Can we talk about the waste that’s cast off when the reactor has finished its use of it? I understand the material will remain radioactive for centuries. Nobody wants that in their backyard.
Not to downplay the issue, but global warming is a much more urgent issue. It's expected to cause far more disasters a lot sooner than any potential disaster from our nuclear waste.
To answer your question more practically though, our nuclear waste would fit into a building the size of a football field. There's even a proposal to put it in some mine/cave in the western United States.
I would be pro-nuclear except for the waste problem. I don’t trust humanity to be able to confine the waste for centuries. For all we know it could be seen as some sort of “treasure” by future, ignorant, civilizations, dug up, and spread around in trinkets. If there is a way of permanently and completely removing them from the biosphere, I’d change my mind.
...if the alternative is climate change continuing to worsen until renewable technologies (particularly energy storage and transmission) are up to par and scale, which one do you prefer?
That's a tough call, but I'd prefer pushing harder on renewable research or finding a permanent solution to the nuclear waste problem, because, as bad as humans are at dealing with medium term consequences of our activities (see climate change), we have no track record of dealing with the long term, and ultra-long term consequences of what we do.
You have worse waste than nuclear waste, some chemical waste does not even degrade with time and will be there forever, doesn't that sound even scarier?
