There are several problems plaguing the nuclear power industry, but the most intractable seems to be where and how to dispose of waste. People keep looking at locations around the United States and, since no one wants it in their backyard, finding an acceptable site will probably be mired in controversy forever.
A very simple option exists on paper. Wrap it in something fairly solid, take it out somewhere in the Pacific, a thousand miles from the closest inhabited land, and dump it in 13,000 feet of water, the average depth. Then go home and sleep the sleep of the innocent.
What, I hear you cry, don't I care about the purity of our sacred oceans? Somewhat, but in this case, not a lot. Or rather, I know enough about geometry to realize that there is essentially no way for mankind to pollute the volume of water that the oceans contain.
With a great deal of work, we could pollute its two-dimensional surface, although it's hard to do even that over a serious portion. We can, and have, polluted its shorelines, which are one-dimensional. But in three dimensions, our puny efforts could not mess up the ocean an iota.
The volume of water in the oceans is about 1.37 billion cubic kilometers. In scientific notation, 1.37 x 109 km3. Or 1.37 x 1018 m3. Or 362 billion billion gallons.
The DOE estimates that it is storing 100 million gallons of nuclear waste. That would certainly already be diluted and would not consist entirely of radioactive molecules. If you stupidly sank it in a manner that it would leak rapidly, you would be diluting the volume of waste to one part in three trillion. Radioactive molecules would be much less concentrated. Even this assumes that essentially no effort is made to contain the waste, so that it leaks quickly before radioactive decay kills it. Any decent containment process would reduce the impact by orders of magnitude. In short, you could easily get rid of our entire Cold War legacy and it wouldn't even be detectable with current technologies.
Unfortunately, this reasonable solution is banned by a treaty that the United States signed in 1993. Thank you, Bill Clinton.
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I'm uncomfortable but you've almost convinced me. However I'm guessing Yucca Mountain objections are easier to overcome than millions of mathematically challenged nuclear activists. Certainly our failure to adopt European style nuclear for American is costing us in blood and probably money now and into the future.
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