Because Hungary had been strongly social democratic basically since WW2 (though much of that was behind the iron curtain), and they'd been hugely improving up to their entrance to the union, with only a little mistake of electing Orban once, before going back to a sane Premier.
And then 2010 arrived, and the entire country took a swing Hard Right and down shit street, but by that time they were already in.
Not so much the lack of direct trains, but the cost is what does it for me. For most destinstions in Europe, the train costs more than flying. It's only when you want to go somewhere far from an airport that it gets marginally cheaper, but youre still paying roughly equivalent prices for a much slower trip.
Except for Amsterdam London, which is somehow almost always cheaper by train.
In addition to hazardous materials regulations, I also do workplace safety, and this doesn't surprise me at aaaaall. People get really casual around stuff that kills you slowly.
I mean, spent fuel is actually quite lethal when not packaged, but you get something like 300-400MWh out of a kilo of fuel. And that's significantly more than I'll use in my lifetime.
I'd gladly keep a kilo of dry-casked spent fuel in my house. It'd make an excellent coffee table or something, if a bit hard to move. I would absolutely not put a lifetime supply of benzene anywhere near my house.
Edit: it would make a shitty coffee table. 1 kilo of uranium oxide is just under 100ml
Oh yeah, you could totally just leave it in a giant pool and ignore it. It'll react, evaporate and eventually break down into cyanide again, rain down, subtly poison the area, react again, evaporate again, etc.
And that's great for the owner of the big pool of cyanide, and very bad for everyone else. Stuff that evaporates doesn't disappear, the cyanide doesn't magically change into cookiedough. You're just spreading it around more.
That's uhh, not what that says. One of the two mentions of half life are your body converting cyanide into thiocyanate, which will kill you and depending on your last bowel movement, make your corpse into hazardous waste itself.
The other mention is hydrogen cyanide in air, which is lighter than air and will decompose back into cyanide eventually, scattering it over a large area. Which will technically make it go away from your site, but spreading toxic waste over the countryside is illegal for a reason.
Hi, I work in waste handling, and I would like to tell you about dangerous materials and what we do with them.
There are whole hosts of chemicals that are extremely dangerous, but let's stick with just cyanide, which comes from coal coking, steel making, gold mining and a dozen chemical synthesis processes.
Just like nuclear waste, there is no solution for this. We can't make it go away, and unlike nuclear waste, it doesn't get less dangerous with time. So, why isn't anyone constantly bringing up cyanide waste when talking about gold or steel or Radiopharmaceuticals? Well, that's because we already have a solution, just not "forever".
Cyanide waste, and massive amounts of other hazardous materials, are simply stored in monitored facilities. Imagine a landfill wrapped in plastic and drainage, or a building or cellar with similar measures and someone just watches it. Forever. You can even do stuff like build a golfcourse on it, or malls, or whatever.
There are tens of thousands of these facilities worldwide, and nobody gives a solitary fuck about them. It's a system that works fine, but the second someone suggests we do the same with nuclear waste, which is actually less dangerous than a great many types of chemical waste, people freak out about it not lasting forever.
In the Netherlands, you need to give permission for someone to check yours, and only credit-providers are allowed to check. I can't look at my neighbor's credit data.
The factsheet is vague because it tells countries to find a way to fix a problem. All countries have to come up with a realistic method to improve natural areas, 20% by 2026, 30% need a concrete plan by 2030 and 90% by 2050.
More importantly, there's a requirement that Member States make a significant effort to prevent worsening in the meantime.
What those plans are, is up to the Member States, but they need to be solid and realistic, not the usual vagueness
Unfortunately it only tells countries to make a good effort. But that's better than nothing, and the current policy of doing nothing is at least out of the window.
As someone whose country just put the moronic Farmers party in charge of the environment, this EU law makes me very happy