Meanwhile you are complaining about waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.
For example, it was forbidden to have more than 50GW installed capacity of solar. By Law.
oh and also destroying the industries building the solar panels, therefore losing the entire market to China…
Obviously, nothing can be done with nuclear power now to address that problem. Looking back, there is no reason to think that fossil fuel usage would have disappeared by now. Even the issue of climate change has had little impact. Nuclear is generally far more expensive.
Now if we had had made the fossil fuel industry pay the true cost of their waste products - greenhouse gases - then there might have been a market for nuclear.
> idealism
If you have a good argument, why disparage people who disagree? Why not address their concerns seriously?
The threat of nuclear waste is very real and serious. There are solutions, but these are serious issues that won't be addressed by disparaging other people.
> waste that sitting sealed and monitored, and is not hurting anyone.
Nobody has died yet (is that even true?), so it's safe?
If you reckon it's OK to leave waste lying around, especially in constrained economic and political circumstances, that's a legitimate point of view. Argue for that. But don't declare that "decommissioning" simply means something like "Do your best, and then be done with it". That's dishonest (I'm not accusing you personally of any dishonesty).
If "decommissioning" doesn't mean complete reversal of all harmful results of the operation of a plant, then we need a new word that does mean that.
How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants we’ve been running for forty years while people like yourself threw ignorant tantrums over nuclear?
How would you “reverse all harmful results of the operation of a plant”?
How are you going to recapture all the pollution they dumped into our air, exactly?
The word apparently means whatever the responsible authorities want it to mean.
> How, by your definition, would you decommission the coal and gas plants
We used to make gas by heating coal with steam; the result was a contaminated site, coal gas, and coke for steel. But the site was left contaminated with chemical waste - stuff that can in principle be chemically denatured, or buried fairly safely. Thing is, I'm against making new coal-to-gas plants, as much as I'm against new nukes.
I don't have to defend coal and gas power plants; I don't have to explain how to reverse their effects; I'm against building any new ones, and my lack of any remedies for the effects of plants built before I was born doesn't invalidate my stance.
[Edit] I think I missed your point, which was probably based on my use of the word "reversing". You're effectively asking me how to complete the decommissioning of plants that were put out of use before I was born. If you want childish, that's childish: you're asking me for a proposal for reversing climate change.
I'm talking about how to build a nuclear power plant that can be properly decommissioned, in the sense that there's no persistent environmental pollution, and the land can safely be returned to normal uses, such as agriculture and residential housing. I'm against repeating the mistakes my grandparents made, in all their ignorance.
You’re making the exact same mistake by rejecting today’s an attainable but imperfect solution in favor of an unattainably perfect one.
The end result is that we waste another few decades spewing pollution into the air.
1. Spew the waste into the air (fossil fuels)
2. Contain and bury the waste (nuclear)
3. Go without electricity when the weather is not favorable until major tech improvements in storage
So unless you want to argue for 3, and I don't think you do, 2 is clearly the best option.