Waste sitting in pits could fill almost 883,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, and oil companies say they need to find a way to reduce it
The companies, including an affiliate of Exxon Mobil, are lobbying the Canadian government to set rules that would allow them to treat the waste and release it into the Athabasca River by 2025, so they have enough time to meet their commitments to eventually close the mines.
Of course they are.
The nuclear power industry is essentially the only one that’s been mandated to be responsible for the cleanup of the entire lifecycle of their product. No other industry has to pay clean up after the mining, refining, use, recycling, long term storage, and disposal. And to be clear, that’s good – every industry should be like that. Nobody should have the “freedom” to dump without repercussions.
I think if the fossil fuel industry also had to shoulder the costs of all their externalities, they would be far less profitable than nuclear power. The entire industry is basically reliant on their ability to dump toxic garbage wherever they want, because if they couldn’t do that, there would be no industry.