It’s arguably misleading to even call it “waste” — it’s recyclable. Even if you don’t recycle it, the little ceramic pellets weigh two hundred fifty-three thous

It’s arguably misleading to even call it “waste” — it’s recyclable. Even if you don’t recycle it, the little ceramic pellets weigh two hundred fifty-three thousand, one hundred and sixty-four (.55696202531645569620 ±) times less per person than gas and coal (and the difference in volume is presumably many times larger): https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#howmuch https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#howmuch > If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here [https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf]. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data [https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_carbon.php https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_car...]). > If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make this waste. > For comparison, in 2007 alone the US burned 948,000,000 metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years! Granted, coal made a higher fraction of the country’s electricity, but the numbers are still crazy impressive for nuclear. > The astoundingly low amount of nuclear waste is thanks to the near magical energy density of the atom. More: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html Edit: replaced “containable” in second sentence with numbers