(Below is my opinion, I respect you have yours, and I'm not having a go at you. I just want to take part in the discourse friendo!)

To me, if they wanted to store it in my area by encasing it now (or, any time in like the last 40 years), I wouldn't mind either.

The issue that isn't fear-mongering that people continually overlook because of all the knee-jerking people lamenting that it's "unsafe", is that we then have to maintain containment for thousands upon thousands of years.

That's the issue, permanent storage, not all the temporary storage that is happening now.

Nuclear is not a great solution to immediately reducing emissions, in my opinion. Takes way too much capital and way too much time to get operational. Don't close still operating plants, but damn, we need to be building the fastest shit possible, right now. Not something that takes a decade to build. We have solutions ready, governments just aren't getting their act together and build it. Even if the business-case doesn't make complete sense; we don't have time.

Sand batteries, liquid air energy storage, lithium ion batteries, flow batteries, (plus a bunch of other contenders) they're all immature technologies but they do work right now, anywhere, no terrain for pumped-hydro required. Sure they're not very efficient, or have crap lifespan in the case of Li-ion, but solar plants literally aren't being built in some places because prices go negative during the day, and plants are being curtailed.

We need to build storage, now, even if it's not a silver bullet. And we can't wait for expensive-as-fuck nuclear.

Someone should call me when we decide re-enriching spent nuclear fuel is fine and we can do nuclear waste recycling, actually getting our money's worth. Or when thorium gets good.

My personal opinion conclusion:

• Nuclear waste is not immediately that concerning for safety, it's the fact we're signing up to store it for longer than recorded history.
• It's expensive and takes to long to build
• The technology needed for the energy transition already exists
• Also agree, that turning off operating nuclear doesn't make sense.

Thanks for reading, looking forward to hearing people's thoughts.

Nobody has. Nuclear casks need maintenance for their life time. We haven't invented any kind of nuclear proof forever material that's immune to entropy. And every single one of these solutions people propose have flaws that render the solution not viable so for now we end up storing it all above ground

Everything in life slowly degrades over time and the longer the life span of something the more it degrades. Especially when that contained is filled with something radioactive.

There are lots of people who are justifiably not comfortable expecting a private company to continue a maintenance cycle that brings in zero profit and all costs for a few thousand years without cutting corners. I don't like the idea of the Elon musks being the Smaug of nuclear waste

Even better: reprocess the fuel. The linear fuel life time decommissions nuclear fuel as useless while it still has 90-something percent of energy potential left. Having a more cyclical life cycle allows for the spent fuel to be reconstituted into new fuel, and to be used anew. All the waste that does end up being produced is only a fraction of the waste produced in a linear process, and only dangerous on a societal timescale instead of a geological one.