This also goes for nuclear.
Statistical estimates of the amounts of deaths and lung problems coal power plants cause, however, can be much more accurate. And they bespeak hundreds of thousands gruesome deaths from coal every year.
The argument about land being uninhabitable is equally silly, because land permanently submerged in the ocean tends to be uninhabitable as well.
The perception of the risks associated with nuclear is so dramatically misaligned with reality. The only conclusion I can possibly draw is that anybody who is anti-nuclear can’t possibly be taking climate change seriously.
The things we compare are nuclear and renewables. The consensus is already pretty clear that coal is on its way out. Which I think we all can agree on is a good thing.
https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-waste-in-disused-german-mine-l...
The salt mine was deemed to be safe for thousands of years. But then people discovered ingress of water. And salt water is corrosive.
I am sure that we will experience very expensive disasters with nuclear storage the next few thousand years.
We should never have used nuclear power in large scale.
Edit: And we should shut down coal, too. It's not about nuclear vs coal but nuclear vs renewables.
Furthermore, to my knowledge there is no higly radioactive stuff stored down there, just some recklessly offloaded cans with cleaning clothes, and such. Again, incompetence and recklessness.
As of now, anything highly radioactive is stored above ground in 'Castor' either under clear skies, or light halls there, or as 'Zwischenlager' on the grounds of NPPs, maybe sometimes exported to make it a problem of other people, as usual...
Anyways, we could possibly transmutate it, like it is researched in Mol, Belgium, 'burn' its full potential in liquid-salt reactors, whatever. This whole longterm storage concept is shizophrenic thinking, because we didn't really research nuclear further, after we had working reactors based on (upscaled)military applications for economic, political, whatever reasons.
I am sure that we will experience very expensive disasters with renewable energy in the next few dozen years.
edit: Another thing regarding long term storage in 'geologic times'. If some group in 100.000 years. or later comes across this, and doesn't know how to handle it, why should I care about those stupid morons?
For all I care they discovered the curse of the atomic pharaos, and deserve it! Degraded bitches!
F-U-C-K-I-N-G-D-E-A-L-W-I-T-H-I-T!
Just shut down both coal and nuclear!
It took the russians lifting off _every single security mechanism_ to cause Chernobyl.
The ojer major incidents like Three Mile Island are just "well, security measures have failed, we didn't have enough fallbacks. It's broken now. Light irradiation around but nothing major".
So, no, nuclear power doesn't stop for anything but the absolute worst conditions. As for the "doing even worse" part, two can play that game: hydro is renewable and yet killed hundreds of thousands. Oh no, stop hydro!
Chernobyl has done less damage and had less impact on those millions of people than the totally routine burning of coal. I grew up in a coal mining region; I fully expect more people suffer negative health outcomes when coal works as expected than in a Class 7 nuclear catastrophe. We just don't count the health impacts properly because it is too hard to prove cause and effect.
The overwhelming safety of the nuclear process makes the failures look bad, because we aren't used to nuclear plants producing detectable levels of ambient pollution.