>Humans are lazy and greedy and stupid. But that applies to everything, and nuclear is responsible for fewer deaths per TWh of power generated than anything you're proposing as a "dirty" alternative.
Such an argument still undermines the pain and suffering such an accident can create, especially because nuclear can create suffering that doesn't necessarily end in a death caused by it.
>This is factually not what we are dealing with. The radioactivity of a substance is inversely proportional to its half life. In other words, the more radioactive something is, the faster it disappears.
Long-lived Radioactive materials have other problems if they are farther up in the atomic charts. Uranium and Plutonium are simply toxic to life (with few exceptions), other materials produced in a nuclear reactor behave similarly.
Large amounts of uranium can still produce lethal amounts of radiation if they're on a long halflife. If it leaks into the ground water, you have much bigger problems because radioactivity from inside the body is even more troublesome.
And it doesn't detract from the fact that the short and medium lived isotopes still need to be isolated for quite some time.
Such an argument still undermines the pain and suffering such an accident can create, especially because nuclear can create suffering that doesn't necessarily end in a death caused by it.
>This is factually not what we are dealing with. The radioactivity of a substance is inversely proportional to its half life. In other words, the more radioactive something is, the faster it disappears.
Long-lived Radioactive materials have other problems if they are farther up in the atomic charts. Uranium and Plutonium are simply toxic to life (with few exceptions), other materials produced in a nuclear reactor behave similarly.
Large amounts of uranium can still produce lethal amounts of radiation if they're on a long halflife. If it leaks into the ground water, you have much bigger problems because radioactivity from inside the body is even more troublesome.
And it doesn't detract from the fact that the short and medium lived isotopes still need to be isolated for quite some time.