24 years of nuclear waste from the Maine Yankee powerplant

But when 8 years of wind turbine blades pile up its not a problem?

It is not at all similar. Those mines were just sealed off from the outside world with the dangerous materials therein left to polluted surrounding ground waters. These are stand alone and separated containers meant to hold these wastes indefinitely, until such time as their half lives render them no longer a threat.

TIL - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/

Which countries?

Are you talking about illegality to enrich to a level beyond that required for civilian use? Like Iran?

up ya bum

Yucca Mountain

Would it be okay to just dump it somewhere in the great canyon or the rocky mountains? Would it reasonably do any harm there?

I wouldn't put it anywhere near a water table if you want to keep consuming that water.

it needs to be protected from weathering.

Yucca mountain was ideal for a lot of reasons - remoteness, stability, but I suspect there are many similar places - also mines. the good thing re: this waste vs fuel waste is it's relatively low half life will render it 'cool' in a few hundred to a few thousand years.

Same goes for the industry behind making photoelectric panels,

I'm not sure how to parse this. are you suggesting that PV production involves radionucleotides?

the recycling of photovoltaic panels has improved enormously over the last decade, and made huge leaps in just the last few years. In some ways, it's becoming a focus for providing new panel production because the recycling can be quite profitable:

"In 2004, according to Germany’s state-owned Fraunhofer Society, Europe’s largest institute of applied-engineering research, one watt of solar power required about sixteen grams of polysilicon; this has dropped now to about two grams. As Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and a senior researcher at Oxford University, calculated recently, “the silver used in one solar panel built in 2010 would be enough for around five panels today.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment

re: Fusion - yeah, irradiated hardware is going to be a real thing, but we don't really have much of an idea how much of it will be produced. to be determined imho.

on top of that, the information represented within them modifies itself, like characters dancing around and shaping new patterns, hence the nickname of "dancing spirits"

Even wind is just using a windmill to spin a turbine, Solar and some very limited small scale thermocouple power sources are our only non wheel based power sources.

The global heating caused by coal will be deadly as well but on a much more global scale.

Yeah, no need to worry about the billions of tons of C02 that has been pumped into the atmosphere...

You could make out with those casks for 5 minutes every day and not suffer any ill effects. Unlike any of the byproducts from coal.

What waste are you referring to that you think does not need to be worried about?

Still waste, and some non radioactive waste can remain dangerous too. Maybe not as bad and for a shorter amount of time, but still.

I think it would be nice to see, to put things into perspective.

Blatant misinformation, there are so many resources you could read or watch to better inform yourself, but you have, at this point, deliberately chosen not to.

If you're worried about nuclear waste affecting your life in any negative fashion, don't go outside and breathe the air or stand anywhere close to a radio transmitter.

No, we do need to worry about those. The company producing them just doesn't need to put in any effort to contain them, and the public has to deal with it. Nuclear is largely so expensive because they have to be incredibly safe, to an honestly ridiculous degree. Meanwhile other power production just throws their hazerdous waste around and let's everyone else deal with it so they can continue to make a larger profit.

Three Mile Island came pretty close to a similar fate. That almost happened and didn't because of a very brave whistle blower. But at its root, companies tried to cut corners because of a profit motive. I.E. a huge capitalist failure. When utilities and things relating to survival needs for people are tied to whether a company can make money off of it or not, they will find opportunities to gouge, cut services, or simply not reinvest into maintenance. The failure of the Texas power grid during the freeze a few years ago is another great example of this.

Looking at the global warming crises, I don't have faith that humanity as a whole is responsible enough for safely handling nuclear facilities. Chernobyl is now in a warzone. I think Fukushima is still uninhabitable. Our monkey brains and 80 year lifespans blinds us from the consequences 200 years from now.

I hope I'm wrong.

modern nuclear designs are pretty much unable to melt down.

Some gifted idiot at a nuclear plant

"Hold my beer.*

I thought the problem was SEP fields. Because as soon as you've found an ideal location for a facility all the locals come out (probably in part funded by oil companies) and are like "this sounds great but not here".

Americans also know how sloppy US contractors get.

You can reprocess then and run them through breeder reactors, but no one has proven you can make money doing it.

That biggest reason no one has permanent storage sites is political. There will always be loud protests at any proposed site.

Outside the environment you mean?

Well, it's usually planned deep underground (and in rock that's unlikely to have water or earthquakes running through) in hopes of it remaining undeterred for as long as possible. If you were to dump it in the desert, then winds or the occasional rain might still carry it all over the place.

If the cylinders in the OP can withstand missile strikes (supposedly) why would a derailment be a problem?

For what? The existence of something?

“Not in my back yard” is the biggest cause of so many issues in the world. Get over it.

Radioactive material decays into non radioactive elements over the course of its half life. This is not kicking the can down the road.

That's not what half life is.

The nuclear energy industry is the safest industry anyone has ever worked in, and it is intentionally so.

Oh, this is not some idiot but rather some LLM propaganda bot. That explains the braindead comment on half-life times...

Dump it in water, heat it up, use the heat for heating. You don't need it to be the most efficient, you only need to not waste it.

Solar can’t scale up fast enough to even meet demand, let alone exceed it.

Based on what argument?

But both is good as well, we can do as much solar as we want and then make up the gap with nuclear.

I think solar will eventually become more effective and ubiquitous, but indeed nuclear should be the gap in the meanwhile. Unfortunately, folks on either side of the debate are dogmatic thinking it's one or the other instead of being pragmatic.

I used to be anti-nuclear, but with the rate of how bad climate change is getting, we need the nuclear power as the stop gap while we ramp up solar and other renewables. Even my boss who has an environmental degree was anti-nuclear but turned around. The vehemently anti-nuclear think we are going to build more nuke plants. Building new plants are indeed expensive, but those in the middle think we should not build more, but instead advocate not shutting down the already existing plants until other renewables catch up.

Moreover, and this is also a hard to swallow pill for many, much of the anti-nuclear sentiment has roots from Soviet disinformation campaign during the Cold War, especially in West Germany to malign nuclear energy. The Soviet Union was afraid that West Germany's civil nuclear programme might turn to a military one. That disinformation campaign still lingers in the minds of many not just in Germany but have spread across the globe.

The environmental cost of the land needed to deploy them?

I did some quick maths a while ago and figured out that it's approximately 3% of our total land use.

For a few minutes.

My basement is air - cooled. I think it doable.

OK just launch it into space