The lifetimes are consistently optimistic, so read it as 30 to 50 years with 30 to 50 more years at incredibly high maintenance cost. The nuclear industry is n

The lifetimes are consistently optimistic, so read it as 30 to 50 years with 30 to 50 more years at incredibly high maintenance cost. The nuclear industry is necessarily incredibly fastidious about where the radioactive stuff goes. Every milligram is accounted for in triplicate. If nothing goes wrong, after decomissioning you can be far more confident that the site is free of harmful levels of radiation than basically anywhere else on earth. Something will go wrong somewhere if we keep building them, and we'll have a multi trillion dollar publicly funded cleanup, a large area for forest to reclaim that used to be two large cities, and a few tens of thousands of people dead (which is a vanishingly low cost compared to an oil war or a lithium coup). There will be a lot of steel and similar that counts as low grade waste that will take decades to deal with, but can be moved around safely and wouldn't really do large amounts of harm even if it were lost. Then there will be 2000t or so of high grade waste. This is the really nasty stuff. The plant operator will claim that the tiny amount of money they put in a fund for it means that they have no responsibility. Everyone will point fingers at everyone else and it'll sit in some temporary site for a while. It will probably eventually find its way into a breeder reactor or some reprocessing method at horiffic taxpayer expense. Alternatively someone will put neutron emitter A in barrel type B and put them half a meter to close together for an instagram photo at some point, and we'll have a permanent no-no zone the size of a state.