This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years
And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy
Apparently the hypothetical future humanoids, somehow ignorant of all prior history, who will, ignoring all warning signs, start eating as much of the waste as fast as possible, then ignoring the obvious connection between eating that stuff and getting sick...
I wish I was kidding, but the argument does seem to be "what if 100_000 years from now somebody digs this stuff up and a few people get sick or die".
We don't have a lot of technology that we knew existed in earlier civilisations - the Aztecs, Mayans, pueblo peoples, the Easter islanders, to name just a few were doing things we have no idea how to do
Isn’t this no longer true? I’ve seen many experimental archaeology documentaries that use a recipe that uses pozzolanic ash and rock from volcanoes in Italy that they show to create the same properties found in Roman concrete. We don’t make concrete with it now because the supply is too limited and the expense of mining it would be greater than making portland cement.
When sealed several hundred meters underground in nonporous rock they do have such long lifespans. It's like observing that corn doesn't have a 10 year lifespan when left out on the counter and then objecting to canning it on that basis.
So just to be clear the concern here is that something buried 2+ miles underground, in a secure container, encased along with other secure containers in a concrete vault, all homed in nonporous rock, in a geologically stable area, is suddenly going to be subjected to an earthquake, against all odds a fault is going to open right through the waste storage area, again against all odds groundwater will appear, the reinforced vault will be weathered to the point of failure (over what timespan I wonder?), and the resulting leak of radioactive material that is multiple miles underground will then somehow affect humans living, what, somewhere within a few hundred miles? Does that really sound like a reasonable scenario to you? Because as far as I'm concerned it's pure concern trolling.
No? I don't see where you addressed these points in context? I am saying that I don't find what you're saying to be at all convincing but am of course open to reasoned debate if you think I've got something wrong. Being concerned about the scenario I outlined above truly seems absurd to me.
Do you see an obvious issue with the sequence of events I posed?
An earthquake will not suddenly take the waste from hundreds of meters underground and throw it in the air. I mean, assuming you store it in a reasonable place.
Yeah, i know about that one and it kind of proves my point, it's been active as a nuclear reactor for roughly a billion years if i recall correctly - every time water seeped into the rock it slowed the neutrons down and the reactor started up, created steam, which then evaporated and stopped the reaction
And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy