There is a way to dispose of it properly, but the water will always get through whatever you do. At best with the most advanced technology, like in France recently, the waste can be put under the earth with vitrification and a whole load of processes, and can last up to several hundred thousand years (at best, and without seismological activity ! big if in some countries), which is still a limited amount of time before water gets in it. Still, you need a lot of fucking money and knowledge to do it correctly, and without years and years of experience you would fuck it up. It's kind of a bet against time, you need to separate the waste from its exterior environment long enough for the radioactivity to subceed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Vitrification (not up to date tho)
The thing is its still recent and only the most advanced countries utilizing nuclear power actually search for better ways, but even in France where its very advanced, the nuclear program is being dismantled without the coherent (i.e. ALL-IN) renewable alternative behind. So you get the worst of both worlds : no actual long-term effective waste storage, no full renewable, half-assed short-term measures.
Nuclear energy would have been passable as an all-in transition (and only transition) measure against CO2 emission before we actually use only renewable, but it's late, it doesn't work as an emergency measure, you actually need a lot of work to do it safely.
They only use uranium as an input because we want to be able to enrich it or use the byproducts in bombs, we could generate more energy for less waste if we weren’t a suicidal species
uranium's pretty easy to work with as these things go. still, fast breeder reactors and thorum need more love, especially as the former can eat up some of the existing nuclear waste
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Disposing waste is a pretty huge issue and groundwater contamination would make Flint taps look like dasani.
If there's a way to deal with that properly then I'm all on board.
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There is a way to dispose of it properly, but the water will always get through whatever you do. At best with the most advanced technology, like in France recently, the waste can be put under the earth with vitrification and a whole load of processes, and can last up to several hundred thousand years (at best, and without seismological activity ! big if in some countries), which is still a limited amount of time before water gets in it. Still, you need a lot of fucking money and knowledge to do it correctly, and without years and years of experience you would fuck it up. It's kind of a bet against time, you need to separate the waste from its exterior environment long enough for the radioactivity to subceed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Vitrification (not up to date tho)
The thing is its still recent and only the most advanced countries utilizing nuclear power actually search for better ways, but even in France where its very advanced, the nuclear program is being dismantled without the coherent (i.e. ALL-IN) renewable alternative behind. So you get the worst of both worlds : no actual long-term effective waste storage, no full renewable, half-assed short-term measures.
Nuclear energy would have been passable as an all-in transition (and only transition) measure against CO2 emission before we actually use only renewable, but it's late, it doesn't work as an emergency measure, you actually need a lot of work to do it safely.
uranium's pretty easy to work with as these things go. still, fast breeder reactors and thorum need more love, especially as the former can eat up some of the existing nuclear waste
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imagine if fission was discovered during peacetime. we would be so much farther ahead