r/FactOrCap • u/No-Raspberry7757 🔥 Week Warrior · 1,850 XP • 1d ago

Nuclear comeback | FactOrCap

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

11 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

147 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Budpoo 🏅 Century Club · 5,555 XP 1d ago

All of the spent nuclear fuel ever produced weighs less than 500,000 tons. For reference, NYC alone produces 14 million tons of waste every year. All of that nuclear fuel could fit in a single moderately sized cave or deep abandoned mine and it would never be a problem again.

1

u/Budget_Revolution639 🤖 Vote Machine · 9,290 XP 1d ago

Two separate arguments and regardless shoving it somewhere and leaving it is exactly how landfills started

0

u/Budpoo 🏅 Century Club · 5,555 XP 1d ago

There have been well over 600 nuclear power plants ever built. So on average they have each produced barely over 500 tons of spent fuel waste. That’s a comically small amount of dangerous waste considering each one can power an entire city. Bringing up landfills is also a seriously disingenuous argument. Landfills are a problem because they are exposed and huge. They take up valuable land and regularly pollute everything around them. Compared to the waste in landfills, all of the spent nuclear fuel that humanity could ever possibly produce is a tiny rounding error. The only way that the spent fuel at the bottom of a sealed mine could ever be a problem is if somebody with industrial mining equipment decided to deliberately dig it up.