Even a cursory glance at the amount of storage in a singe UK site, Sellafield would tell you that you are wrong. Unless, this is a rether exceptional high school https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-sellafield-nuclear-wa...
The parent is ignoring those containment requirements (or relying heavily on technologies that are still in the research phase).
Source?
I used to feel very anti-nuclear, mostly out of fear and lack of information. Then I read more about it and learned that taking point.
Other sources I find from a quick google use different comparisons, like this one[1]:
> In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.
> Used fuel can be recycled.
> More than 90% of its potential energy still remains in the fuel, even after five years of operation in a reactor.
Or this measurement[2]:
> a typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear power station, which would supply the needs of more than a million people, produces only three cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste per year,
1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
2. https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear...
Natural uranium is a mixture of U235 and U238, an LWR consumes U235 and a small amount of the U238. It gets maybe 2% of the energy out of the uranium and most of the long-lived radioactivity is Pu239 and related actinides that have value as fuel. (In a reprocessing cycle almost all of the waste decays in 500 years.)
Reprocessing nuclear fuel to produce uranium and plutonium powder is a straightforward technology.
What's not straightforward is fabricating fuel out of that powder. The most practical way to alloy oxides of U and Pu is to put them through a high-energy ball mill that fuses together nanoparticles of U and Pu.
The HEBM can make something like Silica into a deadly poison, so just think what it can do with Plutonium!
It seems impossible to run a Pu fuel fab that is a safe place to work without using a respirator full time. The French seem cool with it, but it violates the labor laws in every other country. To make it worse, fuel fabrication is a labor intensive process which involves somebody putting pellets into a fuel rod with gloved hands.
There are alternatives (co-precipitation, liquid fuel reactors, robotics) but they have to be developed to close the fuel cycle.
In which case why are a number of other proponents in this thread suggesting the best solution is to bury it?
For instance "no nukes" think it is a scandal that we could spend $100 billion on Yucca mountain, but the average nuclear plant makes about $500 million per year in electricity so that is about 2 years of energy production. It's significant, but it's not crazy.
A reprocessing cycle could easily take a century to fully burn U238 so "what it costs" is influenced by what you think interest rates will be (or should) be for next 100 years.
Fuel cycle costs are nearly zero compared to the cost of the steam turbine at an LWR. If the price of uranium tripled, it would make little different in the basebar price of electricity.
And nope, given reprocessing, breeding, Thorium, and Uranium extraction from seawater, we're not going to run out of nuclear fuel for tens of thousands of years, if ever.
In contrast, all the nuclear waste generated by the world since the invention of nuclear energy can fit into a single Highschool auditorium.
For perspective, a giant freight ship that burns two tons of crude fuel per hour could run on 5g of plutonium per year.