Why can’t we dump nuclear waste in the same place we mine nuclear fuel?
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Aside from the many reasons that people have given for this being a kind of false-equivalency of two radioactive things, I would also just note that uranium mining can take place in all sorts of different ecosystems and even different kinds of mines (e.g. open pit vs. deep hard rock). It’s not like there’s one big uranium mine or anything.
What you really worry about with storage of nuclear fuel is that the containers will eventually break down and start leaking this concentrated radioactive nastiness into the environment. The main culprit in this breaking down and leaking is water. So you are trying to find places to put things where water will never get in, and never move anything inside of it outside. This is one of those things that seems like it ought to be simple, but turns out to be really, really hard, because in the real world water gets _everywhere_ eventually, especially if you have to factor in what it might do over a timespan of hundred or thousands of years. Hence it is hard to come up with a site that you can say, “this will remain safe for anyone nearby forever.” Whether you should even have that as your goal is something one can ask — we don’t have as high of a bar for most chemical pollutants as we do nuclear waste — but that’s the current regulatory assumption.
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