Sorry, but given that the climate catastrophe is the most pressing concern for humanity, I think that gives more weight that religious superstition over the "sanctity" of a mountain in the middle of the desert miles from any humans.
Securing nuclear waste to decay at the bottom of a mountain is a pretty good solution, the only thing against it really is political nimbyism.
Actually, from what I've read in the local newspapers in the areas affected, the politicians are all for it, so you're making assumptions there.
The people who are against it are the people who actually have to live with the stuff for the next thousand years.
If it's so safe, so stable, so easily rendered harmless, why not bury it in the bedrock beneath Manhattan, or Boston, or Virginia? All places that are far more geologically stable than, for example, Yucca Mountain.
If nobody lives there, nobody has to live with it.
There’s always some sort of catastrophe just looming just over the horizon of the next election. Televangelists have made careers from warning the faithful that their doom is assured — unless you reprint (and contribute.) The climate alarmist crowd has taken pages right out of the tent-revival handbook of the 19th century. Snake oil.
Atmospheric CO2 has gone from about 280 ppm pre-Industrial Revolution to 415 today. Yes, figuring out all the impacts and feedback loops is incredibly difficult, but it requires only a passing understanding of physics to understand how being on track to doubling the primary greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will result in a massively warmer planet.
I'll agree that was hyperbole, but interestingly this[1] article featured just the other day in the news here, about how a research vessel reached the north pole several days ahead of schedule because there was significantly less ice than expected. The scientists interviewed said conditions had changed drastically over the last 10 years. So maybe add 20 years to Gore's prediction?
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnmark/forskningsskipet-ff-_kron...
> the North Pole will be ice free by 2013
The tendency is unmissable if you look at the data[1]. People might have been wrong about the exact date at which it would happen, but you should not let the exactitude of the date distract you. It will eventually happen (unless something changes drastically).
And we honestly don't know how the weather will behave on an iceless Earth. Some people speculate that the arctic ice is a sort of heat shield. It makes some sense intuitively: all that white ice reflects a lot of heat back up. Once it is gone... the blue water will absorb and accumulate more heat.
> I also remember the dire predictions of acid rain, the ozone hole, and numerous other proclamations that stirred up the anti-capitalist faithful.
Everyone is starting to feel the change, it's no longer "just words". If you have not started yet you will start feeling it soon.
In my country (Spain), this summer we have had 3 heatwaves in a row, as well as two very unusual clouds of Sahara dust, the first of which reached Finland. I was born in the south of Spain, were's the hottest. When I was little the max summer temp used to be 41 degrees Celsius (105F). Now it's 47C(116F). Max temperatures have increased through the Iberian Peninsula, 41C is "the new normal" in all places except some coastal fortunates and some very northern regions. My options for escaping the summer heat are dwindling.
In the United States my understanding is that the most visible exponent is the extreme drought, in particular the water levels in the Colorado river basin seems worrisome. You might find more information about where you live in [2].
Herbert W. Armstrong predicted that 1936 would be doomsday, and then that 1943 would be doomsday after 1936 came and went, and then that 1972 would be doomsday after 1943 came and went, and then that 1975 would be doomsday after 1972 came and went. How would you rebut that sentence if he said it in 1973 or 1974? Or if Harold Camping, who did basically exactly the same thing, said it? Why wouldn't that rebuttal apply equally to your use of it?
> Some people speculate that the arctic ice is a sort of heat shield. It makes some sense intuitively: all that white ice reflects a lot of heat back up.
But isn't the reason that the ice is at the poles that hardly any of the Sun's heat gets there?
Imagine that without ice the ambient temperature is 5 degrees C. And that the area being ice rather than dark colored rock causes a drop of about 10 degrees C.
So the ambient temperature in the area is under 0. But as it melts for reasons then this cooling effects disappears and now the thing is basically gone forever.
Not commenting too much on the actual theory but you could easily imagine an ecosystem disappearing due to these kinds of changes
And that doesn't even account for securely transporting the waste across the country. Imagine scaling nuclear to the size of coal. What does waste transport look like then?
Maybe this waste belongs precisely in the back yards of those of us who create it. Then we'd be truly careful.
Electricity generation by source in the US in 2021:
Coal - 21.8%
Nuclear - 18.9%
No you actually don't. Even under the most absurdly bombastic delusional fantasy of nuclear-haters the amount of damage nuclear waste deep in a cave in a desert can do is about a billion times less then climate change.
And even based on the pessimistic assumptions, it would be save for 1000s of years.
Are you seriously gone tell me that we should worry about 1000+ years into the future. If we do not have massive technological decay, the people in the next 1000+ years will have the technology to reprocess the fuel if they feel like it.
And if you do assume massive technological decay then the nuclear fuel is in a cave in a desert that will be essentially uninhabited and will most likely never seriously impact humans.
Even further this whole debate is incredibly dumb since putting into a deep cave is terrible idea anyway. As a human society we can just store it above ground in a save location and in case some danger is identified, we just move it to another location. Moving a few tons of nuclear fuel around ever couple 100 years is really no big deal. And again, if society collapses to a point where this isn't possible, that nuclear fuel is the least thing to worry about.
And even all of that is totally irrelevant, because the real actual solution is to simply ut it into advanced reactors, burn it up to a point where it is only 300 years away from matching natural uranium and you simple put it back into the mine where it came from.
If you do it correctly, we can get every person in the world using US like energy and we can store the complete output of world nuclear waste on a single abandoned Walmark parking lot in Gary Indiana.
If we used basic rationality this would be a non issue. This is a cultural political issue, not really a technical one.
> What does waste transport look like then?
Mhhh well it would be an occasional train going along the train network that would never hurt anybody.
And nuclear isn't that far away from coal level of production.
> Maybe this waste belongs precisely in the back yards of those of us who create it. Then we'd be truly careful.
I'm totally fine with storing all nuclear waste around the Whitehouse if that gets people to stop bringing it up as a problem.
Yet instead of advanced technology to the next stage, we spent that money to dig a bit hole.
And even worse, every country spends billions digging holes.
Even a fraction of that money could have been used advanced humanity into the next nuclear age, rather then dumping the output of the last one into a hole.
Besides, if we don't tackle the global warming problem, there might not _be_ generations 300 years down the line to judge our actions.
Nukes are not in competition with them. Nukes are in competition with renewables, where they lose badly.
Renewables + storage + more transmission lines will require construction projects of magnitude much smaller than would be required for enough nukes.
Future people will be fine. Shit we discovered uranium because some guys wandered into a cave and it burned their skin. Locals avoided it afterwards and eventually it was studied by people who knew what radiation was. Any actual storage though would be deep underground, in casks, and behind concrete with lots of warning signs.
Solar and Wind require a backup for when there's no wind or it's cloudy. Their current default backup is burning fossil fuels.
Of those, coal plans are particularly salient because they do generate radioactive waste. Continuously. And pour it over the atmosphere. They contribute far more radiation to the environment than nuclear power stations.
> let future generations worry about it.
I think they will appreciate having to worry about that in exchange of not having to deal with not existing because of climate change.
Why would future generations have to worry about something buried deep underground? Just don't drill there.
Is your objection due to the sanctity of the mountain or another reason?
Last I heard, the big "solution" was to stick it in sacred Native American mountains in Nevada and New Mexico and let future generations worry about it.
If that's all we can do, people in 100, 200, 300 years may not be thinking what you're thinking they will think.