Accidents are bad but left-overs are even worse. I wish people would think more about long-term problems with spent fuel rods. I don't think that burying them is a viable solution as the Asse mine in Germany shows.
The Asse is a people problem, caused by incompetence. Look who is responsible for it, if you like to ;)
Furthermore, to my knowledge there is no higly radioactive stuff stored down there, just some recklessly offloaded cans with cleaning clothes, and such. Again, incompetence and recklessness.
As of now, anything highly radioactive is stored above ground in 'Castor' either under clear skies, or light halls there, or as 'Zwischenlager' on the grounds of NPPs, maybe sometimes exported to make it a problem of other people, as usual...
Anyways, we could possibly transmutate it, like it is researched in Mol, Belgium, 'burn' its full potential in liquid-salt reactors, whatever. This whole longterm storage concept is shizophrenic thinking, because we didn't really research nuclear further, after we had working reactors based on (upscaled)military applications for economic, political, whatever reasons.
I am sure that we will experience very expensive disasters with renewable energy in the next few dozen years.
edit: Another thing regarding long term storage in 'geologic times'. If some group in 100.000 years. or later comes across this, and doesn't know how to handle it, why should I care about those stupid morons?
For all I care they discovered the curse of the atomic pharaos, and deserve it! Degraded bitches!
but, if coal burning continues to pump out carbon dioxide into our atmosphere and eventually completely upend any semblance of stable environment... wouldn’t it be preferred to make not doing that a priority?
And what happens when there's a storm? Renewables alone can't provide all the power needed over extended periods of time without very significant storage, for which there is no large scale cost effective solution actually implemented.
It took a tsunami on an unmaintained nuclear power plant to cause Fukushima.
It took the russians lifting off _every single security mechanism_ to cause Chernobyl.
The ojer major incidents like Three Mile Island are just "well, security measures have failed, we didn't have enough fallbacks. It's broken now. Light irradiation around but nothing major".
So, no, nuclear power doesn't stop for anything but the absolute worst conditions. As for the "doing even worse" part, two can play that game: hydro is renewable and yet killed hundreds of thousands. Oh no, stop hydro!
https://www.dw.com/en/nuclear-waste-in-disused-german-mine-l...
The salt mine was deemed to be safe for thousands of years. But then people discovered ingress of water. And salt water is corrosive.
I am sure that we will experience very expensive disasters with nuclear storage the next few thousand years.
We should never have used nuclear power in large scale.
Edit: And we should shut down coal, too. It's not about nuclear vs coal but nuclear vs renewables.