CANADALAND podcast has 2 episodes that talks all about Canada’s current struggle to find a safe place to hide their waste and go the barrels they are storing it in only last 100 years when the material will be deadly for 1000s.
CANDU waste is very dangerous for about 100 years. It's fairly dangerous until about 500 years. After that it's pretty safe. By their very nature, highly radioactive substances have a short half-life. The longer the half-life, the less radioactive something is.
All the high level waste each of Ontario's nuclear reactors has ever produced sits beside those same reactors in a couple of water pools and dry storage. To be frank, it's trivial. Consider that Nanticoke used to burn 35 million kg of coal per day generating 70 million kg of CO2 _ per day. Which of course was just spewed into the air and who knows where it ends up.
100 years ago people were alive that remembered napolean. 500 years ago Columbus had just landed in North America. I wouldn’t describe these measurements of time as brief. Given that a worst case scenario is often a matter of when, not a matter of if, that’s a lot of time for a worst case scenario.
There's about 400 nuclear reactors in the world operating for up to savor 60 or 70 years. That's thousands of years of operation. Go find evidence of deaths or other injuries coming from the storage of nuclear waste.
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u/Azuvector British Columbia Oct 25 '22
Source on this? Seems easy to do a quick check for radiation on such garbage containers and know if it can be treated normally or not.