A lot of the waste from nuclear energy is not just the spent fuel, it's the waste from radioactive parts of the power plant itself. The spent fuel is the most dangersous, but a lot of it can be reprocessed. But a lot of it is radioactive steal, concrete, etc. that the power plant is made out of. The highly radioactive conditions in the core of the reactor make everything inside the reactor extremely radioactive. They also make the core deteriorate quickly, so it needs to be replaced. You might get a ton of spent fuel and maybe 10 or 100 tons of other material (I hae no idea how much, really).

And this problem of having the radioactive material from the power plant itself will also be an issue for fusion, if they can ever actually make fusion work for power generation. When fusing hydrogen, most of the energy is released as high-speed neutrons. Those need to be captured in a material to make the heat for power generation. That materail will quickly become radioactive. So the spent fuel is harmless helium, but there are still tons and tons of radioactive material to deal with.

The Yucca mountain idea is one way to handle it, the subduction zone idea is another. The French store it all above ground in special facilities. The idea is that they want to be able to monitor it and correct any leaks or other problems easily. If you put it inside a mountain and something happens, the whole confined environment becomes so dangerous, you might never be able to get in and fix it. If you put it into a suduction zone, and it begins to leak before its 1000 years is up, you propably never could get in to correct it.

I think wind and solar are the way to go. It is not cost effective now, but its cost goes down all the time, and the cost of fossil fuels goes up. Eventually they will be the same. But if you could quanitify the cost of the pollution involved with fossil fuels, wind and solar would probably already be cheaper.
dragonrider Reviewed by dragonrider on . O'Reilly interviews Obama, part 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAxdUFSmVxc Yep, and this time it's energy policy and foreign policy. Definitely worth watching. Rating: 5