"In 2015, President Obama found that a separate repository for defense-related radioactive waste was required. DOE reported that defense waste is smaller in volume, less radioactive, and thermally cooler than commercial spent nuclear fuel, stating that a defense repository may be easier to develop."

https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/disposal_of_highlevel_nuclear...

But crucially, commercial spent nuclear fuel is in containers. Spent waste from weapons development was often just dumped in a pit and buried. Our priorities were very different in the 1940s and 50s. Seriously look at this picture [1]. That encapsulates the attitude towards nuclear safety during the early cold war. The soviets just dumped their waste into a lake [2]. Not to mention we detonated a thousand or so nuclear bombs, many of them above ground.

1. https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/History_of_Nevada/Nevada_and...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay

This doesn't really counter my argument. The key part is that it has different kinds of waste. There are more factors than the radioactivity. For example sites like Hanford have melted fuel, which might have inspired that green goo that people associate with nuclear waste, but a power plant only produces solid waste. Aerosols and liquids have vastly different storage requirements and added complexity requirements than storing the typical fuel pellets and solid matter from power generating reactors.

>Aerosols and liquids have vastly different storage requirements

So whip the aerosol into some epoxy and when it cures throw it in the cask with the rest of the stuff.

If you just want to make something that's not solid and reactive into something solid and non-reactive modern chemical science has nearly infinite options.

While I agree with you, for the most part, there is a cost and complexity issue. I was really just trying to tell marsh that they aren't making accurate conclusions from the selected data that they are pulling from to generate their absurd anti-nuclear stance.

Isn't more of Apples to Macintoshes to Honey Crisp to Granny Smith? It's all nuclear waste, but just a different variety.

It isn't. Because we're talking about vastly different types of waste with vastly different toxicity and radioactivity. Power plants also don't produce liquid contaminants. This difference means not only quantity differences, but also vastly different methods for storage are required. Ability to contaminate the local environment is also vastly different. Please stop just guessing at what waste actually involves and read up on it before making such claims.

Almost everything on Earth contains some potassium, uranium, or thorium and thus is radioactive. Its all nuclear waste (from many big, nuclear events in the cosmos), just different varieties