You'd likely do less harm if you just dumped that waste in a heap on a roadside than if you shut down the plants and as a result ended up with more coal plans continuing to run. Where shutting down nuclear would result in wind or solar replacing it, you might be better off. Maybe hydro - with a very big caveat that the big risk with hydro is dam failures, which are rare, but can be absolutely devastating when they happen. For pretty much every other tech, the death toll is higher than the amortised death toll of nuclear with a large enough margin that you could up the danger of nuclear massively (such as by completely failing to take care of the waste) and still come out ahead.

> With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.

By "waste" do you need unused nuclear fuel? We can reduce the "waste" if we wanted to (see France), but it's cheaper to dig up more fuel.

The '10,000 year' thing is interesting: the nuclear "waste" that lasts that long is actually the stuff is not that dangerous. It can be stopped by tinfoil, and the only way for it to harm someone is either eat it or ground it into powder and snort it like cocaine: just being around it is not that big of deal.

The stuff that will get you is primary the stuff that is still around in the cooling pools for the first 6-10 years after removal. After that, there's a bunch of stuff that's around for ~200 years that you don't want to be touching. Once you're >300 years in, the radiation that's given is higher than 'background' in most places, that's why it's considered "risky".

Otherwise, as Madison Hilly demonstrated, it's not that big of a deal:

* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120

* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...

* Also: https://xcancel.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...

If I remember well most radioactive waste by volume is not from nuclear energy production and the share that is very small would be drastically lower if places like the US didn't ban it's recycling. It's half life can also be drastically reduced.

I also wonder. Is it the implied danger over those tens of thousands of years or would it end up being something more similar to Ramsar in Iran long before that?

And? Conventional power plants are killing people now.

Considering how dangerous CO2 induced climate change could be this is like worrying about drowning when using water to extinguish fires.

wait till you learn what we do with arsenic which lasts forever...

There are natural concentrations of radionuclides on the planet as well, there was even one place where a spontaneous fission reaction took place (Oklo, Gabon) millions of years ago. If you dig a sufficiently deep hole in a massive slab of granite (like Scandinavia), you can store all the waste of mankind there for approximately eternity.

German Greens absolutely love your argument, but compared to the pollution that we produce everyday and which kills people and animals every day, waste storage is a nothingburger.