[Jedi72]

Regardless of the reasoning, if the US cant keep a site operating for even 100 years, how do we expect it to keep functioning for 10,000?

Storing nuear waste is a complete non-starter for me simply because of the timelines involved. Nobody can guarantee the safety of anything for thousands (!!) of years, when the USA itself is only ~400 years old.

[allovernow]

Storage of spent fuel is almost entirely passive. You're literally burying it in a geologically stable site, where even if the containers completely dissolve it will take hundreds of thousands or millions of years for that waste to even potentially impact the greater environment to any significant degree.

The only conceivable risk is for some future civilization coming across the cache, not knowing what it is, and potentially suffering as a result. Which presumes that such a civilization will have declined substantially in scientific knowledge at which point it is unlikely that such access would even affect more than a small group of future peoples.

The risk is practically non existent, especially when compared to the risk of continuing to ignore nuclear now. This is pure, unsubstantiated fearmongering.

[briffle]

You really don't need to. The whole reason we have the waste problem now is politics. We could reprocess the waste. the 'old' rods still have 95% of their energy in them. President Carter ended that with a single executive order.