Please note though that the "forever" timescale becomes harmless for all intents and purposes relatively quickly. So IMHO and I don't really know the cause, this conception we have of nuclear is a really uninformed one. See: https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-nuclear-fallout-last

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500964

"Today, the liveliness of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki serves as a reminder not only of the human ability to regenerate, but also of the extent to which fear and misinformation can lead to incorrect expectations. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many thought that any city targeted by an atomic weapon would become a nuclear wasteland. While the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombings was horrendous and nightmarish, with innumerable casualties, the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not allow their cities to become the sort of wasteland that some thought was inevitable. This experience of can serve as lesson in the present when much of the public and even some governments have reacted radically to the accident in Fukushima--in the midst of tragedy, there remains hope for the future."

Ok, but more than 30 years after the Chernobyl disaster, it's still not safe to live in Pripyat. Worker's are limited to spending no more than 5 consecutive hours on site.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/ukrai...

So yeah. Foreverish.

Maybe it is uninformed, but the media certainly doesn't help in it's coverage of nuclear disasters. Speaking as someone with very little understanding of nuclear physics and energy, how it seems like nuclear power plants are amazing right up until they don't work (see Fukashima, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl) or the fuel rods are spent. We still don't have long-term nuclear waste storage plans other than cordoning off certain areas and burying the spent fuel underground[1]. From the same article, nuclear plants have massive 'ponds' 7-12 meters deep that store highly radioactive spent fuel rods for a few years until they reduce their reactivity and heat to something more manageable before disposing of them. When decommissioning a nuclear station, what do we do with that water when in the meantime? Especially if it really is true that a nuclear plant's lifetime is on the order of 50 years[2].

Don't get me wrong, maybe nuclear is the optimal answer to Earth's energy needs. But also, maybe the tech is just not there yet, and certainly the media's fear-mongering needs to be more tempered and more informative to allow public acceptance of nuclear. Otherwise we will probably still keep getting NIMBY responses

[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...

[2] https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.htm...

I'm not quite sure what your question is with the spent fuel pool. The water will just sit there and slowly evaporate probably or be cleaned and checked for contaminants before going elsewhere. It's really not that much water. I think you're making a problem where there isn't one.

The water keeps it from melting as the spent fuel becomes a little more inert each day (it transfers heat to the water, and as we know radioactive stuff has half lives). After a few years, we can move it to dry storage (incased by concrete and steel).

> but it continually tries to push coal

Let's clarify that China, Germany and Japan are consuming more coal per dollar of GDP than the US is. Those are the #2, #3, and #4 economies. Coal dominates both German and Chinese energy. The US coal industry has been contracting rapidly, falling back to 1985 levels, losing about 1/3 of output. China on the other hand, is still consuming as much coal as the rest of the world combined and four times that of the US.

Japan for its part, plans to open four dozen new coal plants in the next decade.

> The US could have been at the forefront of solar and wind power

The US invented modern solar and is at the forefront. As of early 2017, the US was still getting more of its energy from solar than China (not growing nearly as fast however). The US is adding dramatically more solar capacity than anybody else not named China. Capacity equivalent to four or five nuclear power plants, every year. In 2016 the US added 10 times as much solar capacity as what Germany did (an early leader), and nearly twice that of Japan.

The US is #2 in wind power globally and will remain there indefinitely. It's also at the forefront there. It's adding the equivalent of two or three nuclear power plants worth of wind energy capacity per year, while US energy consumption is flat.

The US has 30 times the installed wind energy generation capacity vs Japan for example.

Currently there are only three major players in wind energy. China, the US, Germany. Germany is starting to fall far behind the US just due to economic size variance.

The problem going forward is that the Trump administration is busy reversing all the Obama policies that encouraged renewables,and is pushing fossil fuels as hard as it can. Renewables will expand nonetheless, just likely not as fast as if the Trump administration were not opposed. Were you really not aware of all this?

There are places where solar makes sense and places where it doesn't. When I lived in Utah, entire neighborhoods were covering their roofs with solar. Now I'm a lot farther North, almost Canada. Between the clouds and short daylight hours, solar doesn't make any sense at all for at least 6 months out of the year. I've been watching the percentage of sun received over the winter. Many days you can add all the hours of the day and not come up with as much energy as a single summer hour.

To see Canada look to nuclear isn't a surprise.