Not really. France generates about 70 per cent of their power from nuclear and don't seem to have many problems. For really inefficient solid fission, waste disposal basically consist of digging a swimming pool in a techtonically stable area, throwing in the spent rods, and filing it with concrete.

Heck, as long as it was properly guarded, you could store the waste in my backyard shed without any health issues arising.

I am not a specialist but the current situation looks complicated and not because of waste disposal but for financial reasons and long term planning issues. Areva, the main civil nuclear actor, made a couple of very bad (and shady) decisions, lost a lot of money, and is currently being restructured and partially merged into EDF, the historical energy French provider. Still they decide to keep betting on EPR power plants and engage a lot of resources in a new Hinkley Point EPR project. None of which have been finished yet. At the same time, inquiries reveal deficiencies or falsifications on quality assesments on supplied parts. The gravity of these is not clear yet. Finally, budget are tightening and plants arriving to their initial end of life dates are being requalifed for a decade or more.

I do not think relying so much on nuclear energy was a bad move but it should have been a transitional thing (to renewable energy, fusion, anything else?). And it requires good forward thinking, commitment and the kind of leader we have not had for decades.

Finally, the EPR looks more and more like a big mistake. Smaller designs might have been more successful and offered more agility in time of crisis.

I think this is a reasonable way to view things. Although I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in fission. We're basically using tech developed in the 60s. And just a little nit pick: fusion is a form of nuclear power generation.

And who ensures that it stays there for the next centuries?

I doubt it would stay there for even the next few decades. As crazy as it sounds, I imagine at some point it would become cheap enough to launch into space or in to the sun. I mean, it wouldn't make economic sense. But at some point it would be worth the cost if only so that we don't have to listen to the irrational and ignorant braying of the so called 'green movement'.

They're like the kids in high school who decided they were avowed communists, except now all grown up.

Who says we won't figure out how to reprocess it and safely burn the fissile waste in the next centuries? :)

Geological objects of no worth to anyone tend to stay where they are for long, long, times.

The current solution for nuclear waste is much better than the current solution for coal waste, which is to just dump it into the world and pretend it's not there.

The current solution for coal are testing areas for compressed carbon storage, and they’re less risky than the nuclear waste storage.

The continual leaking of nuclear waste into the ground water at the Asse II underground nuclear waste storage site is a huge issue.

And so, already in '98, the Energiewende was started.

In the early 2000s Merkel tried to roll back the Energiewende, but was forced to roll back the rolling back when Fukushima happened, and people realized we had plants of the same construction type, where continually the emergency generators failed, and everyone said "nothing wrong, even if the generators fail, it can never go up".

German nuclear controls are just as much of a joke as nuclear controls in Japan or the US, and in most countries, they’re even worse.

One nuclear plant in Germany has bribed regulators for years to just sign it off, despite it violating regulations. Then there’s the plant in Belgium, where construction workers drilled through the containment vessel to screw a holder for a fire extinguisher on it.

Holes stayed open for many years.

Nuclear is a nice concept in theory, but in any capitalistic society, it can not work, because greed will end up with companies trying to save money, and if bribes are cheaper than following the laws, they will do that. If lobbying is cheaper, they’ll do that. If they can just leave the country and can’t be held liable, they’ll just do that.

> One nuclear plant in Germany has bribed regulators for years to just sign it off, despite it violating regulations.

Why do you think regulations around coal generation are any easier to enforce than regulations around nuclear generation?

You can easily find millions of people with serious health problems due to coal waste. The problem is so bad that it's recommended that sensitive populations limit their intake of seafood because of the mercury in it, much of which comes from coal. How many can you find with serious health problems due to nuclear waste? How many large categories of food have cautions on them for children and pregnant women due to nuclear waste?

You can talk about possibilities all you want, but the fact is that as they are done coal waste is a lot more dangerous. So it's weird to put so much emphasis on closing nuclear plants first.

We have solutions for clean coal.

Filter all the pollutants out, and use Compressed Carbon Storage for the CO2. We already are enforcing the first on all existing plants, and working on the second.

But long-term, renewables are the only solution.

Nothing works 100%. How many nines does "all the pollutants" consist of? This is important because the amount of waste produced by coal is vast, many orders of magnitude more than nuclear, so even many nines can still result in more harm than from nuclear.

Also, how do you store the pollutants, and why doesn't that technique work for nuclear waste? I'm guessing that storing the pollutants consists of putting it in good, strong containers, which works fine for nuclear waste too. It's not perfect, but it doesn't really make much of a difference whether it's mercury or uranium leaking.

So because there's scope for bad people to do bad things or cut corners, it's not an option? That basically rules out any form of power generation.

For instance, wind power: http://i.imgur.com/xHyOoc9.jpg

This picture was taken just prior to these two engineers jumping to their deaths rather than being burnt alive. I assume the turbine spontaneously catching fire is not an intentional design feature, but rather the result of inadequate quality control during manufacturing?

The long term storage of CO2 in the atmosphere isn't a problem?

Run breeders.