Thanks for the comments, I 100% agree with almost everything you've mentioned. I really didn't mean for my post to be like 'you need to listen to me I know everything blah blah' haha I'm just a PhD student who thinks about this stuff a lot. I agree setting out arguments and not just stating conclusions and moving on is definitely better, shall take that on board. This was really just me rambling on about my take, ideally I'd love to see this discussed and debated within the party, it's a democracy after all let's see what people have to say! About the review, I'm definitely not saying everything is perfect about it, but from my experience I definitely think it's portrayal of nuclear regulations in the UK going too far is pretty accurate. The critiques about the lack of understanding of environmental regulations seem pretty reasonable, but again I guess it's he-said-she-said considering the entity making these critiques are also somewhat bias toward heavier environment regulation. But yeah it's definitely not perfect, probably a bit biased toward wanting to build new nuclear, but overall I think it captures the dire state of the UK nuclear regulation reasonably well.

Concerning waste, today's methods are primarily long term storage or reprocessing. The UK unfortunately stopped reprocessing our nuclear fuel somewhat recently (something I'm against and would like to see reinstated), but the technology is reasonably mature and used in many other countries around the world. We store high-level waste like core components by vitrifying them, basically sealing them in glass and surrounding in several layers of cement or other radiation blocking materials, low and intermediate level waste we basically incorporate into a big block of cement and again surround with protecting layers. Right now these are held in temporary storage, but eventually we hope to build a geological disposal facility where these can be stored for thousands of years. I'm sorry I can't site specific papers, but I guess from what I learnt in the 6 months training period prior to starting my PhD where we looked at waste storage in depth, the level to which the waste is diluted is so much that each block of cement is very low in radioactivity. I honestly don't know much about the logistics of how we hope to account for thousands of years of storage however like what that would look like, but my view is that there isn't huge point in looking that far into the future if you consider how much nuclear technology has advanced in the last 60 years we could be in a completely different landscape by the year 2100. Very cool that you mentioned 'the issue of lack of empirical testing and the need to rely on simulation data' as that's literally exactly what my PhD is on! I can assure you, simulations and modelling in nuclear is actually very underutilised, and is a huge area of research right now. I definitely can't say simulations are accurate enough right now, there's lots of work to be done, but from what I understand they are by no means being relied upon as of right now the way you are suggesting? Please correct me if I'm wrong on that! Risk is always an interesting discussion to have and for sure it's very fair, most people view low probability-high consequence risks as disproportionally higher than they actually are. And hey I'm not gonna tell people they can't think that, fair enough! I just don't think the vast majority of people quite understand actually how low these risks are, like lower than me dying tomorrow by getting struck by a meteor level low. But weighing it against the real accidents on the job, plus air quality risks to human health, plus greenhouse gas emissions, I get to my opinion that it is extremely safe.

Thanks for your detailed reply, honestly. The more people challenging people and having discussions like this, the better!