10k years isn't that long. Some concentrated chemical stuff with heavy metals or mercury or whatever in it will be toxic forever.

> Yes, it stays active for 10k+ years, but it's actually not that expensive to store them at specialized storages forever. Because it's a very small amount on a grand scale.

For some definition of "active".

The first 6-10 years are quite dangerous, which is why stuff is in cooling pools. After about 200-300 years the most dangerous type of radiation (gamma) has mostly burned stopped, and you're left with alpha and beta, which can be stopped with tinfoil and even paper.

I've heard the remark that after ~300 years the main way for nuclear waste to cause bad health effects is if you eat it or grind it up and snort it.

The strange part psychologically is that saying it lasts 10,000 years somehow seems worse and more unmanageable than say cadmium or arsenic which last forever.

I had considered submitting a YC application for a startup that would do this, take waste radioactive material and turn it into uniform physical pellets or cubes for district heating via vitrification, but it seemed like between the capital costs and regulatory hurdles, it's just really, really hard to make commercial economics work. At least with electrical generation with nuclear, you can get some buy in from people willing to tie up billions of dollars for decades even with a high risk of failure, or get someone with deep pockets like big tech to sign a power purchase agreement for existing nuclear capacity.

If the waste has to sit somewhere generating heat, might as well get some value from it.

(global district heating TAM is only ~$200B, idea sprung from xkcd spent fuel pool what if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)

Radioactive materials that produce enough heat to warm a greenhouse in a conveniently sized package are extremely hazardous if uncontained. It's relatively easy to encapsulate radioactive materials against accidental exposure, but much harder to guard against misinformed or malicious deliberate exposure. Then you get expensive and lethal incidents like these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...

The Soviets did this with RTGs for remote on site power production. They're now abandoned and dangerous sources of nuclear material for those with evil intent.

Wind and solar are still competitive without the credits, and while it'd be great to keep the credits to get off of fossil fuels faster, they are no longer needed.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...

> Lazard’s analysis of levelized cost of electricity across fuel types finds that new-build utility-scale solar, even without subsidy, is less costly than new build natural gas, and competes with already-operating gas plants.

> Despite the blow that tax credit repeal would deal to renewable energy project values, analysis from Lazard finds that solar and wind energy projects have a lower levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) than nearly all fossil fuel projects – even without subsidy.

(Lazard is the investment banking gold standard wrt clean energy cost modeling: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...)

Why do that when safely storing the waste takes up an incredibly tiny amount of space and costs much less?

And subsidizing this still won't make new nuclear particularly competitive without ditching the silly LNT harm model and killing ALARA at the regulatory level. If you do that, suddenly nuclear can be profitable (as it should be in a world where the AEC and NRC approached radiation harm risk with actual science).

I don’t think anyone is considering its ingestion. At least I hope not, but these are very strange times.

A substantial amount of "nuclear waste" nowadays is low-level waste - things like old radium-dial clocks, or contaminated protective clothing from nuclear power plants, or medical waste from radiotherapy patients. The overall concentration of nuclear material in this waste is very low, and many of the isotopes involved (particularly from materials made radioactive through neutron activation) wouldn't be terribly useful even if they could be effectively extracted.

I think the science is pretty well understood. We know how to separate isotopes and react them to create new products, but there will always be some amount of junk that's too reactive to toss in a landfill but not reactive enough to use. Also some of it can be used to make bombs, and that makes us rightfully pretty skittish.