Is there a solution for nuclear waste? What does one do with it? Isn't it radioactive for like, 50,000 years?
And Arsenic's forever.
1. What's called 'High level nuclear waste' that needs to be stored for 'XX' Thousand years is actually 90-95% usable fuel.
2. A gigawatt nuclear reactor produces 1 or 2 traincars of waste a year. Note: That includes the shielding on the cars. Newer reactors are more efficient, thus produce less.
3. After recycling*, the remaining isotopes will cool to the more or less arbitrary standard of 'as radioactive as the ore it came from' in a few hundred years.
4. Not to mention that you just reduced the amount by a factor of 20
5. Breeder reactors don't even need the recycling, well, most of them. For a breeder, reprocessing is normally done on site.
6. After sitting in a cooling pool for 40 years, then another 40 in a cask on the nuclear site, it's substantially cooler, going from something like 200 hairdryers to less than 1. This reduces reprocessing costs, and reduces additional radioactive waste from contamination.
7. Your average coal plant releases more radioactive material into the atmosphere than a nuclear plant produces that's safely contained. This is because a gigawatt coal plant can go through 200 train cars of coal a day.
8. For that matter, more energy could be obtained from the transuranics in coal than burning the coal.
9. Besides reprocessing, there's also a technology under development to bombard the waste with an accelerator - artificially causing it to undergo fission faster, incidently producing enough power to be useful once more.
*Don't the greenies
WANT that?