Today I Learned

Spent nuclear fuel is absolutely an environmental hazard, but nuclear power is kinda the least-worst option for managing base load right now.

Practical fusion is decades away still, and while solar and wind are great, electrical grids don't function unless they can exactly meet electrical demand 100% of the time. You need something that can rapidly scale up and down on demand, regardless of time of day or inclement weather, otherwise one good winter storm and everyone loses their heating (assuming you've managed to transition off gas and on to electrical heating). If nuclear is out then your other options are hydro (required very specific geography and has its own environmental impact) or gas/oil/coal.

You can make solar/wind more practical by using grid-scale storage, but the amount of grid storage required to fully decarbonise the grid world-wide just isn't practical unless you can generate significant amounts of power through other means.

Personally, my hope is for a zero-carbon electrical grid in my lifetime. Ideally that won't involve nuclear, but if the choice is nuclear or carbon I'll take nuclear.

Nuclear waste management is a solved problem, conceptually it is quite simple and elegant.

You litterarly just dig a hole, put the waste there and fill the hole in.

Practially you need to dig a deep hole in stable bedrock, put the spent fuel in special fuel containers which are put in the hole, which is backfilled.

Here in Scandinavia we have stable bedrock and technology to drill into it, I have for several years asked myself why we don't get into the international nuclear waste management business, nuclear waste takes up a surprisingly small ammount of physical space, so Sweden, Finland and Norway could just build one facility each and start selling space in them to other nations.

I have also thought about using the waste to boost geothermal power, spent nuclear fuel will still generate a bit of heat, so run geothermal loops around the main tunnel, I realize that the ammount of heat generated by the spent fuel would be limited, but it would still be there and with geothermal heat pumps we can use the extra heat energy to safely heat houses.

I would have zero issues with it if the government decided to build a spent nuclear fuel permanent storage site in my small town.

Please note however, I only see nuclear power as an interim solution, something that will power us through the next 100-150 years, and quickly phase out fossil fuel power generation, while we buy ourselves time to build sustainable power generation that works.

And the amount of uranium available would only get us through to the end of the century.

Just throw it in a subduction rift, give the earth a yummy snack

I always wonder how much of the nuclear fanboyism on social media is actually astroturfing. I suspect it's the majority. While there surely are some genuinely misguided people out there the sheer amount of bullshit you get thrown at you whenever you say anything critical of nuclear technology is just insane.