> Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight?

Why are people still proposing this antiquated 20th century storage technology instead of just building the newer reactor types that not only don't have this problem but are the best way to get rid of the long-lived isotopes we already have from 20th century reactor designs?

The answer to what you do with isotopes with long half lives is that you put them in a reactor that turns them into isotopes with shorter half lives.

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Joel_Mckay 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Mostly, it is the same naive lies we have all heard dozens of times before in the past.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUHuX-Gbenc

Also, the billions of dollars boondoggle reactor projects that never delivered is a hard sell. "Trust me bro" isn't enough anymore. lol =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kkgg494Ifc

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AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent [-]

None of it is lies. The CANDU reactors Canada has been operating for decades can run on spent fuel from legacy reactors and China actually uses them that way. The US hasn't built any of them, or any of the other designs that can do the same thing, in significant part because people keep presenting the circular reasoning that we shouldn't build newer reactors without dealing with nuclear waste when we should be dealing with nuclear waste by building newer reactors.

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Joel_Mckay 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Indeed, Canada was also indirectly responsible for many Nuclear weapons proliferation issues in North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Selling small research reactors to emerging economies had long-term consequences.

As a side note, the CANDU are famously bad designs known to develop heavy maintenance costs even to remain operational. Yes these can run on garbage fuel, but only because other designs could never tolerate such waste.

It is a teachable moment about legacy designs having unintended benefits as well. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNQu_3VQYAE

	▲	AnthonyMouse 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Indeed, Canada was also indirectly responsible for many Nuclear weapons proliferation issues in North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Selling small research reactors to emerging economies had long-term consequences. What does that have to do with how the US can deal with spent fuel? The reactors that consume spent fuel are ordinary power generating reactors rather than small research reactors and the US already has nuclear weapons. > As a side note, the CANDU are famously bad designs known to develop heavy maintenance costs even to remain operational The CANDU design is from the 1960s. It's not what you would actually use for a new project, it's an empirical demonstration that reactors that run on spent fuel are a real thing that actually exist rather than merely a theoretical possibility. There are also modern designs under construction in Europe and the same company is partnering with a US company to permanently destroy some of the US government's cold war era plutonium.