Comment by thangalin
16 hours ago
> It's dangerous. For millenia.
See https://www.jlab.org/news/releases/jefferson-lab-tapped-lead...
> Partitioning and recycling of uranium, plutonium, and minor actinide content of used nuclear fuel can dramatically reduce this number to around 300 years.
The word CAN is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Let's not pretend like the track record of energy production is free of externalities.
We CAN also produce almost all of our plastics from recycled ones. We don't, because those are more expensive than new.
One reason new plastic is so cheap is that we wanted the other parts of the oil to run automobiles and planes. So if we stop doing that suddenly recycling the plastic makes more sense too...
But who cares? Plastic in stabilized landfill is behaving better then the oil in the ground it was manufactured from. It doesn't matter.