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Again, when you bury uranium half a kilometer deep in an area with no aquifer, how will it ever result in contamination?

The only real scenarios are deliberate excavation, and a meteor impact directly on the waste repository. Neither of which are particularly likely scenarios.


Because the ground is not static. And we are just starting to understand what is going on down there. So yes, there are sites that remained quite unchanged (like with the natural fission reactor), but personally I remain sceptical with such statements.
Manuel_D OP
Half a kilometer isn't particularly deep. There are dozens of mines over 2 KM deep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deepest_mines

Are we supposed to hold off on developing the only geographically independent and non-intermittent form of clean energy because of some vague nebulous fear that waste buried half a kilometer deep in bedrock will come back up to the surface and harm people... somehow?

No, but maybe we should not pretend all is super safe and always will be, when we cannot know currently.

Or rather we do know that the initial promises of reactor safety were also quite overconfident. So people assume the same of permanent storage of the waste.

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