I agree with you that climate change > nuclear waste. It is the poly-crisis that touches everything. And I agree that nuclear stuff can be overblown. Most of the time it is fine. But when it goes wrong, it REALLY goes wrong with long term consequences that stretch into tens of thousands of years. It will be dangerous longer than we have had writing or civilization. We will need to signal its danger beyond the current confines of human speech. I feel similarly about the idea of some forms of pollution which will affect places for thousands of years. The thing that gets me is the timescale.

I was watching a post-apocalyptic show the other day and started wondering: if society suddenly collapsed, what would happen to the nuclear power plants? I mean, I know that there are procedures to ramp them down but what then? How would you decommission a nuclear power plant without electricity? Without expertise? What would happen to all the nuclear weapons? I have always wondered if there are catastrophic scenario SOPs for these things.

Now, I have thought that if society does collapse, it will happen more gradually than suddenly. But this little thought exercise made me think that nuclear waste / nuclear energy is one thing that necessitates a certain level of knowledge, expertise, and energy to maintain. A certain level of civilization or modernization.

Again, I could be wrong and I’m willing to change my mind, but that is where I stand at the moment.

Many good things have been said. I would add that what give me comfort is that in the present moment, it is really, really hard to tell signal from noise. You often don’t know the impact of people or events until many years out. We often said in grad school that you can’t write history until at least 30 years have passed from the event. So, it seems chaotic and confusing because it is hard to for us to understand what it important and what is not.

The other thing is that every generation often sees the sky as falling in. An ancient Greek philosophy lamented about his parents had it all figured out and his children where going to ruin everything. That same sense of doom is pretty pervasive.

That is not to dismiss any of the real terrible things out there. Climate change is the big problem on the horizon. Nuclear waste is another. But I think on the balance, we are going to muddle through fine. The great blessing of humanity is that we are adaptable. The curse of humanity is that we are adaptable.

You kind of stole most of my answer! Thanks for sharing.

REALLY tried to like it. Watched the whole thing but then afterwards, I felt like I had watched nothing. The farther away I get from the show, the more I dislike it. All of the acting was great. And when they got away from the video game, the story was wonderful. But I felt like I was watching a video game - which I was in a way. And I felt like it was trying way to hard to be profound. It’s sad because I thought that “Chernobyl” was one of the best things I’ve ever watched on television.

Edit: Completely realize that this post was not about TLoU but just needed to get this off my chest. When everyone raves about it, I feel like I’ve been taking crazy pills. On the subject of the post, yes, streaming services are getting way too expensive and I think we’ll reach an inflection point soon where they will all start collapsing at once.