Tech companies are turning to nuclear to fulfill the skyrocketing energy needs of artificial intelligence, with major corporations like Amazon, Google and Microsoft announcing plans to invest in nuclear power. But the speed at which energy needs are growing may not align with the construction or revitalization of nuclear infrastructure, says Alex de Vries, who researches the unintended consequences of AI and cryptocurrencies. There may be a “mismatch between the needs of tech companies today” and the future, while nuclear power continues to carry the same safety risks that led to its phasing out in the first place.
Long term storage is not supposed to require maintenance over that time, the worry is rather preventing people to dig them up unknowingly in the future. Actually dangerous wastes have way smaller half lives that that.
Long term storage is not supposed to require maintenance over that time
Ideally. Though you can do a 80s Germany: Find a suboptimal storage site right next to the inner-German border, so as to piss off the other side of the Iron Curtain. Surprisingly, only a few years after you reunite (and it feels so good), except now you have a bunch of contaminated water in your storage site after mere decades.
But quite honestly — how can you predict the fate of even the “safest” storage site? Will there be a fracking boom near it in the next 200 years? Something other new technology? And in that sense, it really doesn’t matter whether half life is 10k years or 100k years.
Long term storage is not supposed to require maintenance over that time, the worry is rather preventing people to dig them up unknowingly in the future. Actually dangerous wastes have way smaller half lives that that.
Ideally. Though you can do a 80s Germany: Find a suboptimal storage site right next to the inner-German border, so as to piss off the other side of the Iron Curtain. Surprisingly, only a few years after you reunite (and it feels so good), except now you have a bunch of contaminated water in your storage site after mere decades.
But quite honestly — how can you predict the fate of even the “safest” storage site? Will there be a fracking boom near it in the next 200 years? Something other new technology? And in that sense, it really doesn’t matter whether half life is 10k years or 100k years.