Yes, I get that. But I think we should just keep in mind that it is no sustainable or long-term solution. Since many people have started talking positively about nuclear energy in the last few years, I think it is important to remind everyone of the problems that arise with it.
Can you show me any evidence for that? I’m really curious how we could develop a technology to safely store nuclear waste for millions of years. I mean, on that time scale you’d even factor in changes in geology and all kinds of other factors. Sure, there are definitely people who say that “it should be fine”. But how can you reliably model geology on that time scale? You simply cannot. So I would definitely disagree with your statement that storage is a solved problem.
Yeah sure, coal plants obviously have to go. But why not invest in sustainable energy production?
Nuclear waste cannot just be buried, unless you don’t care about polluting huge areas with radioactivity. In Germany, there have been decades long debates where to store nuclear waste and even to this day there hasn’t been found a good storage for the waste we produced in the 70ies. And this shit costs billions of euros that the company profiting of the plant doesn’t have to pay but that in turn society has to pay.
Hm, on the one hand this could be survivorship bias, i.e. only a lucky few scripts in stone have made it through. If you left enough of these glass discs or other modern media in very specific conditions they might also withstand thousands/millions of years maybe?
On the other hand, I think the amount of data and the corresponding resolution is important, too. If you’d try to store petabytes (or more) worth of data you’d have to carve really really tiny scriptures into stone unless you want mountains of stones just to save some bits of data. But the moment you scale your resolution up and your data engraving gets much smaller, you’ll also get a much more error prone, susceptible system. So even stones with tiny scriptures would certainly not be able to survive millions of years (at least the vast majority of them).
Oh wow, so even more radioactive waste that will afflict thousands of future generations and the environment for a tiny amount of produced energy now :(
Thanks for all the informative sources. First of all, I think you are probably right that it is a political or rather economic problem, not necessarily a scientific one. Capitalism doesn’t give any incentive to care for the environment or to recycle anything if it isn’t profitable. And politics are heavily influenced if not driven by capitalism.
But then, seeing the various articles you provided about nuclear waste storage, I didn’t really get the impression that it is a solved problem. Sabine Hossenfelder spends a very long time talking about what nuclear waste is but only mentions problems with storage for hundreds of thousands of years for a very short time. And also Elina Charatidsou doesn’t even mention potential problems of geological changes etc. And the facility she is presenting is still in the research stage. So where are the solutions for a long-term storage that guarantees safety? Nuclear waste may not be as problematic as it is made out, but real solutions look different to me.
Very interesting also the point about recycling nuclear waste. I haven’t even heard of it and it sounds like a really good thing to do. We’d still have very high costs handling and storing it, but only for a few hundreds of years at least. Although it seems like actually applying this is still not really planned by most countries and even then the problem of nuclear waste doesn’t go away fully.