[texuf]

Except you can’t transport it. We built a giant cave for it in the desert and everybody agreed that the material was too dangerous to drive past people’s homes so we just leave it sitting around on site hoping a natural disaster doesn’t wash it away. I’m pro nuclear but we need to be honest with ourselves.

[richk449]

Nuclear waste is transported regularly:

https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-transp.html

[chickenbig]

> everybody agreed that the material was too dangerous to drive past people’s homes

Everyone? A vocal group of activists, perhaps.

The same could be said for transport of chemicals by rail; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de... and still that goes on.

[roenxi]

I mean yeah. They do leave it sitting around on site. Because it takes up no space, they can build a bunker to store it without adding all that much to the cost and there are idiots hyperventilating at the thought of transporting dangerous goods around. I'd imagine the nuclear people decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

I feel ridiculous having to argue that volumes of material this small represent a real threat. If you wanted to move it we could. Split it up into little loads and put it in a stupidly over-engineered shielded truck. Goodness me this is not a real problem. They've been ignoring it for decades and the consequences are somewhere between nil and nothing interesting. There is nothing here to be honest about, there is no reasonable threat to debate. We transport explosives, we transport poison, we sometimes get massive port explosions that can level a district. Then we've got old mate claiming 2,000 metric tonnes of a relatively dangerous material represents a serious national problem. The absurdity of that is frustrating to deal with.

[ok_dad]

Yes, the powers that be have ignored the issue of nuclear materials sitting on site at power plants for decades, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to make 5 or 10 times more of the stuff at other sites and trust that the actual knowledgeable experts, who haven’t done shit for decades, will figure out a solution by the time it’s bigger issue.

We should decrease our power usage as a whole planet, and reduce dependence on technology that has outsized biological risks, like nuclear and plastics, rather than rushing into some future that will only enrich the already wealthy.