[mimixco]

Hanford and Rocky Flats are two of the most polluted places on Earth. Hanford has polluted the Columbia River, a tragedy in itself.

Nuclear is like the insolent child who refuses to clean up his room. There isn't any cleanup, really. The waste keeps piling up (usually in something that looks like a swimming pool). It must be attended to by humans for decades or centuries. And the uranium cycle leaves its dirty underwear all over our planet.

There is nothing eco about nuclear.

[benzofuran]

Thus reprocessing - if Hanford's government contractors could get over the hump and get the vitrification plant online, it'd be a lot easier to clean up the waste that's interred in the solid dump and tank farms. And if we didn't have state governors screaming about "No atoms and radiation in my state!" and not allowing passage of waste through their state in properly designed containment and transfer casks, we'd be able to get that waste to a facility where it can be made safer.

The radiation plume under Hanford is not as terrible as certain sources make it to be, the same with the contamination of the river. The area around the reservation itself has led to a recovered and strong population of many endangered indigenous animals in the area as well.

Regarding Rocky Flats, again, not as terrible as many make it out to be. Once you factor in living at high elevation there's not a huge increase in overall exposure.

An important consideration that comes into this is that most of these were weapons production facilities (dealing with purifying and handling some of the nastiest material around).

The waste from properly designed and operated power reactors is a much cleaner and much easier to contain process. Condemning an entire avenue of clean energy (most of the fuel needs for a century+ which have already been extracted and refined) because the work done on the technology in the 40's-60's (when we were still figuring out how awful some of the waste is), is not conducive to progress.

Source: Field engineering on projects at Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Yucca Mountain