Wow, that comment is extremely misleading and exaggerated.

1) Everything in the universe, including the sun's solar radiation, is finite. It's just a matter of scale. The heat in the earth's core is practically infinite for humanity's current and near-term needs.

2) The heat generated in the earth's core is a combination of fission decay and residual heat from the earth's initial formation. The fission reaction is locked away 5000 KM deep (as in 5 million meters), deep-enough that it poses no threat even if you drill down thousands of meters to tap into that. That is very much not true of man-made nuclear fission.

3) There is still no long term storage mechanism that is guaranteed to keep nuclear waste for the several million years it would take to decay to safe levels, considering possible things that could happen over that time scale.

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shearerp a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Wow, that comment is extremely misleading and exaggerated.

Wow, quite the oversell there! Modern nuclear reactors are widely recognized as safe by nonpartisan sources. And why do we need to solve for millions of years of storage? In a couple centuries at most, we'll be able to blast the stuff into space if that's what makes us comfortable.

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jabl a day ago | parent [-]

This is getting very off topic, but this "let's dispose of nuclear waste by shooting it into space" is such an insane idea. In which universe is the risk associated with a frickin space launch lower than a deep underground geological repository?

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shearerp 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So you are 100% confident that a few centuries from now there will be no safe way to dispose of nuclear waste by shooting it into space? Well, maybe you have a time machine, but I don't, so I still think it's a fine idea that we can determine the practicality of later. The point remains that we don't need to solve for millions of years.

	▲	jabl 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Of course, I can't predict the future. So sure, if we in the future have some magical Star Trek technology that would make space travel entirely safe and ordinary, sure. Won't happen with anything like chemical fuels though, thanks to the tyranny of the rocket equation. And if we have such magical Star Trek technology, surely we'd also have the technology to transmute the waste into safer elements that don't present a long-term radiological hazard (that we in principle know how to do already today, it's just prohibitively expensive for little benefit)? In the meantime, while waiting for the magical Star Trek future to arrive, I'd much prefer if we'd store the waste we have and continue to generate in a safe and responsible manner. Which, whether we do reprocessing or not, would involve deep geological disposal. If we later come up with a significantly better idea and for some reason have a motivation for doing something, sure, then we can dig it up again and shoot it into space, transmute it, or whatever the idea at that time is. What I'm saying is that with anything like current day rocket technology, disposing of nuclear waste by shooting it into space is just a laughably insane idea.

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fodkodrasz 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also wasting valuable mass... of heavy elements. Transfuse it and possibly even use it as an energy source, or bury it, and let's be done.

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totetsu a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Even getting it from storage pools in reactors to storage facilities overland has risk.

	▲	jabl a day ago \| parent [-]
		Massively larger than the risk getting it from the storage pools to the space launch facility, to the extent it cancels out the definitely non-zero risk of the rocket launch failing?

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MarkusQ a day ago | parent | prev [-]

1) With proven technology, nuclear is "practically infinite" in the same sense (available fuel will out-last the sun, even at 10x current energy usage).

2) The "residual heat" is long gone, and my whole point here was that saying nuclear was limited when geothermal is a form of nuclear was disingenuous/misleading. Trying to turn that into a scare / safety issue is exactly the sort of nonsense I was objecting to.

3) There are lots of viable long-term storage options, including grinding it up, mixing it with the tailings and putting it back into the same hole we dug it out of. Or dropping it into a subduction zone, and letting it fuel future geothermal plants. But we won't do any of those, because it's far too valuable. If you are worried about things being "misleading and exaggerated" you probably shouldn't be bringing up the nuclear waste "problem".