...called science.
Any answer to this question would involve an understanding of science, but the people who ask it, ask it because they, um, don't understand science, engineering or technology.
Thus the question cannot be answered, not because it doesn't have an answer, but because any answer would be beyond the comprehension of the questioner.
I note with due contempt that dangerous fossil fuel waste kills 7 million people per year, and yet no one is concerned with shoving it into rockets and sending it off to the moon.
This is reported in one of the most comprehensive surveys of risk factors and death ever compiled:
A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010
Nowhere, absolutely nowhere in that important paper, authored a wide array of academic physicians, epidemiologists and health authorities does the word "nuclear" appear.
Exactly, how many people, in the last half a century of the accumulation of so called "nuclear waste" (which by the way is not "waste" at all) has used nuclear fuel killed? As many people as will die in the next twenty minutes from air pollution?
Which is likely to have killed more people, so called "nuclear waste" or the air pollution created by generating electricity to run computers so people can bad mouth the form of energy invented by the finest minds of the 20th century?
The solution to the so called "problem" of "nuclear waste" is to leave the used nuclear fuel in place until such time that humanity is no longer ruled by ignorance. It does what real wastes do not do: It decays, often into extremely valuable materials.
Has any event associated with nuclear energy, including the events of Chernobyl and Fukushima, hyped ad nauseum, killed anything like the hundreds of millions who died because of air pollution since the first nuclear plants came on line in the 1950s?
Don't know? Don't care?
Well then, what exactly is left to say?
I say: Nuclear energy need not be perfect; it need not be without risk to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is. This somehow offends people. They insist that nuclear energy be perfect or that everything else will be able to kill at will. Where is there a shred of intellectual or moral integrity in such an argument?
Unfortunately, the fear and ignorance that attaches itself to nuclear issues has, in fact, be a chain that has been attached to what might have been the last, best, hope of humanity. This ignorance will prove, I expect, comparable in a scale of destruction probably not seen since the times of the black death.
Have a nice week.
= new reply since forum marked as read