ok well lets settle it. how much waste would be produced if the whole country ran on nuclear? regardless of the volume of waste, how serious is a breach of containment? is the waste a target for terrorists? can it be weaponized?
That waste goes into Yucca mountain, and it's behind / underneath 100s of meters of neutron heavy metals. If we were exclusively powered by nuclear power for a century without recycling, it'd be something like 100 football fields. Absolutely, completely, utterly inconsequential.
1 inch of neutron-heavy lead is enough to dispel the radioactivity from full blast of a thermonuclear weapon and be safe for a human. Saying that the Yucca mountain waste facility had potential for harm is the most unscientific, embarrassing thing that a certain unnamed political party has ever claimed on nuclear waste.
and meanwhile solar is simple and there are no doubts about it. probably much easier to do cleanly. nuclear people want us to hold out for this miracle reactor that cant melt down, but they are too impatient for a panel that doesnt have heavy metals?
and its not embarrassing, i just think solar edges out nuclear. im not dogmatically against nuclear.
It seems like we should put all our eggs into one basket but why? If people realised how 'anti-nuclear' they actually were, things would move along faster.
Yucca Mountain hasn't accepted waste and there is no plan for it to begin accepting it. The government collects a tax on nuclear generation and used it to construct Yucca Mountain but political considerations have blocked it being used.
There is no current plan for long term storage of nuclear waste in the US.
Replace Yucca Mountain with any out of the way mountain, and there are many around the world globally. (We wouldn't want to be shipping every nation's nuclear waste to one spot).
The point is that nuclear waste has been well understood for 75 years. The mechanism for how it's shielded, by natural means, is so well understood that the political destruction of these sites is a crime against science.
The fissile, radioactive isotopes came from mountains in the first place, and we're not telling people to not live by mountains.