What do you mean by that? Deep geological storage seems to work pretty well, and the 'size' of the problem is so small that even if we were to 100x it it would still be minuscule when compared to e.g. coal ash runoff, which includes fun things like arsenic and mercury and is currently 'disposed' of by stuffing it in landfills or even uncovered open-air pools.
> Deep geological storage seems to work pretty well
Not well enough - the crystalline parts of earth's crust are still too porous to reliably keep it contained. It would - in the long term - leak like radon gas.
And what about the mid to low radioactive waste? Also let's not forget France does not have any long term storage facility for their highly radioactive waste yet. Why if it is so easy have they not managed?
Nuclear-level containment on geological timescales is potentially impossible.
Its not like you can put it into a dump and its "gone" like household trash. Radioactivity is ionizing, so it corrodes all materials and cannot be physically contained. The earth's crust is to porous (i mentioned the radon problem in another post) to keep it underground.
A partial solution is to build reactors that can use that waste. Thorium reactors can do that and have the advantage that you can't make a bomb from it and that it is easier to control.
You're saying a flatly mistaken thing in absolutist terms from pure fucking igonrance, as if you knew what you were talking about, at that. There are many ways to store nuclear waste very safely, just as there are many ways to store all kinds of dangerous things safely and do all kinds of dangerous things we need to do as a civilization, safely. As for the size of the "problem" growing. Go look at how much space even all the world's known HL nuclear waste combined requires, and how slowly that space (hint: it's tiny, as in, fits-into-a-college-sports-auditorium with room to spare for a quick basketball game tiny) grows year over year, or would grow even if we exponentially increased our use of nuclear.
People such as yourself, just blandly stating plain nonsense with certainty are cause for many problems in the world, and for nuclear energy, they're as common as fruit flies, buzzing around any serious debate.
Just to give a little context: in Germany, which the OP was about, just the search for a suitable place to store nuclear waste started in 1999 with the formation of a working group of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety [1]. It is expected that the result of the search process will not be available until the year 2046 [2].
Maybe it's not quite as easy as the layman thinks, especially considering that Germany has a lot less space then, say, the US.
So we are waiting for the bureaucrats to find a solution for something that doesn't even have a real pressure to be done (meanwhile the stuff is stored on facility and it doesn't cause much problem).
The bureaucrats already take forever to do anything because they get paid regardless and they even have an incentive to make stuff look more complicated than they are (look how important the work is). Add to that your typical political nonsense, especially from a government that was readily hostile.
Add to that the typical nonsensical German overengineering, where they find ways to make stuff in an absurdly complex manner for what are generally little benefits.
They briefly mentioned that problem in the article: Flamanville was very late, in large part because it was a collaboration with Siemens, who forced the use of stupid German regulations. The result is that nobody wants to buy this stupid design, because why would they, when there are perfectly viable alternatives without the German overengineering bullshit.
By the way, I have a strong feeling that this is industrial sabotage from Germany, using Siemens as pawn. Considering their reluctance for nuclear since basically forever, it makes no sense that they pretend to even be working on it.
So, if there is one thing that should be absolutely clear to anyone not ideologically corrupted, is that nobody should give two shits about whatever Germany does/think around nuclear power. They have proved to be largely incompetent and politically corrupt in the matter.
... and this research is done by people like my partner, who is currently writing their thesis about that. I could cite their previous publications here but that would dox me.
