Photovoltaic solar produces lots of waste, more than nuclear. And it requires lots of land.
Solar thermal is much more efficient but it's expensive and no one seems to be doing it in scale. And it too requires lots of land.
And don't say we have lots of land, we do, but it's remote, so you need a lot of infrastructure to make use of it. We can do that (we did for hydrocarbons), but it's not a slam dunk.
Because of that, nuclear produces less waste and is better for the environment.
It produces treatable wastes, ones that can be allowed to enter the normal economy and processed, rather than wastes we are so scared of that we can't let anybody touch them and so inject them into deep water aquifers instead.
Also, all waste comparisons I have seen people make with nuclear generally seem to only include volume of spent fuel, and not the wastes from the process of making the fuel in the first place, which are several orders of magnitude greater.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_plant#Radioactive_trace_el... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#High-level_waste [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash#Environmental_problems [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reduction
You can take a landfill, put dirt over the top, and now you have parkland for people to use. It's happened to two intracity landfills within a couple of kilometers of where I live. The same can't be done with nuclear waste.
Why not? Just bury it a bit deeper.
But it doesn't matter - you don't need to. Unlike bags, there is so little nuclear waste we can afford to dedicate one tiny area to it.
The entire nuclear waste of the US in the past 40 years can fit in a room 350 feet on each side. (Basically 1 city block.) That's it. That's all the space you need for the entire united states!
Maybe DOE should hire some HN experts so they'll learn how the job ought to be done? As much money as the nuclear industry has stolen from taxpayers, I think they can afford you.
But "environmentalists" stepped in and ended funding. Now we are stuck with the current situation of pretty much every power plant for themselves and storage all over the country.
http://www.clarkcountynv.gov/depts/comprehensive_planning/nu...
The UK is currently committing to building a whole new set of boiling water reactors while still having not made up its mind about the location of the UK long term waste store, which is taking a while as for reasons of politics, the government is relying on voluteerism rather than geologic suitability to decide where in the country to put it.
We did have a breeder reactor in Dounreay. It is shut down now and the surrounding beaches are off limits for a while, due to old fuel rod fragments being pumped into the sea. The management were also prosecuted for dumping solid nuclear waste in landfill.
(Plus with a bit of confidence and engineering we can burn all the waste to energy, leaving nothing at all.)
These were the direction we were headed in the 60s, unfortunately, we then discovered that Uranium was not as rare as we thought it was, and in our usual manner, decided to go for the conventional ones we have today.
Whilst breeder reactors produce waste, they can also reuse it, as well as being more efficient. Some proponents say they would allow us to reuse today's nuclear waste. Additionally, the waste produced has a shorter half life than the waste produced from conventional reactors.
Solar thermal is much more efficient but it's expensive
and no one seems to be doing it in scale.