This will be our most damning legacy. We are living in the first age when our garbage will impact life long after everything about us and our time is completely forgotten. The very first proto-humans were around 100k years ago. Could you imagine if people were getting sick and dying because of their trash? No sign or label will ever work. We can’t build anything that will last beyond a few thousand years at best with unforseen geological time and forces. We have no clue what the Earth’s climate will be in 100 years; 100k is on the other side of an iceage or two; the Sahara will go green and back to desert; coastlines will shift by dozens of kilometers; rivers, planes, and deserts will trade places. We can’t model and plan for anything on that scale. Nuclear is the most costly and destructive tax humans have ever made against future humans. We will be despised for nuclear waste.

I am persistently mystified that so many people – many calling themselves “green” or environmentalist – consider this a solved problem.

Spent nuclear fuel piles up in retaining pools at nuclear reactor sites, and we can’t take it anywhere because nobody can figure out where to put it. Everybody has easy answers and a proper & permanent disposal site and method are always “just around the corner”.

Meanwhile, solar and wind – for all of their problems – can meet large portions of our energy needs RIGHT NOW with minimal capital outlay to install new capacity.

And the amount of uranium available would only get us through to the end of the century.

Some countries successfully dismantle the remnants of the rods. Residues are extracted from spent nuclear fuel and rods are made not on uranium but on plutonium. The remmans of this rods is even more enriched than before reaktor starting work. as a result, it is possible to burn unenriched uranium and other heavy nuclei, so that the fuel will definitely last for a long time.

“[Nuclear] is costly, potentially dangerous, that there are problems dealing with and siting waste, and that future generations are left with a legacy they will not appreciate. …uranium is itself a non-renewable resource, due to run out well before the end of this century. So even if it were to be cost-effective, safe, and harmless to future generations, nuclear energy is not a long-term solution to humanity’s energy problems.”

Dobson, Andrew, (2000) GREEN POLITICAL THOUGHT, United Kingdom: Taylor and Francis (Books) Limited, pp.56

Standard green party retoric, they don’t see the forest for the trees.

If we had built nuclear power plants and closed coal, oil and gas power plants back in 2000 we would have several nations with a carbon free grid these days.

I don’t think Dobson is out to mislead people from an academic point-of-view, so I take the uranium comment as being true. If it is the case, then I’m not sure how you had better insight into the future of nuclear power.

Read their arguments above. Also, is it this Andrew Dobson? An academic but hardly an expert on the nuclear physics.