Sanguine about how to handle the radioactive wastes

A new book by big name in the movement stake out the boundaries of that debate. On the pro-nuclear side stands Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, by Stewart Brand.

Stewart Brand is fairly sanguine about how to handle the radioactive wastes produced by nuclear power plants. He regards efforts to somehow isolate nuclear wastes for thousands of years as not just absurdly costly, but also wrongheaded, arguing instead that we should figure out how to store it for a couple of hundred years and leave to future generations the choice of what to do with the used fuel. “If we and our technology prosper, humanity by then will be unimaginably capable compared to now, with far more interesting things to worry about than some easily detected and treated stray radioactivity somewhere in the landscape,” writes Brand. “If we crash back to the stone age, odd doses of radioactivity will be the least of our problems. Extrapolate to two thousand years, ten thousand years. The problem doesn’t get worse over time, it vanishes over time.”