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Re:China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear re... by gambiting on Monday November 08, 2021 @03:27PM (#29153813)
The thing about nuclear waste is that even a lot of it is not a lot in absolute terms.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

"In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."

Re:China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear re... by SavantIdiot on Monday November 08, 2021 @03:36PM (#29153895)
I understand what you're saying, especially when compared to trillions and trillions (quadrillions?) of tons of CO2 and particulate pollution of coal and oil burning.

OTOH, It would be nice if the nuclear waste could be stored that way. But that concentrated football field can be used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Ultimately it requires a large amount of infrastructure to prevent leakage, exposure, theft, explosion, degradation of infrastructure, terrorism, etc. So maybe the football field turns into a billion-dollar-a-year "small-town-sized" facility that has to be maintained for as long as humanity exists (10,000 years?). Now it seems much bigger.

Re:China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear re... by lazide on Monday November 08, 2021 @07:26PM (#29156181)
Not really. Almost all current nuclear waste is stored on site in casks and does fine.

Fly ash produced by coal just in the US dwarfs it in both volume, total toxicity AND total radioactivity, and is in the 30+ millions of tons a YEAR. And that is only the tip of the iceberg. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash#Disposal_and_market_...]

Thankfully a lot of it is used in cement and similar that entrains it decently safely (dilution is the solution), but just the portion that doesn’t on any given year outweighs all nuclear waste ever produced

Re:China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear re... by jjoonathan on Monday November 08, 2021 @03:29PM (#29153834)
...and that's from generating 20% of the US's energy the whole time.