modern civilization produces non-nuclear waste products that prompt similar concerns over waste safety. (See, for example, the famous Love Canal incident.) By fixating on nuclear waste and ignoring other industrial byproducts that are at least equally as harmful, anti-nuclear activists reveal themselves as being motivated by some kind of emotional or ideological opposition to "the atom" in particular instead of, as they claim, an altruistic concern for the safety of humanity in general.
All in all, these people are Luddites, and they've set back the progress of carbon free energy by almost a century. We need to ignore people afraid of nuclear power in the same way that we ignore people who worry in public about the power of witches and Mercury in retrograde.
> The most radioactive substances decay in years or decades, not millennia.
s/decay in/have half-lives of/
Some of the stuff made in a nuke is not made by any other earthbound process, and even a tiny amount of it is dangerous. Plutonium has a half-life around 20,000 years. At a stretch, European civilization is 10,000 years old (and we generally struggle to read texts that old - when they exist at all).
> Anti-nuclear activists routinely ignore the possibility of reprocessing nuclear waste into more nuclear fuel.
Quite the contrary; they oppose it. Windscale/Sellafield has been the target of protests for decades. The problem is, to extract and concentrate the stuff you want to output, you create a greatly increased volume of stuff that you don't want/can't sell.
We can’t manage shit that needs a few years of care unless it continues to make profits right now. It’s a fucking joke.
So your local government is recommending a nuclear waste dump, as mine is.
Here’s basic maths to know if your getting screwed or if they’ll be doing all the coolest activities shown in the nice diagrams with big solid containers and a scientists in lab coats monitoring for issues for eternity. People will definitely be there working and maintaining 50 and 500 and 5,000 years after the initial political announcement, right?
Anything needing maintenance for decades either needs to be politically important, like government spending on educational institutions or hospitals. What’s that you say? Your hospital buildings are decaying. Oh umm let’s chat further.
Ok so back to the maths. This thing needs its own stewardship funding.
Let’s say it costs a mere $20million a year to maintain. To be honest I don’t know the cost, insert X. So what your going to want is a simple endowment, setup in a nice 10,000 year organisation that’s free from corruption, that’ll reliably generate your needed $20M in funds a year. What’s that, the government haven’t announced support for a new corruption free, science institute that is funded upfront to run for eternity? I sure you just missed it.
So your looking for an endowment that will reliable generate your $20M a year, or whatever figure, ongoingly, forever. Luckily this can be achieved, you just need to think of this like the interest to be earned from a big term deposit.
With say a need for a say 2% guaranteed yield, nice and conservative, you’ll need around $1 Billion to be setup in a waste stewardship endowment institute thing.
And here’s where you can expose all the BS. I’ve seen no announcements for anything close to these funds, for these types of facilities. All that seems to be budgeted for is intial job creation construction as well as a couple of political cycles of funding.
These are mud map numbers, but hopefully they illustrate the grift involved in most of these initiatives when they are not taking straight on long long long term stewardship and how that’ll be funded 50, 500, 5000 years from now. Hell we can’t even think in those sort of long timeframes.
<end of rant/>