You'd likely do less harm if you just dumped that waste in a heap on a roadside than if you shut down the plants and as a result ended up with more coal plans continuing to run. Where shutting down nuclear would result in wind or solar replacing it, you might be better off. Maybe hydro - with a very big caveat that the big risk with hydro is dam failures, which are rare, but can be absolutely devastating when they happen. For pretty much every other tech, the death toll is higher than the amortised death toll of nuclear with a large enough margin that you could up the danger of nuclear massively (such as by completely failing to take care of the waste) and still come out ahead.

Going forward, so long as you have competent engineering, the biggest risk of hydro power will be your water sources effectively drying up. (That could be literal, or diversion to irrigation and other uses, or various combinations.)

But the yet-bigger problem with hydro power is the extreme scarcity of suitable dam locations.

Competent engineering isn't enough. You also need to never end up being in a war zone, and being able to commit to ongoing maintenance forever, or outlawing all construction far downstream (or finding the even more scarce type of locations where nobody wants to build downstream).

Yeah, kinda?

In "most" military situations, the enemy would not want the dam destroyed - because it's a valuable part of what they want to conquer, or doing so would flood their own supply lines, or whatever. And having a well-placed reservoir could save your butt if a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm#City_firestorms got started.

To keep providing power to the grid, everything from coal to solar to nuclear needs "forever" maintenance. Yes, an unmaintained dam is a hazard. That can be neutralized with a strategic breach, or (some locations) letting the reservoir silt up. But high-rise buildings, flood-control dikes, and quite a few other things are also "people die if not properly maintained" hazards.

The issue is that many large dams will kill a huge number of people if they fail.

The Banqiao dam failure alone is the worst power plant failure in human history by several magnitudes.

Not many dams have the potential to kill that many, but there are thousands of damns with potential to make Chernobyl look like a minor little affair.

As for wars, you just need to go back to 2023 for the last major dam to be blown as part of war. It "only" made 60k people homeless and killed 200-300. Just last year another dam was hit by drones but didn't burst.

While "big dam failed, lots of people died" is a very clicky headline, you are overselling it.

Between the direct costs (at the plant), and still having a 1,000 sq. mile exclusion zone 40 years later, Chernobyl really isn't overshadowed by the potential of thousands of dams.

And by the hellish standards of that war - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain... - 200 to 300 dead is a rounding error.

We could have a Chernobyl every year, and the environmental impact would still be a rounding error compared to hydro, if we're going to go to environmental impacts rather than lives.

That is the weakest aspect of hydro - it causes massive green house gas releases during and in the aftermath of construction, and destroys vast ecosystems.

> With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.

By "waste" do you need unused nuclear fuel? We can reduce the "waste" if we wanted to (see France), but it's cheaper to dig up more fuel.

The '10,000 year' thing is interesting: the nuclear "waste" that lasts that long is actually the stuff is not that dangerous. It can be stopped by tinfoil, and the only way for it to harm someone is either eat it or ground it into powder and snort it like cocaine: just being around it is not that big of deal.

The stuff that will get you is primary the stuff that is still around in the cooling pools for the first 6-10 years after removal. After that, there's a bunch of stuff that's around for ~200 years that you don't want to be touching. Once you're >300 years in, the radiation that's given is higher than 'background' in most places, that's why it's considered "risky".

Otherwise, as Madison Hilly demonstrated, it's not that big of a deal:

* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120

* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...

* Also: https://xcancel.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...

If I remember well most radioactive waste by volume is not from nuclear energy production and the share that is very small would be drastically lower if places like the US didn't ban it's recycling. It's half life can also be drastically reduced.

I also wonder. Is it the implied danger over those tens of thousands of years or would it end up being something more similar to Ramsar in Iran long before that?

You simply put waste deep underground in geologically stable rock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

And? Conventional power plants are killing people now.

There are natural concentrations of radionuclides on the planet as well, there was even one place where a spontaneous fission reaction took place (Oklo, Gabon) millions of years ago. If you dig a sufficiently deep hole in a massive slab of granite (like Scandinavia), you can store all the waste of mankind there for approximately eternity.

German Greens absolutely love your argument, but compared to the pollution that we produce everyday and which kills people and animals every day, waste storage is a nothingburger.

Considering how dangerous CO2 induced climate change could be this is like worrying about drowning when using water to extinguish fires.

wait till you learn what we do with arsenic which lasts forever...