Nuclear is worse in every other way except space used, and Earth is huge.
I will never understand the fawning over a technology that has proven so lackluster under human control. (Nuclear is fantastic with rigid controls such that the US Navy implements, but this never happens is commercial fleets)
Australia will be at 100% renewables before the first nuclear generator would come online if you broke ground today. We should stop mourning nuclear and keep ramping renewables and battery production. The model is proven at scale.
This was already a little sad, but now that the economic case has turned decisively against nuclear power, with things going badly for basically every nuclear project and things going better than expected for most renewables it's becoming absurd.
Sorry, but you are the one making judgment calls and "enjoying being correct" here. I'm advocating for nuclear power, and I also understand the battle is mostly lost, so please don't act smug like this. Other than the economic case, there are massive hurdles on the way of a 100% renewables world, which I hope will be overcome, since that's obviously the way the world is going forward to now.
1. Producing large quantities of power
2. Continuously, for several decades
3. Hiding most of the costs until long after those responsible have become unaccountable
On top of that, while reliable and cheap renewables are “nearish future”, fusion tech is potentially not much less “nearish”, and would enable people to go back to living in Northern Europe, America, Asia, etc.
Note: I’m not trying to espouse or argue for a particular approach here; I’d trying to suggest some reasons why there might be so much (and such long-lived) “fawning over [nuclear] technology”. This is just some mildly educated guessing on my part.
Hence why the article describes one of the projects under consideration is a massive renewables concentration in northern Australia (the population of that area is a rounding error), with the goal of exporting to Asia via undersea cable.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-total-mass-and-volume-of-a...
Note also that this is mostly just considering high level waste (like, the actual spend fuel rods and reactor parts), and not all low- and intermediate-level waste, of which there is a lot more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Classificati...
If I follow your link, I read this: Over the past four decades, the entire industry has produced about 62,500 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. That's the high-level waste.
The rest of the comment goes on to explain that including all low- and intermediate-level waste, plus legacy waste from military activities, then it may reach the millions of cubic feet you're citing.
Low-level waste is not much more dangerous than the extra natural radiation you receive from a plane trip, so the real danger is high-level waste. And that can fit in a fraction of the space required for a single solar park.
https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-wast...
I should clarify that I'm not against solar as an important part of the energy mix, but it seems incredibly wasteful when we consider the sheer amount of material required in panels + storage to replicate the sustained output of a single fission plant, not all of which can be easily recycled. Solar hasn't historically been widespread enough for us to experience the issues associated with widespread end-of-lifing of components, but one look at the electronics industry and the waste it produces should tell us that it could be a massive problem we're kicking down the road. The sheer amount of material required to run the world on solar energy is staggering. Nuclear waste is comparatively a tiny and easily tractable problem by comparison - all the world's nuclear waste over a 50 year period could probably fit in a single underground site of sufficient volume.
There has been plenty of work done on smaller, safer fission reactor designs over the last 50 years, but the regulatory burden to get new designs approved & operational is extremely limiting. There's no way to do it without the support of government as things currently stand, and it's a pity - nuclear could provide 50%+ of the global energy mix emission-free with a relatively small footprint compared to solar, and certainly with far less in the way of materials input between plant construction & fissionable material (the latter producing 24,000,000 kWh from a single KG of U-235).