Eli5: What is so bad about the waste of nuclear power plants? Why are many governments so against it? What is so hard about storing the waste in a safe place?
In: Technology
The waste is not that difficult to manage. It is small and easily stored. The problem is that it has a half-life measured in tens of thousands of years in some cases. So where do we put it that will be safe for that long?
The benefits of nuclear also relate to the waste. Nuclear waste is small and easily stored, easily sequestered, unlike the waste of fossil fuels, which we puke into the atmosphere and which will take billions of years to clean up. (Life on earth has been sequestering carbon from the atmosphere for 2 billion years. We are putting it back into the atmosphere in a few hundred years).
The resistance to nuclear power is an exercise in what-about-ism. Nuclear is cleaner, safer and cheaper than fossil fuels, and more practical than wind or solar for now. It is not perfect, and it will be overtaken by solar. It is marketed as an alternative to coal, not solar power.
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