And again the question which decides the future of every nuclear power plant. Where to put the fuel after usage? No one wants it, tax payers have to pay for the disposal.
Also, tax payers don't pay for nuclear waste. Rate payers do. It's factored into the sale price of nuclear electricity via the Nuclear Waste Fund.
https://psmag.com/ideas/the-hiding-place-inside-the-worlds-f...
I don't understand this, and would love if someone could point me to a resource on it. How is it practical to essentially "kick the can" on storage/disposal?
As I understand it, the plan o more or less bury the stuff and hope we figure it out in the future. I read this as "just let some future generation deal with a catastrophic failure". That sounds awfully similar to how we've dealt with the climate/environment in general.
Burying atomic waste on the other hand requires laughable amounts of space if you want to compare atomic waste vs carbon for let's say 100 years of global energy production. We already have to deal with the "catastrophic failure" of carbon storage as a "future generation" as you already mentioned.
I know a lot of people like to imagine that getting rid of atomic waste is basically some people with shovels digging holes for some hazardous yellow barrels, hoping in a thousand years no one will find them. Well, no. Atomic waste is much more manageable. And to be honest: If we had a way to say efficiently compact/solidify/whatever carbon then we would do the same with that stuff today already, just with the difference that we would leave much much much more waste behind for future generations.
The reason why it sits in on-site storage is because on-site storage is about the only option in the US, due to anti-proliferation regulation, and the politicization of Yucca Mountain.
France's 55+ reactors send their spent fuel to a single facility in La Hague, where it only consumes half the facility's capacity. The remaining capacity is resold to other countries' nuclear plants, inasmuch as other countries still operate nuclear plants after Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters.
Reprocessing is about 6% the cost of their entire nuclear program. The program in turn can supply about 1/6th of the program's nuclear fuel. But they stockpile it, unenriched, whenever original processing of mined uranium ores would be cheaper.
The non-Pu, non-U radioactives still have to be extracted in a separate step or be buried somewhere for their 100-year cooling-off period, but the volume is much lower than it would otherwise be without reprocessing. If Yucca Mtn were ever fully opened, and if it took only post-reprocessing waste, it could bury all the world's vitrified waste until it becomes cooler than the average parking lot, much more safely than the current status quo.