Quote Originally Posted by dragonrider
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.
Yeah, I was going to touch on this but my post was already long enough as it was. They didn't take radioactive contamination into consideration when they were building the first and second generation of nuclear power plants, but now they're definitely looking at that. One thing they're doing is developing new alloys that absorb neutrons but don't transmute into radioactive isotopes with long half-lives. They can use these alloys in areas where neutron radiation levels are high. Even though these alloys don't produce long-lived radioactive isotopes, they often break down into elements that have a negative impact on properties of the alloy, so they would need to be replaced, but they wouldn't need to be classified as radioactive waste.

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.
Engineers are still pretty good at designing these things, and even if it did leak it'd be way underground far below groundwater levels. As long as it stays there, no problem, at least in the subduction zones. Another thing they can do is mix it in with glass. That way, you can smash it all up and the waste still won't leak out. The main problem with subduction zones is that the people that live in those areas still don't want nuclear waste anywhere near them. (Not in my backyard!)

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.
One issue is that wind is most active in the morning and evening, and solar cuts out at night. Also, solar panels are expensive and require manufacturing processes that produce lots of pollution. But presumably if we got really cool nanotech, we could solve that problem. I wrote a short sci-fi story for a writing class in college in which all roads and parking lots were made out of a self-repairing organic substance that also collected solar energy. I still think that would be awesome.