The cost for handling nuclear waste is likewise ignored. Even worse, forget the cost, just knowing what to do with the waste isn’t absolved problem. A solution isn’t a solution until we know how to deal with this last step.
Temporarily storing the waste onsite forever isn’t a solution.
Fusion is a pipe dream, an absolute fantasy. Yes, we should still research it, but it’s still a fantasy. We can’t even sustain a positive energy fusion reaction let alone deploy it as an energy source.
Waste isn't 'temporarily stored onsite forever' It's stored in cooling pools onsite while the most active radionuclides decay, because the fuel elements are giving off enough heat to melt if not actively cooled. This takes around 5 years. After that the waste is moved offsite for vitrification and storage.
Vitrified nuclear waste has caused a grand total of 0 deaths or incidents throughout its history. More people die due to solar plants each year than have died to vitrified nuclear waste in all time.
Gen 3, never mind gen 4 reactors are able to consume waste from older reactor designs and spit out relatively inert waste products. Gen 4 reactors generally don't produce the kind of active waste that needs cooling pools, and their waste can be immediately made inert.
The hot waste problem exists only because most plants operating today date back to cold war era designs and were intended to produce weapons grade nuclear material rather than the the cleanest kWh. Despite that, they're still cleaner than every other energy source we have today.
> Vitrified nuclear waste has caused a grand total of 0 deaths or incidents throughout its history.
How do you know? From what I learned, a big problem with spent fuel is radiotoxicity. How do we know that no amount of weakly radioactive, but pretty toxic because of that material made it to the environment? Are all those storage containers that safe?
Vitrification is the process of turning the spent fuel into a glass-like substance. This includes chemically stabilising the fuel so that it's not chemically reactive, and immobilising it in a crystalline structure. While vitrified waste is stored in containers, it doesn't really need them. The only way it would be a health hazard is if it were liquefied with sulphuric acid or aerosolised by explosion and then ingested.
Even if all that were to happen in the worst possible case scenario (as has happened at Lake Karachay in Russia where untreated nuclear waste leaked into the groundwater in large volumes), it's still a long shot from being as deadly as the fossil fuels we take as a given today. That sets the upper worst hypothetical imaginary case for vitrified nuclear waste if some super volcano erupts at the storage site and converts it back into a chemically active form.
You can buy kitchen plates and glasses made from uranium glass, and that stuff is relatively a bigger hazard than vitrified nuclear waste. So is the americium in your smoke alarm, so are the various nuclear materials used at your local hospital for radiography and radiology.
To really nail this point home: coal fired power plants release more radioactive waste into the environment that nuclear plants do. The trace uranium found in coal can't be combusted and makes its way out the chimney, and that is more than a nuclear plant releases including disposal [1].
> coal fired power plants release more radioactive waste into the environment that nuclear plants do.
Are the coal-produced concentrations of such waste equal or higher than with the nuclear power waste? Say, if somebody is particularly unlucky and digests that?
Temporarily storing the waste onsite forever isn’t a solution.
Fusion is a pipe dream, an absolute fantasy. Yes, we should still research it, but it’s still a fantasy. We can’t even sustain a positive energy fusion reaction let alone deploy it as an energy source.