Can't they not put some of the waste into containment barrels and stow them somewhere?
Provided the waste isn't liquid and won't migrate off site, it's fairly easy to contain. Much of the really bad waste that we have to deal with in the present is not the result of power generation reactors, it's the result of nuclear weapons production.
Unfortunately, most people since the 1970s are incapable of distinguishing between peaceful reactors and nuclear weapons, so there's an incredible amount of fear involved.
Spent nuclear fuel is given time to cool off under a pool of water. After that, it is encased in a concrete cylinder. These cylinders are then buried. The main concern for the burial site is that it isn't close to an aquifer, in case the cylinders degrade and leak fuel.
Geologic activity is not a concern for the waste itself (but it could damage entrance tunnels for the digs), in fact some groups are experimenting with using subduction zones to make waste get sucked out of the earth's crust.
Thieves are not a concern either. The waste caskets are huge concrete cylinders buried underground. One might as well mine uranium. Or just buy it commercially. Reprocessing the waste into weapons requires large centrifuges which are much harder to obtain than uranium itself.
The hypothetical scenarios in which humans could be contaminated by buried nuclear waste are well into the realm of hyperbole. Sure, if someone dug hundreds of meters underground in a waste disposal site with no natural resources in the vicinity and broke open the storage caskets then yes, they will be exposed to radiation. There's no way that this would happen accidentally, at least short of even more outlandish scenarios that involve societal collapse, subsequent loss of all records describing nuclear waste disposal sites.
Edit (HN won't let me respond): Let me phrase it better: the Yucca mountain dig has enough capacity at the moment to accommodate the waste that would be generated by nuclear power over the course of centuries. The waste itself will be stored for millennia (though much of it will likely be reprocessed if nuclear power becomes more popular).
The point remains: nuclear waste disposal is a solved problem
Also, you don't need to process nuclear waste to build a weapon. Attach some Caesium-137 to an air-burst weapon and you can ruin lots of land really quick.
It's ironic how the "centuries" mentioned are in fact not enough (by a long shot) for 100% of the waste to decade.
If the more accurate "millennia" was used, it would be unrealistic in a very obvious way (at least, to prudent engineers/managers) to talk about maintenance.
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Software project, 20 years after: "This project sucks. Nobody knows it. It's undocumented. There are bugs unfixed for years. There are no tools to work with it. We can't work on it without breaking something. It's a disaster."
Nuclear waste disposal project, 10.000 years after: "EVERYTHING IS PERFECTLY FINE".
Sure. /sarcasm
Not to mention the need for extremely long-term solutions on the scale of 10,000 years. You can't rely on any current civilization or language still existing. So you have to properly communicate "Don't go in here or mess with anything, this is dangerous" without words.
And that's after figuring out the above problem of the actual storage facility.
Oh definitely not, just a consideration that's needed.
The bigger issue is that there is no current long-term storage solution. The communication bit is long-long-term thinking while storage of material is current need.
There is a long-term storage facility in Norway, I believe, that is being built or has been built.
So are we really going to block effectively unlimited non-intermittent carbon-free energy based on the concern that some future civilization might decide to dig deep in a remote location with no natural resources, and they might encounter a waste casket, and they might decide to open it. And they might do all of this without any knowledge of radiation poising. Yes, if all of those conditions are met, some poor sap thousands of years from now is going to get irradiated.
I'm going to weight the positives of nuclear power way higher than the narrow chances of people being contaminated by waste. There are valid concerns over safety and costs of decommissioning, but those are limited to the operation of the plant itself and the disposal of the reactor (the pressure vessel). The waste management argument is very weak.
That's a solved problem already. Skull and crossbones, etc.
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/beyond-biohazard-dang...
Iconography across cultures is a fractally hard problem, as you just demonstrated.
Even having past civilizations being storytellers causes the story and culture to mutate over generations.
You are talking about a 100 generation game of telephone to make sure one particular symbol is passed down with perfect recall.
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Personally the best solution in my opinion is bury it deep down in a chamber that can withstand the time needed, leave signs on the outsides of the container. Then forget about it.
Don't bother marking it visibly on the surface level.
Arrrrg, don't be riskin' yur life inna therr!
The unshielded fusion reactor which we orbit around is likely to be a bigger problem.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26425674
> Despite advanced schemes in Finland, not a single country worldwide has an operational underground repository.
For medium-grade radioactive waste landfills typical at research sites (landfills that contain things like transuranic/TRU contaminated materials, things like gloves/aprons/tools/containers used with uranium), the process is generally to excavate the landfill using equipment with air filtration (and using chemical binders and site containment to prevent radioactive fugitive dust), then loading the material into large gloveboxes where workers sort through it by hand to classify based on type of material and radioactivity levels to ensure that it is all safe for the intended storage strategy. It is then usually mixed with something to provide shock protection, binding, and contain any liquid seepage (famously often cat litter).
The big problem is that acquiring equipment with operator protection for this kind of work, and building out a processing facility with gloveboxes, air filtration, and monitoring/sampling (which needs to be onsite since, prior to processing, none of the waste is considered safe for transport) is expensive and takes quite some time. Even then, since there is usually no perceived urgency, a relatively small facility will be built that will take many years to complete the job.
The waste, once packaged, may be stored on-site or transferred to a short-term repository (often just a well-built warehouse where certified staff monitor for any trouble). Ultimately it should be transferred to a long-term repository where it should be safe for the indefinite future without expensive continuous monitoring, but for a variety of reasons, both technical and political, this doesn't yet happen on a large scale.
This is, though, what is happening in New Mexico right now - various sites, but most notably Los Alamos National Laboratories, are excavating and processing their waste landfills, packaging the material, storing it temporarily on site in purpose-build facilities or transporting it to an off-site certified storage facilities (e.g. commercial operations near the New Mexico-Texas border), and ultimately transferring it to the WIPP geological repository. If you know anything about WIPP's rather rocky recent past, you will know that this process is still fraught with occasional problems and the industry has plenty more to learn about how to do it safely and efficiently.