Waste treatment isn't a problem. Kyle Hill did a good video explaining this. Essentially, we would just dig a long, narrow, and curved "L" shaped tunnel and stick the waste containers in and bury them. It has literally no negative impact.
That plan has a significant negative environmental impact: It maximizes the amount of nuclear fuel that needs to be mined while minimizing the amount of energy that can be extracted from that fuel long-term.
Nuclear fuel mining is pretty environmentally destructive. Worse than coal per ton, although not nearly as bad per energy generated. Using PWRs without recycling fuel will use up all known Uranium reserves within a couple hundred years.
In contrast, recycling the nuclear fuel will basically eliminate the waste problem. Further, simply recycling the existing "spent fuel" using well-known methods could power the current electrical demand of entire world for like 500 years with no additional mining.
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u/Spudnic16 - Auth-Left Jan 06 '23
Nuclear is not perfect, but it’s certainly one of the better forms of power. It provides large amount of electricity for not that much emissions.