Most of nuclear waste should not called that. The more radioactive something is the more energy production capability it still has. Only a lunatic puts that stuff in caskets and digs caves for storage, and doesn't reap that. If the spent fuel was re-used correctly, we could run all the humanity's toys with it for several hundred thousand years without breaking any sweat.
... And that brings us to those costs. There are parties that benefit from causing the costs to ramp up. So they have tried to find out ways to do exactly that, and prevent the good cost reducing innovations from reaching even testing so they could be mass adopted some day.
It is widely known that we have knowledge of vastly safer reactor types, but we haven't been able to even get permits for full scale test runs. We know that there are several things about the fuel cycle we could improve, but we have to stove the best stuff away. We could actually go and fix some of the old installations, and their design features, but we are not allowed to do that either. Probably we could drop the price of nuclear power to a fraction (say, 1/10th?), but it is not politically correct to talk about that publicly. And so on, and so on.
Many people simply want nuclear power to fail.
... And that brings us to those costs. There are parties that benefit from causing the costs to ramp up. So they have tried to find out ways to do exactly that, and prevent the good cost reducing innovations from reaching even testing so they could be mass adopted some day.
It is widely known that we have knowledge of vastly safer reactor types, but we haven't been able to even get permits for full scale test runs. We know that there are several things about the fuel cycle we could improve, but we have to stove the best stuff away. We could actually go and fix some of the old installations, and their design features, but we are not allowed to do that either. Probably we could drop the price of nuclear power to a fraction (say, 1/10th?), but it is not politically correct to talk about that publicly. And so on, and so on.
Many people simply want nuclear power to fail.