[paulmd]

We don't need billions of years though, "hundreds of years" of fuel is hopefully long enough for us to figure out the tech that will get us through the next couple hundred years after that. And nuclear is fine for that. We're not talking kicking the can down the road by 20 years, we're talking hundreds or perhaps thousands of years of fuel.

Humans are plenty smart and the people of tomorrow will be better equipped to solve tomorrow's problems.

It's not even a matter of "ripping off a band aid" and paneling up the planet - solar panels aren't going to last hundreds of years either, we will be lucky to get 30 years out of them. Can we make more, sure, but we could also do nuclear and then make solar panels in 500 years when we're running out of fuel.

The biggest problems are that we need to come up with the political will to reprocess waste (extracting additional usable fuel and compacting the amount of true waste that needs to be disposed of) and then dispose of it in a proper repository rather than just letting it sit around on-site indefinitely Fukushima-style.