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.
