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Radioactive waste is highly toxic. It does decay over time, eventually becoming radiologically inert, but the time high level waste takes to decay to the radioactive toxicity of uranium ore, which is not exactly safe, is 6,000,000 years. It is hard for people to imagine a period of time this long. It is about twenty times as long as Homo sapiens has existed, and about 100,000 times the age of Pericutin, our youngest volcano. So no one knows where to put the waste to be safe from unforeseeable natural change.

Its toxicity does not require any direct exposure, the radiations can go through sealed containers. Furthermore, different types of radiation require different types of shielding.

It poses security problems because it can be used to create weapons.

The political realities are such that few people are willing to live near a place where the waste is put, so in the United States there is no comprehensive plant to deal with high level waste. The result of this is that the high level waste is stored on the banks of rivers and lakes and on the seashore, because that is where the nuclear plants are.

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