No personal attacks, please, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry dude. (I tried. You shoulda seen the stuff I deleted. Radiation poisoning is a horrible way to die.)

That's naively reductive. Any human endeavor, at virtually any scale, carries some risk. A cursory cost benefit analysis indicates that the potential reward, slowed or reversed climate change and fewer deaths from pollution, likely offsets the tiny probability that some future group of humans may stumble upon the waste and suffer. Consider also that any future civilization is likely to be advanced enough to recognize the danger of such an archeological site. Not to mention it's unlikely that any pictographic warnings will completely degrade over the course of thousands of years.

This really comes off as a minor issue considering the huge ratio of benefit to cost.

The shape of your thought is that of the car exec who okays the production of a dangerous car because it won't kill enough people to matter to the bottom-line. There's a difference of degree but not kind.

You really don't understand how that's controversial?

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? Real life carries risk. The rational behavior is to consider cost/benefit and make an optimal decision.

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.

It's not like the Trolley Problem, it is the Trolley Problem.

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.