Reply #14: I had always had my doubts.

[SheilaT]

The lifetime of nuclear waste can be extremely long, and I've occasionally come across stuff that talks about how are we going to protect dangerous nuclear waste for the many thousands of years it will remain dangerous, given the way civilizations have risen and fallen in the time human civilization has been around. How do we build waste sites so that many years down the road people who have no idea what is there, who no longer speak, read, or write any current languages, can be made to understand that this stuff is dangerous, very dangerous.

Obviously, things like what's happened at Chernobyl and more recently at Fukushima are more immediately worrisome, but there are long-term aspects that I'm not sure have ever been fully addressed by anyone, not governments, not the nuclear industry itself, not journalists, not anyone so far as I can tell.