What exactly about this do you not buy?
And what is your solution for storing nuclear waste safely for hundreds of thousands of years?
> And what is your solution for storing nuclear waste safely for hundreds of thousands of years?
While it's a problem, it's actually a fairly tractable one, because the volume of high level waste is small and it doesn't leave the plant as part of normal operations. For coal power, for contrast, we store much of the waste in peoples' lungs.
See https://whatisnuclear.com/chernobyl-main.html#again
Or even just another comment in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653778
Or the fact that it hasn't happened despite hundreds of active nuclear power plants around the world (not all in countries that you would expect to have high safety standards).
Or the safety statistics in general: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Same with the waste issue. Nobody asks what the proposed solution is for CO2 storage (it will remain for billions of years! The horror!) when proposing to keep open coal/gas plants a bit longer until we have solar/wind/hydro+storage all set up, but with nuclear we need to find more reasons for the phase-out.
Here's another info page: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
> If these materials are burnt in fuel through recycling, nuclear waste would only remain radioactive for a few hundred years
And that's ignoring that we're also managing to deal with the waste so far just fine, also without recycling.
(The tally is at 40 minutes time wasted for these two answer so far, also because most of the previous one was 'researched' and written on mobile. How long did it take to ask the question? This is why I contemplate templates.)
"Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from a million years to 30 minutes"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30652334
Obviously this particular idea is still blue-sky but as technology improves, I'd like to think we'll be able to solve problems like this within a few decades.
(although I'm still waiting for my Mr Fusion, Flying Car etc).
We got from horses to Lamborghini Huracan in a century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...