You can't dismiss the waste problem out of hand given the environmental problems at places like Hanford [0] and the costs of safely decommissioning old plants, especially damaged ones like Fukushima [1]. There's abundant evidence that it's a costly, poisonous mess if done badly.
Personally I don't think this is the biggest problem with nuclear power, and it's certainly not in and of itself a reason to switch to alternatives. But it's not an issue to ignore either.
The output of a nuclear reactor isn’t waste, it is fuel for a different kind of reactor. If we built those reactors (called a breeder reactor) then we could safely and economically use that fuel, recycling so much that the actual waste would go from tons of material filling Olympic class swimming pools, to a few barrels. Nuclear power, done properly, is the cleanest source of energy we have.
Why don’t we? Politics and the lack of military uses.
As opposed to all those military uses of dams and wind turbines. Right. And of course, I wonder what the fuss is all about with Iran, then...
The reason nuclear is in decline is the track record of spectacular disasters: Three Mile, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima. Get at least a generation without massive failures, and people might be willing to give nuclear a chance; but there have been 3 in my lifetime alone!
(Plus, in any country not as big and isolated as the US, any plant is a massive weakness from a defense perspective...)
I mean, if you want to talk about safety records of power production, I'd like to point out that fossil fuels kill about 3 million a year, and biofuel (wood, dung) kills about 4.3 million a year. Those estimates are from 2012.
Nuclear is nowhere close to that over the past half century of use, even if you toss in fatalities caused by nuclear weapons, which is a whole different category.
Realistically, installation of solar and wind is actually more dangerous than Nuclear, because of falls.
What I mean is that the fuel reprocessing designs aren’t miniaturizable, so government money wasn’t spent developing them because they couldn’t be used in aircraft carriers or submarines. When civilian power plants were made, it was basically just scaled up military designs. The same contractors built both.
Also the fact that we use uranium instead of the safer and more abundant thorium is because you can’t make thorium bombs.
The reactors that have failed are these military derivative designs that lack safety features because there is no space for them in a submarine. No modern design has had such a failure, or could have such a failure since they have no reliance on active cooling and have safeguards to structurally prevent a core meltdown.
You can't bring up the externalities of Nuclear and then ignore the externalities of literally every other clean energy source. How many people in China were killed building Hydro plants, how many poisoned by heavy metals manufacturing solar equipment?
Nuclear has its issues, but everything else does too.
"how many poisoned by heavy metals manufacturing solar equipment"
Zero? How many people have died making manufacturing computers, tvs, toys, or appliances; all of which have all the same heavy metals as solar panels by virtue of being electronic goods? This is essentially FUD. A single PV panel can generate 5-10 Mwh over its service life, conservatively. On the low end that is equivalent to about 2 tons of coal. Since coal contains a broad cross section of heavy metals and they become more bioavailable when burned, I think you're better off with the panels.
Hanford is a cite of nulcear production for military use and there were problems with that.
It has little to do with nuclear waste for civilian use today and is in no way comparable to civilian nuclear waste and how it is stored.
Also, Fukushima is the exception of the exception, it is a bit of land that can not be used for long while its not a lot of land and its in a nuclear exclusion zone anyway.
I don't want to ignore the issue, but I will just say that the amount of time, ink and energy spend on it is way out of proportion to how much it matters
People keep making the argument that climate change is a existential issue but then saw, well, nuclear is not a solution because of this nuclear waste problem. That is insane reasoning in my opinion.
Personally I don't think this is the biggest problem with nuclear power, and it's certainly not in and of itself a reason to switch to alternatives. But it's not an issue to ignore either.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/03/24/national/estima...