Can the waste be sent into the sun or into deep space? That's something I've always wondered.
If we sent the waste away, there would be very little criticism left.
Way too expensive. Nuclear waste is very dense and heavy, it needs a lot of energy to shoot it into space.
Also, spent fuel still contains like 98% of its original energy because regular slow reactors are not very good at burning up fuel. So recycling fuel would be much more advisable, it'd also reduce the amount of waste that has to be stored for extremely long times.
You can recycle fuel rods in reprocessing plants, or use fast breeder reactors. These have been developed back in the seventies because they thought uranium reserves were much smaller and utilising fuel more efficiently was desired. But then it turned out uranium was much more plentiful and it was cheaper to just produce more fresh fuel than recycling it. There is some reprocessing going on, but it's also expensive so there aren't too many facilities doing that.
The thing about the waste disposal is that it is a political bargaining chip. Those against nuclear power will never allow a truly viable disposal solution since they think that "but what about muh waste" is an argument against using nuclear power. Even though nuclear waste already exists and is a problem that has to be solved either way, and continued use or not doesn't change that.
There's always the argument "but muh fast breeders don't exist, just one in Russia, it doesn't work". Well, we could have been decades ahead with the technology. We had a grid scale fast breeder built in Germany, the sodium was heated and circulating in its coolant cycle. Guess what, the government changed and pulled the plug on the reactor before it received fuel. Now it's an amusement park.
France had two fast breeders. The first demonstrator ran quite well, the second had issues. It also had terrorists (a now deceased green politician from Switzerland) shooting the construction site with an RPG and constant protests.
No shit the technology isn't here yet, these faggots always block it.
There's a high temperature gas cooled reactor running in China now, guess what, that technology was developed in Germany in the 70s/80s as well. It had issues and the people responsible were idiots about it, but it had potential. These idiots had an issue with leakage and tried to keep it under wraps, right when chernobyl happened. So that was retarded, but the technology was sound. Could have been decades ahead again.
Many issues are purely political.
Nuclear power is a bit of an interest of mine and I have some work experience in the industry. So I might be able to answer some technical questions.
/edit:
I don't think fusion will ever work and I'm not even remotely read upon that. I'm just looking at the way they are trying to use magnetic fields and I just don't see how the fuck they can keep that stable 24/7? It has to be a meme right? They want to replicate the suns pressure (generated by it's own mass!) with magnets!? Without calculating, my gut tells me that the energy exchange is a big fat massive net negative on this one. Again, maybe 100 years from now I'm wrong and I'm the retard...
You got a few things wrong there. First of all, there are many different approaches to nuclear fusion. The most common and well known is magnetic confinement (of which there are several different types as), and there they don't replicate the Sun's pressure. So for nuclear fusion reactions to occur you need pressure, temperature, and time. It's called the triple product, and you can exchange time and pressure and temperature for each other. So if you have lower pressure, you need more temperature and so on. In the very common TOKAMAK magnetic confinement approach, the confinement time is up to a few seconds (a TOKAMAK can only work pulsed, although there are some workarounds to keep the plasma current going while the primary coil resets), pressure is very low, but temperature is very high. A different type of magnetic confinement is the Stellarator, it can theoretically run continuously due to its magnetic field geometry, but pressure and temperature are similar to a TOKAMAK.
The most promising approaches right now seem to be inertial confinement approaches, where confinement time is really short, but pressure and temperatures are very high. This is what works in a thermonuclear bomb, and it's the only approach that so far has shown net energy production at the National Ignition Facility laser experiment. It was just scientific net gain, so fusion output exceeded laser energy on target, but it does seem promising. With increasing laser efficiency (the NIF laser is hilariously inefficient) and a slightly different approach (direct vs indirect drive) one can very likely get proper net energy gain from this.
As for energy exchange, you gotta understand how massive nuclear fusion reactions are. We're talking MeV per reaction, magnitudes larger than even nuclear fission. So very small amounts of fuel can yield shitloads of energy.
I can go into more detail on various fusion approaches, too. Nuclear power is a bit of an interest, but nuclear fusion is a HUGE interest.
Also, work experience in that field.
