FACTS [0]:
1. The nuclear industry still has no solution to the 'waste problem'.
2. The transport of this waste poses an unacceptable risk to people and the environment.
3. Plutonium is the most dangerous material in the world.
4. Nuclear waste is hazardous for tens of thousands of years. This clearly is unprecedented and poses a huge threat to our future generations.
5. Even if put into a geological repository, the waste might emerge and threaten future generations.
6. Nobody knows the true costs of waste management. The costs are so high that nuclear power can never be economic.
IMO, nuclear power does not represent what's best about the US but highlights its weaknesses. Americans love their quarterly reports, but are not good so good at 100 year plans, let alone 100,000 year plans.
Nuclear waste lasts for a very long time. The amount of spent nuclear fuel stored at US nuclear power plants continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year [1].
The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is a proposed deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste in the United States. Federal funding for the Repository ened amidst widespread national, state, regional and tribal opposition. [2]. Meanwhile the federal government has paid billions of dollars in damages to utilities for failing to dispose of this waste and may potentially have to pay tens of billions of dollars more in coming decades. So yeah you the US taxpayer are paying for it, whether your utility use nuclear generated electricity or not. => The nuclear industry still has no solution to the 'waste problem'.
Without a permanent national storage solution, the government pays the utilities to store the waste on site. Over time utilities move some of the older spent fuel into "dry cask" storage. These casks are stainless steel canisters surrounded by concrete. Fuel is typically cooled at least five years in the pool before transfer to cask. NRC has authorized transfer as early as three years; the industry norm is about 10 years. The NRC certifies cask designs and licenses dry cask storage facilities for up to 40 years. [3] Not thousands of years!
Assuming idealistically that generation of nuclear power stops today, then the EXISTING nuclear waste will have to be stored not for hundreds of years, not for thousands of years, not for tens of thousands of years, but for hundreds of thousands of years. That is the existing waste, which will continue to cost "tens of billions of dollars per decades", with a lifetime storage cost that makes the cost of the original nuclear power plant (typically with only a 30-year life anyway) negligible by comparison. Again that is the exsiting waste. So assuming we continue to generate nuclear power, the nuclear waste continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year, each ton with its own lifetime storage cost. And we're talking about GROWING that nuclear capacity. Let's grow the already exponential lifetime storage cost. Not even the Federal Reserve of the United States of America will be able to create enough money to pay for the total cost of ownership of nuclear power.
There are different types of nuclear waste - high-level waste, transuranic waste, Uranium or thorium mill tailings, Low-level waste, Technologically enhanced naturally-occurring radioactive material (TENORM) [4]. Like most things, these too follow the 80/20 rule - 80% of the waste is lower level waste and 20% is higher level waste. Make sure you know which waste is being discussed. Each type must be disposed of according to its risk to human health and the environment. Plutonium Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years! That is the time it takes for the radioactive level to become half of what it is now.
The nation has over 85,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. DOE is responsible for disposing of this high-level waste in a permanent geologic repository, but has yet to build such a facility because policymakers have been at an impasse over what to do with this spent fuel since 2010. As a result, the amount of spent nuclear fuel stored at nuclear power plants across the country continues to grow by about 2,000 metric tons a year. Meanwhile, the federal government has paid billions of dollars in damages to utilities for failing to dispose of this waste and may potentially have to pay tens of billions of dollars more in coming decades.
DOE also oversees the treatment and disposal of about 90 million gallons of radioactive waste from the nation's nuclear weapons program. Most of this waste is stored in tanks at 3 DOE sites. According to federal law, certain high-level mixed waste must be vitrified—a process in which the waste is immobilized in glass—and disposed of in a deep geologic repository. However, DOE estimates that about 90% of the volume of this waste contains about 10% of the radioactivity and is therefore considered to be low-activity waste. [1]
[0] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
[1] https://www.gao.gov/nuclear-waste-disposal
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
[3] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/r...