That's just hope. How convenient not having to deal with the mess! To me, it sounds like a religion.
The same argument could be applied to rising CO2 levels. Just let future generations figure it out. What could go wrong?
The "safely" caveat is controversial, maybe even dubious, certainly politically charged, but there's a fundamental difference here nonetheless.
Er, no this is demonstrably false. France recycles >98% of its spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors. This isn't fantasy, this is already existing technology. It's not as profitable at the moment which is why few countries recycle waste but it is absolutely something that could be done in the future.
It's not like rising CO2 levels, and this comparison is intellectually dishonest in the extreme. Rising CO2 in the atmosphere levels impact the environment, spent nuclear fuel buried underground does not. The possibility of contamination is either nullified by storing waste in areas already contaminated by nuclear testing, or by burying it miles underground.
Unfortunately nuclear energy had a very bad PR for past 50 years, as a result nobody wanted to do any searcher in areas related to it).
It seems that it is slightly better now, environmental organizations at least are not trying to occupy nuclear reactors, unfortunately still they are pushing wind farms and solar farms, even though they cannot be usable on a massive scale without efficient way to store energy surplus.
There is not a positive way to tell people that will be forced to quit their homes, workplaces and properties when nuclear problems eventually arose but hide information or lie systematically about it does not help, neither does the "see no evil/ what could happen?/ but nobody died / your cancer is not my fault" permanent defensive stance deployed again and again.
Nuclear energy sector worked hard to earn the current mistrust
That is an enormous problem, but the problem there is that governments aren't being held accountable for forcing people out of their homes.
The Fukashima evacuation debatabley caused ~3 orders of magnitude more deaths than the Fukushima nuclear disaster ([0] see the sidebar for 2,000:1 figure and the opening paragraphs for the debatable part).
When the cure is that much worse than the disease, we have to ask why we are forcing people to evacuate.
Whenever the government enacts a policy there are the potential for statistical deaths. Approve a coal plant? Statistical deaths. Change safety standards? Statistical deaths. Drop speed limits? Statistical deaths. We can cope with some unidentifiable people being worse off. It happens all the time. The responses to nuclear risks are not only irrational, they are out of line with how we treat all other physical and chemical hazards.
Statistical illness and deaths from nuclear are not worse than any other health issue. This is a fantastic time to use the science to make decisions, and it isn't at all obvious to what standard the exclusion zones are being managed. When the gap in damage done by the response and the crisis is that large there is a lot of room for questions to be asked (I wish I spoke Japanese so I could look up some primary reports on the subject).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
In that case, is there an increase or decrease in statistical deaths? We had a recent change here and I'm interested on how it might change things
I guess that maybe is for things like that:
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2915/2004/1600/belarus.jp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...
The Integral Fast Reactor was a reality in 1994, including a reprocessing scheme and inherent safety, when congress cut its funding. It's not my favorite reactor. My favorite, the molten chloride fast reactor, was theoretically investigated in 1972, including its potential for transmutation of actinides (excellent), I-129, Tc-99 (both good) and even Sr-90 and Cs-137 (both rather pointless).
What could go wrong and in fact did go wrong is politics. That's what prevents the practical investigations.
Renewable is simply a cheaper, easier form of energy. And it gets cheaper every single day.
And many of the bids for power projects are including batteries as well.
Meanwhile, my home country is phasing out "expensive" nuclear and building up "cheap, easy" renewables, and electricity gets more expensive every year.
Renewable here are propped by subsidies even to get at the same price of nuclear-produced electricity, so I don't know how you get that.