Because nuclear leaves toxic waste that lasts over 10000 years in the best case; and because wind, hydro, solar, and tidal are better alternatives in most cases.
>Because nuclear leaves toxic waste that lasts over 10000 years in the best case;
That might be theoretically true for the moment, but not in the near future. Right now waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
>...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years
>...and because wind, hydro, solar, and tidal are better alternatives in most cases.
Most cases? How is that? The issue with most of those sources are the very low capacity factor. There are obvious reasons that (except for hydro) that currently they generate very little percentage of the world's electricity. In the case of hydro it has caused more environmental devastation than almost any power source except coal and the accidents have caused orders of magnitude more devastation than other power sources.
Wind power kills more people per kWh than nuclear does. Hydro power often relies on dams that devastate ecosystems. Solar is expensive as hell. I don't even know about tidal, does anyone even do that?
France has had a tidal generator for 50 years, where have you been? I do recognize that model is limited, and other sites are few and fraught with the same issues as dams: natural flow is better for the ecosystem in those locations.
For what it is worth the cost of solar is dropping - and pretty steadily at that, if I recall correctly.
Japan has researched and is working on developing tidal energy [0]. But that's the only case I know of off-hand even related to tidal energy at all... and it hasn't been built yet.
At some point you have to accept that all energy sources have drawbacks. Besides not making a whole lot of sense, this particular objection is pretty small potatoes compared to toxic fogs that kill people by the thousands, or other fossil fuels that appear to be altering the climate on a planetary scale.
No, the existing storage pools at nuclear reactors provide a long-term buffer that can smooth out any irregularities in shipping. After all, there already is such an irregularity.
Once you start shipping the waste again, it's not really all that difficult. It's transported in containers which are essentially indestructible.
So, make the Navy earn their keep by escorting it.
The US and Russian navies have already been transporting nuclear material all over the planet on their ships and submarines, in the form of both power-generation reactors and ballistic missiles. They have been doing so for decades with a very good safety record.
What gives you the ability to make a prediction on the 10,000-year scale? That seems wildly inappropriate. 10,000 years ago, you'd be the person saying "We should bury our magic artifacts in a big tomb in the desert! Nobody will find out what is inside for 10,000 years, because nobody can live in the desert and the sand is too hard to travel across..."
Any you'd be completely wrong about that. Because 10,000 years is far too long for some off-the-cuff calculation to draw reliable conclusions from. It's not even clear you could put this stuff safely on the moon once you start throwing around 10,000-year timescales.
The concern with long-term storage in places like WIPP is the possibility that future subliterate humans may access the site without being able to understand the warnings. But if we store the waste in Antarctica, that's not a realistic possibility. No one can go there without access to significant intellectual and technological resources.
And it's unreasonable to suggest that nuclear waste couldn't be safely stored on the moon. Any future civilizations who can travel to the moon will almost certainly be acquainted with nuclear physics themselves. However, launching high-level waste into space has obvious risks of its own. It will also make it hard to recycle it later, if future technologies are able to extract more power from it.
It's just as likely for some very literate future humans to build a city on top of it and have it seep into their ground water. Or maybe even a volcano or earthquake knocks it all out into our oceans.
It's not about other people being too stupid to handle it. It's that we're too stupid to handle it right now, so any way we handle it is liable to be a huge mistake in both unforeseen and easy-to-predict ways.
I think you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. Nobody is going to build a city on top of anything in Antarctica. The other calamities you mention aren't going to happen either, at least not in any location chosen for this purpose.
Meanwhile, people are dying right now from fossil fuel emissions. It just doesn't look all edgy and apocalyptic on CNN the way a nuclear accident does, so you don't care.
I don't actually think sticking it in Antarctica is a bad idea. I'm not arguing about that. I just think your attempt at making a 10,000-year prediction about human behavior and construction is absolutely crazy.
You don't even know what people are going to do 200 years from now, let alone 10,000. Try to image how much is going to happen in that much time. How many people will have lived and died? What is the population of Earth? What is the climate like? We just wouldn't build a city out there to drill for oil? Or any reason? Extrapolate this out.
Transport is the only problem here. If there's a way of reburning fuel, or of containing it on-site long enough that most of the most harmful radiation has subsided you'll be fine.
The shorter the half-life, the more dangerous the radiation is. Radioactive elements with long half lives are generally less damaging and it's only from prolonged exposure you're in trouble.
Polonium is notoriously toxic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...) and has a furiously short half-life. Plutonium has a half-life of about 24,000 years so the radiation is spread out over a much, much longer period of time.
You can hold a plutonium sphere and suffer no ill-effects. The same cannot be said for one of polonium, something so nasty that nanograms of the material can kill you.
So basically it's the short-lived elements you need to worry about the most. The long-lived ones are relatively harmless. The biggest concern with those is securing them from those intent on using them for harm, as refining and weaponizing nuclear waste is a concern.
That might be theoretically true for the moment, but not in the near future. Right now waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
>...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
>...and because wind, hydro, solar, and tidal are better alternatives in most cases.
Most cases? How is that? The issue with most of those sources are the very low capacity factor. There are obvious reasons that (except for hydro) that currently they generate very little percentage of the world's electricity. In the case of hydro it has caused more environmental devastation than almost any power source except coal and the accidents have caused orders of magnitude more devastation than other power sources.