Eli5: What is so bad about the waste of nuclear power plants? Why are many governments so against it? What is so hard about storing the waste in a safe place?
In: Technology
Where do you think the nuclear fuel comes from? It’s mined from the ground. The ground is radioactive. Coincidentally, but unrelated, the sky is too. Bananas are radioactive. So are people. You are radioactive. (Go ahead and google something like “How Much Radiation Does the Human Body Emit?” if you’re curious.) It’s totally natural and nothing to be concerned about.
The problem with nuclear waste is just that it’s concentrated. It just so happens that it’s easy to concentrate, and that’s what we do to get power out of it. You have to concentrate it for that.
If you concentrate any dangerous thing (like a poison), then it’s not easy to dispose of safely. One accident with a concentrated poison could get into the groundwater and contaminate the drinking water for an entire region. And that’s exactly the fear of nuclear waste.
Radiation isn’t dangerous in natural amounts (well, it is, but no more so than just being in nature), but concentrated it can be much more dangerous. And we have to concentrate it to get that value out of it.
The other aspect is how long can it be safely stored? It can take a long time for radioactivity to degrade. And we’re a “buy a new phone every two years” society. We’re not really good at long-term projects that can be secure for multiple generations. There’s nothing technically stopping us, but human nature and our culture tends to ignore and neglect things that are old.
We’re fully capable of containing it safely, but not quite mature enough to do so.
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