There are actual risks with handling really dirty waste and turn it into really dirty fuel - you can't just hand-wave away that as "environmental activism."
It's much more risky than just leaving the waste in a pond cooling for 20 years while hoping that you will be retired before someone actually have to get rid of it.
Re:Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards
by tremon on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @06:33AM
(#14086407)
Of course there are risks -- but are those risks really of a different order than having to build nuclear storage containers that will hold for thousands of years?
I'd say that activism has left us with the most undesirable outcome: we still have ancient reactor designs producing unmanageable waste, and every solution to actually reduce that waste has become politically unfeasible. All that we've done is create massive amounts of technical debt that will burden generations to come.
Are they wrong though? proliferation risk seems to me an important point. Also are risk of theft, attacks on facilities and transportation, leakage due to natural disasters, and of course: bad politicians doing "unavoidable" cuts. Moreover, even with FBRs you get Pu-contaminated MSO (http://e360.yale.edu/features/are_fast-breeder_reactors_a_nu...).
Once you take all these issues into consideration you just need to extrapolate and see how nuclear accidents will happen once in a while.
It is mostly because of military influences (proliferation risk) and environmental activism that these solutions have never been fully developed and deployed.