Civilian nuclear power began as a public-relations effort by the Eisenhower administration to soften the image of the then-dreaded atom. It would, we were promised, make our toasters work instead of (or in addition to) making our cities burn.

In one view, it’s been a success. Nuclear plants were built across America, and, in a time of climate awareness, they have been promoted as an important part of a clean energy future, more reliable than wind and solar. New, more compact, easier-to-build nuke plants are being proposed. Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island are distant memories of a primitive past.

Only one matter has been left out of these newly positive accounts: after more than 70 years, civilian nuclear plants have left a lasting legacy of waste. There are some efforts to re-use some waste products to provide new nuclear fuel, but across the country, and around the world, nuke plants have as their neighbors a growing number of “temporary” waste storage facilities, including one on a Southern California beach. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/24/san-onofre-nuclear-power-plant-radioactive-waste-unsafe)

But temporary is lasting a long time, although not nearly as long as the lifespan of the waste. Some byproducts of nuclear fission remain radioactive, dangerously so, for eons, thousands of years, in some cases a longer period of time than our species has existed. The storage facilities are temporary for a good reason: up to now, almost no communities in this country, and just a few overseas, have allowed a more nearly permanent waste storage facility in their neighborhood. Ever since a powerful Democratic senator waged a long and successful war against a federal storage facility in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, nuke waste has been a less desirable neighbor than a cut-rate brothel.

The current push to resume building nuclear plants is a byproduct of the AI boom (or, in a darker reading, an exhaust product of the AI bubble). You will search in vain, in all the gee-whizzery of that promotion, of any mention of where the inevitable byproduct of those new “modular” plants will be stored for millennia.

Politicians have been haranguing us for years about how federal budget deficits will burden our grandchildren. They don’t deign to mention the generations of great-great-great grandchildren who will have to live with, and maybe solve the problem of, their radioactive inheritance.