Here in Nevada a lot of us don't care about the waste that is all ready stored in Yuca Mountain. The Native Americans do, but that's another issue.
Many of us worry about how the waste is transported there, on large trucks, just recently on I-15 which goes directly through the center of downtown Las Vegas. Especially because its done in secret so there are no extra protections around the trucks carrying that waste.
4. Proper Payment (Not a risk, but still an issue)
Many of us would also be ok with keeping the waste in our backyard, but whenever there is an unevenly distributed danger or burden it is proper to reimburse the communities most effected, which isn't really happening.
Nevada as a state has either the worst public schools in the country or sometimes we get up to 48th place, depending on the year. A few million for our public schools in exchange for being the nuclear waste disposal site for the country seems like a fair trade.
This is why salt formations are ideal. The existence of the formation is proof that water isn't leaving the area and hasn't been leaving the area even on geological time scales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
Experience teaches that anytime we can't see the risks of a technological solution, it's not because there aren't any. But because we can't see them.
Or BSE (mad-cow disease; at the time, the UK minister of agriculture, John Gummer, publicly fed his daughter a beef burger to show there was no danger from consumption of Brittish beef) though that one is not a technological solution, as such; but it's a well-known case were risk was underestimated.
> I don't understand why nuclear waste disposal is so controversial.
You answered yourself.
> What am I missing?
A functioning conscience.
This really comes off as a minor issue considering the huge ratio of benefit to cost.
You really don't understand how that's controversial?
The car exec is pinching pennies to buy a yacht. I'm talking about switching to nuclear power to save potentially millions of lives with a marginal risk to a small number of people in the future.
It's like the infamous train problem, where you must choose between one life or multiple lives. Except in this case it's quite unlikely that future lives will be significantly impacted by nuclear waste.
To simplify further, you have 3 options:
1. Do nothing and allow continued fossil fuel related deaths and the likely progress of climate change
2. Ignore nuclear, bet on renewables, which have their own cost and may not come online quickly enough to avert global crisis.
3. Switch to nuclear yesterday, save millions (or billions) of lives from climate change and pollution, with a tiny risk to some future civilization.
Yes, the executive and I are both thinking "coldly", but the difference is that he is optimizing for pennies, whereas I am optimizing for lives and environment.
I don't want to argue with you, what you're saying just sounds like rationalization to me. If you don't see the grotesque arrogance of poisoning the only known biosphere in the Universe, well, "I can't even...", as the kids say.
Here, imagine that Dr. Who (I know that's not his name) picks you up in his TARDIS and takes to the bedside of one of the people dying of radiation poisoning, can you explain to that person how you were just "optimizing"?
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> Every time you get in your car, you take the risk of causing a fatality to another driver or pedestrian. Have you sworn to walk everywhere?
I actually don't drive, and for exactly that reason: I learned as a child how many people are killed every year by car collisions and I was so horrified that I vowed never to drive a car, and I haven't. (Technically, I did have a camper van a little bit, as part of a plan to buy some land and camp there while building a house. It was a violation of my vow but I allowed for it as I wasn't going to use it on the road except to get to the land. Other than that, I've kept my vow.)
Our traffic system is an insane "mayhem lottery" that we force everyone to play whether they like it or not.
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> switching to nuclear power to save potentially millions of lives with a marginal risk
Yeah, or we could just reduce our power consumption and increase our energy efficiency.
1. Some population thousands of years from now stumbles upon the waste and a small minority may die from exposure/contamination
2. Containment breach occurs due to degradation or earthquake or some other destructive event and some minimally radioactive waste leaks out of the containment site.
Are either of these serious concerns with respect to the benefit of nuclear power? If disposal occurs somewhere deep in the continental U.S., are there even any actors powerful enough to commandeer the waste for nefarious purposes? What am I missing?