| The waste is a vastly exaggerated problem. We've released vastly more uranium and thorium into the atmosphere via burning of coal than we've generated waste from nuclear plants that needs long term storage (the vast majority of nuclear waste by volume has a half life short enough that it is not a storage problem for more than a few decades; only a few percent needs long term storage). Now, the waste that needs long term storage is more dangerous than the dispersed uranium from coal, but most of the spent fuel can also be reprocessed at least once, and at least India is looking into reprocessing spent fuel multiple times to reduce the amount of high level waste that actually needs to be stored rather than reused. The resulting storage volume is miniscule, and while it needs to be dealt with, it takes a lot for it to be a significant risk. E.g. plutonium is nasty in some ways - you really don't want to breathe in particulate. But it mostly emits alpha particles, which can be blocked by not much more than cardboard (I remember physics class when our teachers demonstrated with an alpha source, a geiger counter and cardboard...). Large scale dispersal of plutonium particulate would require a large explosion, so the challenge with plutonium (and uranium) storage is largely to ensure there's no risk of reaching critical mass. But that's "simple" enough to do just by diluting the material enough. There is a security aspect (you don't want people to have an easy way of mining plutonium from waste to produce weapons) but the main storage problem is down to fear. Most of the gamma emitters have short half lives. I grew up in Norway, and remember the massive fear after Chernobyl relating to Caesium contamination for example (fallout making it into the soil caused Cesium to get picked up in various plants that were eaten by sheep, deer, elks etc. in the highland regions). While it was a public health concern, Caesium-137 has a half-life of "only" 30 years, and a biological half-life in the human body of a few months, and there are plenty of "workarounds" in the case of a major accident (deep ploughing; screening the riskiest food sources; fertilizing with potassium) that helps reduce Caesium uptake until it's radioactivity has sufficiently diminished and/or it has been spread enough to not be a problem any more. That's not to say we shouldn't take nuclear waste seriously, but it's not a big deal compared to a lot of other hazardous waste we don't think twice about. |