[ericmason]

Whenever I see an article about storing nuclear waste for such longer periods of time, I can't help but think we will find a use for nuclear waste and end up digging it all back up way before 100,000 years.

[Banthum]

It's hard to reason intuitively about long time scales, because nothing is fixed any more. Usually we imagine technology, demographics, culture, etc to be fixed with respect to our decision-making, because most of our decisions are very short-term (and because people are quite lazy thinkers and prefer to face problems with fewer variables). But longer-term decisions, everything is in flux.

It reminds me of that concept where if you want to travel to another star, the best time to leave is not 'as soon as possible'. It may actually be better to wait several decades or centuries to develop new propulsion technologies (possibly based on entirely new branches of science), launch later, and arrive earlier.

Blast, I can't remember what that's called.

[golemotron]

It's related to the 'Adams Law of Slow Moving Disasters', but I agree that there is a more general concept to be named.

[ChuckMcM]

This is why vitrification was abandoned as a disposal mechanism. There are a number of interesting papers on how it would work well (example http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022311513...) however it makes it essentially impossible to reprocess fuel so disposed. Sad really.

[ajarmst]

We already have: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/512321/safer-nuclear-powe...

[jobu]

Are you being sarcastic? Transatomic walked back almost everything they said: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603731/nuclear-energy-sta...

[stevep98]

And the advances in robotics necessary to handle processing the waste are probably just a few decades away.

And if we don't develop these machines, our AI augmented successors will.

Ironically, it's just really short-sighted to plan for something that far in the future.

[rbanffy]

The difficulty here is that radiation fries the brains of the robots, not that they aren't smart enough to work with the stuff. I was a bit shocked the robots people send to observe Fukushima die in minutes of exposure.

It's not something making smaller and faster transistors can solve.

[jessaustin]

If things go well, we'll eventually have enough surplus energy that it will become reasonable to drop the worst stuff into the mantle.

[vacri]

I'm still waiting on our flying cars that we were supposed to be commuting in. And our free beamed energy.

[saboot]

After a period of a few hundred years it becomes a pretty ready to go repository of weapons grade plutonium. The problematic isotopes all have died away.