Thinking on Talks (parts I & II)

[David Cantrell]

On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 04:00:58PM +0000, Ben Evans wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 03:11:16PM +0000, David Cantrell wrote:
> > * I'd be happy with just encasing the waste in glass** and burying it in
> > old mines.  Keep good records of where the damned stuff is, and either
> > leave it for ever or let our great-grandchildren deal with it.  They'll
> > probably turn it into a tourist attraction just like how tourists these
> > days go ooh! and aah! at old mills and railways.
> Not quite great-grandchildren. If the Romans had built nuclear power plants
> in Britain we would still have to be guarding the waste.[0]

If continuing to guard it is the way to deal with it, then so be it.
They can damned well pay for it.

Alternatively, the way to deal with it might be to float it up into
orbit using anti-gravity doo-dads and kick it into the sun.

> Funnily enough, neither that nor the decomm costs are ever factored into 
> the cost profile of nuclear fission.

Nor was the cost of cleaning up the grot left by filthy inefficient
factories during the Industrial Revolution.  And yes, I include social
malaise in that grot just as much as I include poisoned rivers.

I submit that despite you and me having to pay to clean up that crap, we
still benefit daily from what they did.  And that unborn generations (like
you and me) had no right to have our views taken into account back in
1800 - we can not in good conscience condemn people to lives of peasant
misery.

And just as we might bitch and moan about what they did while still
reaping the untold benefits arising from their filthy industrial
economy, likewise, our great-grandchildren have no right to hold us
back, and can be expected to gain greatly from our filthy fission power
all while bitching and moaning at our short-sightedness.

-- 
David Cantrell | random organic glop and a metric fuckton of electricity

    It's my experience that neither users nor customers can articulate
    what it is they want, nor can they evaluate it when they see it
        -- Alan Cooper