Why do I feel a long post coming on again....
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In my opinion the largest drawback of nuclear power is the very long halflife of the waste. It is easy for us to just shove the waste into a large hole in the ground but in 10,000 - 50,000 years a lot of geological activity can happen and it is not certain that the people of that time will know of the danger.
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But not all of it is highly radioactive. In most cases just burying it underground away from groundwater is sufficient. And, even though the environmentalists would hate me for saying this....... we could dump it in the ocean. It's very large and very deep, and it would only affect a very minimal proportion of ocean life. Personally I wouldn't have any problem with dumping nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean.
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I'm not against nuclear power but i'm also not all positive about it, that would be too naive. While it looks good on paper the implementation is not good enough many places. Britain has Magnox reactors that were designed to run for only 20 to 25 years but some are still running eventhough they are 30 to 45 years old
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But you have to understand why the implementation is bad. The current economics of nuclear power make it difficult to use. I do not know of the nuclear power situation in the UK but I do know of the situation in the United States, and it would not surprise me if they are similar.
Since TMI, the NRC has levied numerous, often arbitrary requirements for nuclear power plants to get licenses that make it almost impossible to get them. The US Capitol building in Washington, DC would be illegal to use as a nuclear power plant because the radiation levels are too high. Paperwork for setting up a nuclear plant is almost endless. It can take longer to finish it than to build the plant. Sometimes in the midst of construction requirements are changed, requiring new construction in place of what has already happened. Because of the extreme requirements put on nuclear power plants and the way they are built, each one is currently built slightly differently from others. There is not as of yet any "expertise" on building nuclear power plants because new teams of engineers build each one, causing the same mistakes to be made over and over. Once a reactor vessel at a California plant was installed backwards. And then the environmentalists can file hundreds of lawsuits, making it impossible to get the required licenses. Several nuclear power plants have been changed to coal in midconstruction because of the difficulty in obtaining licenses. Some plants were nearly finished for ten to fifteen years before obtaining licenses to operate.
The nuclear industry needs two things to become more economical. First, much of the paperwork needs to simplified as a great deal of it is arbitrary. If licenses are easier to get, plants will become easier to build. Second, there needs to be a more standard design for nuclear power plants, which will prevent mistakes from being made over and over. Right now, nuclear power plants can cost from $1 billion to $3 billion to build.
However, once built, nuclear power plants are far cheaper to operate than coal plants. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Almost all of coal plants' cost comes from their operating costs. They require thousands of trainloads of coal a year to operate. A nuclear power plant only requires a few truckloads of fresh fuel per year. Coal plants also must constantly run mining operations to get coal, in which many miners die. The pollution from coal plants is estimated to kill 50 people a day. The volume of waste produced is actually more than the orginal fuel, and they put more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants do.
So, because of the operating costs, the final cost per kilowatt hour to the customer is virtually the same to the customer. If nuclear power becomes easier to build by relaxing many of the arbitrary requirements and by using common designs, it will become much cheaper.
The anti-nukyular power activists don't care that coal plants are more radioactive than nuclear ones; that the Capitol bulding is more radioactive than a nuclear plant is legally allowed to be; that the only proven deaths from nuclear power were at the poorly designed Chernobyl plant, but it is a proven fact that over 50 people a day die from the pollution caused by coal and oil plants. They don't care that the heating power of a gram of uranium is similar to that of something like ten million tons of coal, that coal mining causes thousands of deaths, or that coal power plants require trainloads of fuel a day, and that nuclear power plants need a few truckloads per year. They also fail to realize the advantages of NTRs or NEPs, and that Yucca Mountain will cost $58 billion, mostly due to them (note that this is approximately three times the cost of a manned Mars mission).
Basically, if I wanted to stay safe from radiation, I would replace all coal plants with nuclear ones.
While nuclear power plants can have problems, in practice if safety regulations are followed they do not. A perfect example of a problem at a properly regulated plant was Three Mile Island. There was a major problem, and if the plant was not designed for safety people might have been hurt. But the containment structure prevented any radioactive release and protected the population of the area. The same cannot be said for coal and oil plants, whose pollution affects everyone in their area, including wildlife.