Then 2% means for all waste (high level, low level, mixed) 50 football fields stacked 30 ft high for the US for all waste. Or one tenth of a square mi sunk 30+

Then 2% means for all waste (high level, low level, mixed) 50 football fields stacked 30 ft high for the US for all waste. Or one tenth of a square mi sunk 30+ feet down. The US is a very big energy-intensive country and that’s a very small patch of land for that fraction of energy needs met. And since most is low level, 90% of that just gets stuck in a salt mine for a few decades. Not exactly a dump and not exactly a vault (monitoring, retrievable), but it’s not exactly rocket science, cf. Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. If delaying nuclear until we “fully solved” nuclear waste means that tens of thousands of Asians die of lung diseases every year instead, maybe a half-solution is good enough. Weapons proliferation via (theft and) reprocessing of the much greater amount of high-level nuclear waste resulting from a “nuclear future” is the real thorn in the rose.