> I am trying to give a good faith response,
Okay, and in that spirit I'll not how I'm interpreting some of your responses. They may not be what you intended but I feel that if I note how I see what you are saying that this can prevent us from talking past one another, which is an easy thing to do accidentally. Let's try to work through this together.
> The lifetime numbers are not made up and I never said the original author was lying.
When you said:
>> we can make up numbers about recycling and lifetime of the waste?
I assumed that it was "make up numbers about lifetime of waste." I'm still having a hard time reading this another way tbh. Would you care to clarify?
> You argued that it was OK to be handwavy because of NIMBY preventing a repository.
No I argued
>>> I'm not sure what other argument they are supposed to make.
Under the condition
>>> without something in place all you can argue is "this problem isn't as hard as people think. We can do it, here's real world examples elsewhere."
I still stand by that. I'm not sure what else you can argue other than "We can do it, here's examples" when there isn't an exact thing in place. I should mention that there are plenty of simulations that show that this is the case. What are we supposed to argue? "Here's an example in the US and that's why we should do it in the US?" That doesn't make sense because we'd then be doing it and wouldn't need to argue in favor of doing said task. I'm still confused what your problem is. Which brings me to
> It is completely unproven that we can do this for 100s of years.
Which again, I'm not sure what you mean. We have simulations. We have small scale testing. We even have medium/long scale testing. The only thing we really don't have is a literal experiment where we've tested this containment for 100 years. But we have for almost 100 years. The likelihood that things become more dangerous after 80 years (from Manhattan project) seems unlikely given literally everything we know about radioactivity and it's nature to reduce in danger over time. So I'm not sure what you're asking for as "proof".
This also is, in my view, silly in the same way it is silly for a recruiter to ask for 10 years of Carbon experience. Carbon is less than a year old, so it is impossible to have 10 years of experience. Though, from personal experience, I've seen this literal argument made by the government to a DoE lab. DoE wanted to improve storage based on simulations and physical testing but the gov said "can't do it because it isn't proven" with "proven" being "full lifetime" physical testing. This is a rather silly, and understandably frustrating, argument. Clearly if you aren't allowed to test something because it isn't "proven" then you can't fulfill the conditions to prove it. The situation is set up to fail and, understandably, make people angry. It is circular logic. If you aren't intending it in this manner, please elaborate because that is how I'm interpreting and I apologize if it isn't the intent. If your intent is to say that we can't have the technology proven until we have a full lifetime example (and thus hundreds or hundreds of thousands of years), please let me know. I will have a followup.
> and at the same time use some hypothetical future development to say the other technology does not have an issue.
Actually, I don't think the author argued anything that wasn't already being done either in another country or through lab scale testing (as in physical testing. Well past simulations).
> What do you mean? Understanding languages that are several hundreds to thousands of years old is not straight forward.
Sorry, I am arguing a different point. Allow me to clarify. I think the premise that literally all human knowledge from now (and previously) will be lost, is a bit naive and an EXTREMELY high bar. While it is something we should be concerned with, it shouldn't be a deal breaker. After all, the bar is so high that it is essentially impossible to meet this bar. We've also got plenty of historical examples to prove that this is unlikely, given that no such event has ever happened and that we also know not to drink water from ancient Roman pipes which are lead lined and who believed that stagnant water was safe. Personally, I believe that if a future civilization is capable of digging miles into the ground and breaking open several feet of steel and concrete, then there's a high likelihood that they also know about radiation. True, it isn't guaranteed, but by the time we were able to achieve such a feat, we also knew about radiation. What I'm saying here is that "worst case scenario" shouldn't prevent us from making steps in the right direction. I'll also argue that this bar is only set for nuclear materials. We produce substantially more amounts of waste with lead and other heavy metals, which are both toxic and *are toxic forever*. At least radioactive materials becomes less dangerous over time (and with exponential decay!).
> I'm talking about that they are obvious targets for terrorist attacks, protests etc..
There's almost a hundred years worth of history on this and we haven't seen a single one. Actually, fun(?) story. A company I used to work for was looking at DoD proposals and we were going to submit one on dirty bombs (well we did). But in the research phase (I have a physics degree and specialized in nuclear) I couldn't find a single case of a dirty bomb actually being used in the wild. This is despite several nuclear weapons and a lot of weapons grade material being stolen/lost after the fall of the USSR. Why? Because it is fucking stupid. Dirty bombs don't increase your kill count. They drastically increase your risk of dying before you deploy your weapon. They also increase your chance of getting caught (there are examples) due to how good we are at sensing radiation. And it is just difficult to get your hand on (and quite expensive). It may increase the terror part of terrorism, but it really just isn't worth it. You could set off thousands of pipe bombs for the price of one dirty bomb.
> Also I recall some experiments or expert assessments for at least the french/German castor containers which showed possible (impropabale but not unrealistic) scenarios that they would not withstand.
Wait, I want to zoom in
> improbable but not unrealistic
What's the bar then? Does it have to be impossible? You have to know that isn't a realistic bar, right?
> The French facility (and I assume Russian one, I don't speak Russian) is much more like a temporary storage, also not proven yet that it will work.
What do you mean unproven? They have successfully stored THE ENTIRE COUNTRY'S RADIOACTIVE LIFETIME WASTE for decades. DECADES. What is unproven?
> I covered recycling already, it is highly uneconomical produces a lot of low rate waste and is only done for political/military reasons in France.
Actually, the reason we don't do it in the US is because it is just cheaper to buy new Uranium. This is not true for France, so they recycle. While it is economically advantageous for France, it isn't for the US. That's besides the point though as fuel is an extremely small part of the cost of the reactor (including waste). But a good reason to do it is to reduce the waste "problem." I REALLY encourage you to read [0] and I find it hard to have a conversation without this per-requisite.
I'm not sure how I moved the goal post tbh, but I will now. To something I feel is actually much more fair. Why does nuclear energy have to be so much safer than other sources of energy? Clearly no source of energy is perfectly safe nor is perfectly green. My question is why nuclear technology has to be leaps and bounds ahead of others. With generations old technology: fewer people die, there's far less environmental damage, it operates at zero carbon emissions, and we've safely stored the material for nearly a hundred years without killing a single person. Hell, we can't say the same about literally any other energy source. After decades of use, in dozens of countries, we've only killed a few hundred people and almost all of those are due to a singular event (Chernobyl) that was at the birth of the technology. Are we not allowed to improve? Are we to be but the sins of our fathers? (bad analogy since that was Russia) Rooftop solar, hydro, geothermal, and natural gas kills more people, so I'm a bit confused. Why does nuclear have so much higher of a bar than any other source of energy? Is it just you don't like nuclear or is there a legitimate reason to the higher bar? Why are we even having this fight? The position is renewables + nuclear not renewables _vs_ nuclear. The point is to get rid of coal, gas, and oil. The situation in Ukraine would definitely be different if Germany didn't kill off their nuclear plants. I honestly don't know what conditions (what level of proof) is needed to convince you. This is why I'm unsure if there is a good faith argument to come from here. If there's no argument that can be convincing then it really isn't good faith.