Exactly as you said: old plants. We don't update them as we should to make them as safe as they can be. That's not an engineering problem, that's a political problem.
Waste storage? Same story. We have plenty of useless desert in the US, but people don't want to be anywhere remotely near them.
Recent advances in solar and wind technology might make it within reach...if we were dealing with 1-2 billion people, not close to 10 billion people in our lifetimes. All of these people want to live like we do: they want to eat meat, they want light at the flick of a switch, they want heat at the turn of a dial. Assuming prices will go down and efficiency will go up to match skyrocketing demand is greatly misguided.
Not to mention, extracting and refining the rare earths necessary for a lot of these devices is unfathomably ruinous to the environment, and recycling is just as bad (see my other comment about lead poisoning in Kenyan kids).
You have brought up 2 political problems and 1 technological fantasy. Nothing about economics. Nuclear is fine.
I don't understand the nuclear waste "problem". Anything that is radioactive for thousands of years is also not very radioactive because it has such a long half-life.
More concerning would be the chemical toxicity hazard, but that is void because nuclear waste is vitrified (turned in to glass), which makes it extremely chemically inert.
Then there's the possibility of recycling the spent fuel (waste?) in fast spectrum reactors, if we can work out how to do that reliably / economically.
It's radioactive for that long because it /is/ waste. We haven't finished extracting the valuable energy from it yet. (that's what 'waste reduction' (breeder) reactors are supposed to do; concentrate up the useful stuff and leave most of it clean enough to either decay really quickly, or so slowly that it's not harmful.)
> It's radioactive for that long because it /is/ waste.
I'm not sure what you're saying here? How does being waste make it radioactive?
If it still contains valuable energy it isn't waste. By virtue of the fact that nobody wants it I'm assuming that energy can't be extracted economically at this time?
There is plenty of energy out there. Recent advances in solar and wind technology make it within reach.
Nuclear is simply not an economical solution.