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WASTE_BREATH

                                                    January 12, 2022

Summary: there isn't really that much
nuclear waste; it gets sealed up by design,
and it gets less dangerous the longer you
wait; and what we're actually doing isn't
at all a bad stop gap.


The United States had a scheme to bury high-level
waste in the Yucca Mountain repository, but due to      There is however, a
a confluence of different political objections,         very similar waste
this repository was built but never opened.             repository already
                                                        in use, it's just
This causes no great problem however, because what      currently reserved
we're actually doing with high level wastes isn't       only for military
bad at all: we store them in dry cask storage at the    waste.
nuclear power plant sites, which is arguably
preferable to using Yucca Mountain for many reasons:

  o  It's not dangerous.  With nuclear, the quantity of
     waste is small for the energy generated, and it's
     not that difficult to seal it up.  The nuclear
     facilities are already secure areas, so the
     Terrorist Attack movie-plot threats you might come
     up with are largely covered already.

  o  The longer you leave it in "temporary"
     storage, the less dangerous it is, and the         With nuclear waste
     safer it would be to move it elsewhere.            the hottest stuff
                                                        decays the fastest.
                                                        You might note that
                                                        this is not the case
                                                        for chemical toxins,
                                                        which essentially
                                                        have an infinite
                                                        half-life.


  o  The current generation of nuclear power
     plants we're using don't actually burn
     the fuel very efficiently, so there's a       The light water pressurized
     lot of useable nuclear fuel inside the        reactors we've been using
     'waste".  Really this fuel should be          could be improved on: we went
     reprocessed and recycled rather than          with them because we had the
     buried permanently in a place like Yucca      technology already, thanks to
     Mountain.                                     the nuclear navy.

  o  Yucca Mountain was always a gold-plated
     solution, an attempt at hitting design
     criteria that were arbitrarily chosen
     for political reasons: they wanted to
     claim they were sealing the waste up
     for tens of thousands of years.

         That would make sense if you wanted
         to wait for the radioactives to all
         decay into lead, but lesser goals
         (like say, the level of radioactivity
         of the ore that was dug up in the
         first place) would be more sensible.

         But even that is probably excessive
         compared to the actual risk to human
         life in the event of some small leak
         from these deep salt dome formations    We've been doing a lot
         hundreds of years from now.             on this fof very
                                                 little actual purpose...

                                                 We implicitly act as
                                                 though some kinds of
                                                 death aren't such a big
                                                 deal but others are too
                                                 horrible to contemplate.
                                                 
                                                 



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