For perspective, one person's lifetime nuclear waste would fit in a Coke can.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125740...
For perspective, one person's lifetime nuclear waste would fit in a Coke can.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125740...
Most physical waste from renewables is simple stuff like steel, aluminum, and glass. These are all recyclable, and (more to the point) they will be a small fraction of the same materials produced in the rest of industrial society. If we can deal with the non-energy-related waste from industrial society (and we must, if we are to have an industrial society at all, even a nuclear-powered one), we can deal with the waste from a renewable system to power that society.
You don't need to equate it per unit weight for GP's point to be relevant: there are several orders of magnitude less fission waste than waste from PV or Wind. The entire volume of the dangerous wastes produced by the French nuclear park during its whole life (40 years) can fit in an Olympic swimming pool! (3 200m³).
Of course there are other wastes (up to 4 million cubic meters by the French definition of a nuclear waste, which includes every piece of gravel from a nuclear plant: the walls of my wife's office will one day be considered as “Nuclear waste” by the French authority), but the most dangerous of those isn't specific to nuclear: it's asbestos!
The number to look at is "water dilution volume" -- how much water would some waste need to be diluted in to bring it down to regulatory limits. For spent fuel 1 year out of a reactor, the waste from 1 GW(e)-year would need to be diluted in something like 3 trillion tonnes of water to reach regulatory limits. This is dominated by soluble species like Cs and Sr.