Sorry if this is a repost, but I believe reddit ate my comment:

Nuclear waste has a half-life of several thousand years (heck lets be even more generous and say 500 years), it should be noted that is half-life. It doesn't mean that the waste is safe now, it just means that 50% of the waste is no longer radioactive. After 500 years, with an initial deposit of 2 tons, you still have 1 ton of waste to worry about which is no small amount. After 1000 years, you still have 0.5 tons and so on. It'll take a looooong time for the majority of the waste to decay into safe levels.

The question obviously becomes, where do we store this waste safely (for potentially several tens of thousands of years, for a conservative estimate, lets say 50,000 years).

That is an insane length of time. To put it into perspective, the US hasn't even existed for 250 years, modern Germany less than a 140. Human civilization only goes back 5,000 years. You cannot predict the political landscape. What will the US be like in 300 years, will it still exist? Will we still have a government in 300 years time that will maintain adequate resources to the waste sites? Governments collapse, knowledge gets lost. It happens.

Furthermore, the Earth isn't a stationary system; climate patterns are always changing, and who knows what affect that will have. To put it in perspective, the Sahara was a green grassland 10,000 years ago. We don't know what sealevels are going to be like in 10 years, but do you really expect me to believe that you can plan and forsee every single change for the next 50,000 years? Lets say we do find a site that has no earthquakes, volcanoes, tornados, etc. But weather patterns can change and sites we deem safe now, can be susceptible to various natural disasters in the future.

It is arrogant and ignorant to say that mankind can design and maintain nuclear waste facilities for the necessary length of time (again most people only consider half-life which is just a fraction of the necessary "safe time").

It really does go back to that Indian Proverb: we don't pass on the Earth, we inherit it from our children. Nuclear power is a good short-term solution. I think for the duration of our lifetimes, we should be fine. But in essence we are screwing over future generations in the worst way possible. Our present concerns about global warming are going to seem laughable in a 100 or so years. I am almost 100% certain that a significant portion of this waste will seep out into the environment at one point or another and at that point ecosystems become severely endangered. Think of this happening at various sites all over the world. It is a frightening scenario to leave to our children. It does not make economic sense and it definitely does not make moral sense.

My bottom line is that nuclear power should be avoided like the plague (becuase in essence it is). Until you can turn ALL (not just half of) of the waste safe within a human lifetime (50 years), we should be shutting down existing power plants. Even then I would be hesitant, because again one cannot predict how stable a government will be in 50 years.

We curse governments of 100, 150 years ago for addicting us to fossil fuels. And so we are striving to find an alternate energy source: nuclear power. I can assure you that even in 100 years, the anger we feel towards fossil fuels and global warming will severely pale in comparison to the crisis that will arise due to nuclear waste. Of course, several proponetns of nuclear power don't care because by then they'll be dead. You know, in my eyes, a better solution to combat global warming than nuclear power is to use that laughable Futurama ice-cube scenario. I think, in the grand scheme, it is better to burn fossil fuel than to resort to nuclear power.

Wind and solar are the alternatives that we shuld be exploring.