User:Macquigg/Sandbox/Nuclear power reconsidered/Notes

= Notes for future article on waste management = Question on a FaceBook forum I fear a future dark age with unwitting scavengers rummaging through nuclear waste for valuables. What is our moral responsibility to these future generations? Response from Jess H Brewer Let's explore your "nightmare scenario": thousands of years from now, after all the short-lived (and therefore very "hot") fission products have decayed away, a tribe of neolithic hunter-gatherers breaks into the nuclear "waste" repository and breaks open a dry storage cask. The guy who opens it and gropes around in there gets sick the next day and dies of radiation sickness within a few more days. His best buddies also get sick but recover; a decade or two later (if they haven't been eaten by bears etc.) they get leukemia and die. The rest of the tribe (who observed the effects on the first few and have since stayed away from the repository) received a small dose; a few percent of them get cancer later; an even smaller number have mutated children. Net death toll: maybe a dozen, assuming a tribe of 150 (best size for such communities). Lesson learned by tribe: stay away from the repository. Is this your nightmare? Seriously? Is it worse than the probable consequences of using coal for power instead of nuclear? Is it anywhere near as bad as continuing to burn "cleaner" fossil fuels, or (worse yet) doing without power when the wind doesn't blow overnight? You don't get to decide our future on the basis of, "Something bad might happen, you never know, and since it's RADIATION, it's too horrible to imagine!" Imagine it! Know what you are talking about! EVERY industrial-scale project will kill some people who would otherwise have lived and save some people who would otherwise have died. You don't get to duck the responsibility of making those comparisons and choosing the project that promises to save the most and kill the least.