Radiation sources decrease their radioactivity significantly as they decay. The more radioactive, the more rapidly they decay. Some elements have significant energy in their decay chains, but those also tend to stabilize after awhile or be so valuable it’s pretty ridiculous making them ‘waste’ instead of fuel. They also aren’t a large volume of these wastes. The amount of actual plutonium in this waste is small, for instance.
You can see this even around Chernobyl, where before the recent war it was fine giving tours. The trinity test site has given tours for decades.
I’m not downplaying everything here as being fine - you wouldn’t want to lick it. And, like the area surrounding a lead smelter, maybe don’t do camping trips with the kids or build a house outside Chernobyl for awhile. But if someone builds more houses there in a couple hundred years, it’s VERY unlikely to be a problem.
The scale of the problem is minuscule compared to the scale of mercury poisoning and toxic waste from mining even a tiny fraction of the stuff used for equivalent energy production.
The amount of toxic airborne mercury released from cement production (baking the cement) to build the buildings for the reactors almost certainly has killed more people than any nuclear accidents.
I’m saying the idea that even 100 years from now it will be some kind of dangerous glowing mass is fantasy. Even the elephants foot is likely to be safe to approach with basic safeguards (like washing your hands afterwards) pretty soon.
The story that 10k years from now a society will be wiped out because they dug up some huge ball of nasty nuclear waste is much more likely to be a story about how people built a society in an area around an old lead smelter and all their kids got lead poisoning, or mercury poisoning from built up metallic mercury, or any number of other problems.
The long term dangers tend to get exaggerated by many folks for their own reasons (including the planners for long term retention/storage and politicians), but aren’t really realistic.
Edit: also, unlike my car keys, if the waste IS actually radioactive, it’s easy to find even in microscopic quantities using technology and skills available to any high schooler. It’s VERY unlikely that humanity would forget how to build a cloud chamber detector if this was even a passing concern.
Unlike say dioxin contamination, or any of a dozen types of long lived industrial poisoning/contamination you’ll find near any major population centers or industrial areas literally right now that are a bigger risk.
Your argument, which is, apparently, that radioactive waste becomes inert over time thus it isn't an issue, supported by hyperbolically inflating the alleged original concern to an extinction level event, is flawed (in many ways but also) because not all radioactive waste becomes inert over human timescales. Transuranic waste will still be quite deadly 1000 years from now. No one, anywhere, ever, had any anxiety about nuclear waste causing human extinction. The problem really is as inconsequential to human existence as a large elementary school being built in 3409 on top of a leaking toxic nuclear waste dump and no one noticing until 3430, by which time, over the decades, quite a lot of kids got sick. It's no less horrifying even if the species is not really at risk of anything.
I don’t think I’m the one doing the hyperbole here?
Transuranic waste won’t be as deadly 1000 years from now as it would be today (for the same waste). Any actinides with dangerous enough levels of radiation to kill someone quickly will have notably decayed by then, even if they are still present in detectable quantities. Some of the middlin’ ones will still be around, but they are almost never in notable enough quantities to cause problems unless someone literally eats a significant amount of it directly.
If it is still deadly for someone depends entirely on dose, exposure, composition, and concentration. Same as a chunk of lead, dioxins, PCBs, methyl mercury, non-organic pesticides, etc.
And unlike all those other dangers, it’s pretty easy to detect radioactive waste as….
It’s radioactive.
It’s pretty unlikely it’s going to be a problem big enough to kill any notable number of people AND folks somehow forgot how to detect radiation (you literally can buy a pretty decent Geiger counter on Amazon for $20, or build a cloud chamber yourself), AND no one is doing any of the detecting.
And considering how little actual waste there is compared to the far worse (by real life impact) industrial waste we still produce, this is not the problem it always gets made out to be.
Like in the Chernobyl thread awhile ago where folks where breathlessly talking about how the soldiers were in grave danger from the radiation (which some spikes were notable, but were small spikes), when said soldiers are getting blown up with Javelins, mines, and shot by Ukranians at a level currently several orders of magnitude worse than even the highest theoretical estimation of radiation problems could predict.
Radiation sources decrease their radioactivity significantly as they decay. The more radioactive, the more rapidly they decay. Some elements have significant energy in their decay chains, but those also tend to stabilize after awhile or be so valuable it’s pretty ridiculous making them ‘waste’ instead of fuel. They also aren’t a large volume of these wastes. The amount of actual plutonium in this waste is small, for instance.
You can see this even around Chernobyl, where before the recent war it was fine giving tours. The trinity test site has given tours for decades.
I’m not downplaying everything here as being fine - you wouldn’t want to lick it. And, like the area surrounding a lead smelter, maybe don’t do camping trips with the kids or build a house outside Chernobyl for awhile. But if someone builds more houses there in a couple hundred years, it’s VERY unlikely to be a problem.
The scale of the problem is minuscule compared to the scale of mercury poisoning and toxic waste from mining even a tiny fraction of the stuff used for equivalent energy production.
The amount of toxic airborne mercury released from cement production (baking the cement) to build the buildings for the reactors almost certainly has killed more people than any nuclear accidents.
I’m saying the idea that even 100 years from now it will be some kind of dangerous glowing mass is fantasy. Even the elephants foot is likely to be safe to approach with basic safeguards (like washing your hands afterwards) pretty soon.
The story that 10k years from now a society will be wiped out because they dug up some huge ball of nasty nuclear waste is much more likely to be a story about how people built a society in an area around an old lead smelter and all their kids got lead poisoning, or mercury poisoning from built up metallic mercury, or any number of other problems.
The long term dangers tend to get exaggerated by many folks for their own reasons (including the planners for long term retention/storage and politicians), but aren’t really realistic.
Edit: also, unlike my car keys, if the waste IS actually radioactive, it’s easy to find even in microscopic quantities using technology and skills available to any high schooler. It’s VERY unlikely that humanity would forget how to build a cloud chamber detector if this was even a passing concern.
Unlike say dioxin contamination, or any of a dozen types of long lived industrial poisoning/contamination you’ll find near any major population centers or industrial areas literally right now that are a bigger risk.