The_Butcher -
Let me separate your remarks into two categories: opinions and assertions of fact.
You have ever right to your opinion on what might happen in the future, and everyone has opinions, sobeit.
Your assertions of fact, though, contained flaws and mistakes, and it was to those that i directed my remarks.
First, no one died from the TMI accident. There was no rad release to the environment of any significance whatsoever. So, your initial allegation was wrong. Repeat, you made an erroneous statement. There is copious evidence, mountains of studies, and Congressional and Presidential commissions, all of whom agreed with that finding. You might find some anti-nuke who will shake his or her head and say it's all a conspiracy, but that's about it.
Second, the loss of life at H + N was a human tragedy, but a small one when one compares it to the loss of life overpoweringly likely in plausible alternative scenarios. This was a war that the Japanese started by a Sunday morning attack while at peace. Many thousands of lives had already been lost, including many, many Americans. Every day the war was prolonged, innocents would die in China, Korea, and everywhere else the war touched. Sitting in an easy chair, cool drink in hand, snacks within reach, armchair Wednesday morning (not Monday morning, it's too far removed from that) military and political quarterbacks love to say how things just might have been done better. If you're of that ilk, fine, but you might do better framing your remarks as opinions. The nuke bomb deaths at H + N should never be considered as proof of the evil of nuke bombs, but credited instead with providing an unprecedented and unexpected opportunity to Emperor Hirohito to end the war millions of deaths earlier than it would have otherwise. So, I repeat, H + N were not evil deeds, they provided by far the best and least costly way in human lives for Japan to manage with their own society to end the war that they themselves had started. To wail at the evils of H + N is to try to wrongly re-write history and slander the honorable men who made the decisions.
Third, I would gladly stick my head in any rad container of low level waste thirty years after it was filled. Even cobalt-60 with its 5-and-a-fraction year half-life would have had about 5 half-lives to decay.
Fourth, as I said originally, the dumpster count of high level waste, also called spent fuel, would be one per year per reactor. That was high, as it is more like one per every two years, but let's stay with one per year. There are 104 operating commercial power reactors in the US, but let's say there are 1000, instead. I expect fusion or some other tech to come along in the next century, maybe even PV solar, but let's say that doesn't happen until 300 years from now. Each dumpster, including separation space in its own little scooped out revetment out in some desert might use a few dozen square yards, let's call it 100 square yards per dumpster. There are 3,097,600 square yards in a square mile, but let's call it an even 3 million.
Now, let's do a little math:
- (1000 reactors) x (1 dumpster/year) x (100 square yards per dumpster) x (300 years) / (3M sq yds per sq mile)
- the answer? 10 square miles, or a desert parking lot of just over 3 miles on a side
(Use more realistic assumptions, and you could get it down to maybe just ONE square mile, this in a nation with thousands and thousands of square miles of desert and wasteland - Great Salt lake Desert alone is over 4,000 square miles, the Mojave is 22,000 square miles, and the Great Basin Desert is about 190,000.)
You could put that in the middle of some fed reservation and no one could probably even find it. The bunker-boxes-dumpsters would laugh off crashing airplanes, fires would hardly scorch them, and it would be simple to guard.
The whole anti-nuke gesticulating and posturing and wailing mess over where could we POSSIBLY put all that waste has always been a laughable farce to engineers with a calculator, or even a pad and pencil.