> We already can't get a grip on climate change and plastic waste, let alone waste that has to be stored safely for 700 million years.

Please stop it with the physics theater. This stuff doesn't need to be stored for 70 years, let alone 700 million.

Nuclear waste from a modern reactor is touch-safe. Not touch-safe in 50 years. Not touch-safe next week. It comes out of the reactor touch-safe. You just have to wait for it to cool down to room temperature.

It's eat-safe in under ten years.

I have no idea why anyone would look at someone saying "700 million years" and not be reduced to peals of laughter. Did you just look up the half-life of uranium 235 or something?

The goal isn't to get rid of the uranium

Why would you need that? There's uranium all over your house, right now. You know you eat tiny pieces of your plates constantly, right? I sure hope you don't own any Fiestaware. Uranium is perfectly safe, and in lots of your consumer products. Stop learning safety from Marvel movies.

In 700 million years, if you actually had a dangerous energy source, life would have evolved to make it food by then. You know, like the black mold did with the space station in under a hundred, from a zillion miles away?

The ultra-hot stuff that you're taught to fear never actually comes out of the reactor.

The French glass their waste and put it in the floor, as a tourist attraction. They walk on top of it, no metal cladding, five foot gap. They've been doing it 40 years.

Just how radioactive do you think this stuff is?

Do you understand that hot springs like Yellowstone are way more radioactive than radioactive waste?

Do you understand that we go bathing in those? (They're actually pretty nice, once you get used to the smell of sulfur.)

Are you about to give me some mess about the kind of radiation? You going to try to teach me about roentegens vs grays? Look it up first. It's not going to play out the way you expect.

Holy shit, man, look at the numbers.

Like. Have ... have you ever looked at how much radiation you get from a TV tower? Have you ever checked where the closest TV tower is to you?

The same people that are terrified of nuclear waste think there's nothing wrong with cell phone radiation. It's baffling to me. You get *so* *much* more radiation from a pair of bluetooth headphones than you ever will from nuclear waste

I've got like ten bluetooth transponders around me just because I find cables annoying, and a cell phone in my pocket right now

You know that football field of nuclear waste barrels that doesn't exist on the entire planet, but that John Oliver keeps pretending is a lot to save the entire planet?

Go on, find it. Move one barrel out of the middle. Sit there. Bring your iPhone and a radiometer.

Now hold your iPhone high enough up that the large amount of metal won't block your cell signal.

Check the radiometer.

Do you think you see more energy in the cell phone band, or all the others put together?

Ooooooooh, better protect against that for (checks watch) 700 million years.

And not, you know, the loss of the ecosphere.

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> Are you kidding me?

No, I am not kidding you.

It's never killed anyone and it's never going to, no matter how much public panicing you do.

If you cannot name a single person that's ever been killed by it - if it's safer than making bread flour and safer than skateboards, but it can stop climate change - then it's time to settle down.

You're quoting the half lives of things that aren't even in the barrel, and you want to be taken seriously as some kind of source of knowledge.

Stop.

This is dishonest.

Climate change is real. Solar power doesn't work. Wind power doesn't work.

Nuclear power does work, and has the best safety record of any power system, almost by a factor of ten.

If the most you can do is pretend there will be death someday, by mechanisms you can't describe, involving the wrong numbers and things that aren't present? Then you shouldn't be part of the discussion.

The engineers and physicists do not agree with your future visions.

I'm not willing to watch climate change destroy the planet I live on today, just because you think something bad will happen millions of years from now which the physicists say is wrong.

Climate change is killing millions of people, today, and threatening biodiversity and the continental food supply

We can stop it, but you're sitting here saying "but in millions of years" and you aren't even correct

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> The mentioning of human history is pretty useless and misleading because

It's what really happened.

You're literally saying "ignore reality, ignore history, ignore the scientists, and pay attention to my scary stories."

No; I don't think that I will.

I've taken the relevant classes. They do not teach the things that you are saying.

The second you say "reject the evidence of history," you have condemned any argument you could possibly make

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> but it will exists more than 2,000 times longer than mankind exists so far.

No, it won't. You just don't understand the physics involved. The actual hot products in those barrels don't even make it 10 years. Even the old ones didn't make it 50.