I changed my mind about nuclear waste
Look here’s what you want to consider. The waste needs to be stored safely and responsibly for not a decade, not a century but for thousands of years.<p>We can’t manage shit that needs a few years of care unless it continues to make profits right now. It’s a fucking joke.<p>So your local government is recommending a nuclear waste dump, as mine is.<p>Here’s basic maths to know if your getting screwed or if they’ll be doing all the coolest activities shown in the nice diagrams with big solid containers and a scientists in lab coats monitoring for issues for eternity. People will definitely be there working and maintaining 50 and 500 and 5,000 years after the initial political announcement, right?<p>Anything needing maintenance for decades either needs to be politically important, like government spending on educational institutions or hospitals. What’s that you say? Your hospital buildings are decaying. Oh umm let’s chat further.<p>Ok so back to the maths. This thing needs its own stewardship funding.<p>Let’s say it costs a mere $20million a year to maintain. To be honest I don’t know the cost, insert X. So what your going to want is a simple endowment, setup in a nice 10,000 year organisation that’s free from corruption, that’ll reliably generate your needed $20M in funds a year. What’s that, the government haven’t announced support for a new corruption free, science institute that is funded upfront to run for eternity? I sure you just missed it.<p>So your looking for an endowment that will reliable generate your $20M a year, or whatever figure, ongoingly, forever. Luckily this can be achieved, you just need to think of this like the interest to be earned from a big term deposit.<p>With say a need for a say 2% guaranteed yield, nice and conservative, you’ll need around $1 Billion to be setup in a waste stewardship endowment institute thing.<p>And here’s where you can expose all the BS. I’ve seen no announcements for anything close to these funds, for these types of facilities. All that seems to be budgeted for is intial job creation construction as well as a couple of political cycles of funding.<p>These are mud map numbers, but hopefully they illustrate the grift involved in most of these initiatives when they are not taking straight on long long long term stewardship and how that’ll be funded 50, 500, 5000 years from now. Hell we can’t even think in those sort of long timeframes.<p>&lt;end of rant&#x2F;&gt;