Myth vs. fact: Is nuclear power really a climate solution?
Myth #5: Nuclear waste has been resolved
As of 2020, there were 350,000 tons of highly radioactive waste worldwide awaiting safe storage – not including the waste left in tailing ponds at mining sites. No country has yet opened a safe storage site. The Yucca Mountain waste depository – built on stolen Western Shoshone land in Nevada – has since been cancelled due to mass opposition from the tribe and others.
The irony of environmental protection under the capitalist system cannot be starker in this case. While the Yucca Mountain site was under construction, the Environmental Protection Agency founded a task force to devise a “marker system” to communicate the dangers of the site to future generations who may not understand currently-used languages 10,000 years or more from now. Yucca Mountain sits on an earthquake zone, and if filled to capacity and then breached by seismic activity, would release the radiological equivalent of two million nuclear detonations, enough to kill everyone on the planet 350 times over! We must immediately stop creating radioactive waste rather than wasting billions on creating a life-threatening problem that currently has no solution.