Not a nuclear engineer - nor do I play on on TV! - but the last numbers I have seen for radioactive waste were some 144 MILLION tons already, an amount that already (without new plants) is going up by over 20 million tons per year. Had we gone with Yucca Mountain, we already have more than it could hold within the salt formations.

Reprocessing holds promise, as well as the French process of using the waste heat and common sand to fuse the spent rods into a fairly stable ceramic. I do not doubt that we can eventually solve this issue, but if we are already generating 20 million tons MORE per year on top of such a vast amount of waste, perhaps we should take a step back and REALLY find a solution. Apparently, the first generation of plants have burned through the initial setup of materials and the reprocessing plants that used some byproducts in nuclear-weapons projects no longer HAVE that as an outlet for these elements.

Thus, the amount going into the waste stream is increasing swiftly even without new plants. Frankly, given the massive amount already in storage (and most plants are running out of any available space), it is the kind of problem that we just cannot kick down the road. What happens when an online plant MUST have new rods, and its storage pools are full? What if we DID find finally that there WAS no safe way to store this stuff - five years after building a new wave of nuke plants that are essential to our grid? Some things MUST be done rationally and responsibly - and this may be a good example.

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves"--Bertrand de Jouvenel