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From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container.

The storage units for this stuff is incredibly robust and safe. Radioactive stuff is also incredibly easy to detect. No company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way. People would know right away. IMO, this is much less scary than being next to a chemical plant.

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Planning on storing it locally solves the problem of transport. Nobody wants an 18-wheeler hauling a couple tons of nuclear waste driving by their neighborhood. That’s regardless of how far away it’s going.
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Waste which will be here for many generations of humans and can seriously harm them is overblown?

It never cases to amaze me how much blatant misinformation circulates around this topic.

Just a few years ago, nobody sane would have predicted Trump. How can anybody seriously predict what would happen to this waste in a few years? I'm not even talking about generations here.

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Again, destroy a dam and you get a catastrophe. Don't do anything in particular and watch how many people die in the mid-term due to climate change.

It's all about risk management.

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Like they said, if it’s properly stored and monitored it’s not going to harm anyone.

If you’re worried about some kind of societal collapse leading to it being abandoned, well in that case there are much bigger problems that are more immediately dangerous.

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Waste management has always been a purely political problem, since breeder reactor designs have existed as long as enriched uranium fission reactors. Most of the waste of breeder reactors is radioactively inert; the problem is that mining uranium is profitable in itself, and it probably shouldn't be.
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Snarky answer: It's simple, they are just going to build the final storage on the border to Germany. Then it will be their problem when it starts leaking.
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I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.
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This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years

And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy

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An earthquake will not suddenly take the waste from hundreds of meters underground and throw it in the air. I mean, assuming you store it in a reasonable place.
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What kind of animal is going to dig through concrete and steel and also be hundreds of meters underground in solid rock?
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Sure, you need the right place, but it's not like there's a shortage of space far away from everything.
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Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for the environment”.
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What is the solution?

Where are the free nuclear plants?

Sizewell C = £40 billion

That’s a lot of PV solar and battery storage.

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You're talking about building new, now, with very expensive nuclear and very cheap and performant solar.

Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past.

Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.

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Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.
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Ask why it suddenly got so expensive and why delays were introduced. Hint, it happened more in some countries than others.
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Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.
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