"Today, the liveliness of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki serves as a reminder not only of the human ability to regenerate, but also of the extent to which fear and misinformation can lead to incorrect expectations. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many thought that any city targeted by an atomic weapon would become a nuclear wasteland. While the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombings was horrendous and nightmarish, with innumerable casualties, the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not allow their cities to become the sort of wasteland that some thought was inevitable. This experience of can serve as lesson in the present when much of the public and even some governments have reacted radically to the accident in Fukushima--in the midst of tragedy, there remains hope for the future."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/ukrai...
So yeah. Foreverish.
Don't get me wrong, maybe nuclear is the optimal answer to Earth's energy needs. But also, maybe the tech is just not there yet, and certainly the media's fear-mongering needs to be more tempered and more informative to allow public acceptance of nuclear. Otherwise we will probably still keep getting NIMBY responses
[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
[2] https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.htm...
The water keeps it from melting as the spent fuel becomes a little more inert each day (it transfers heat to the water, and as we know radioactive stuff has half lives). After a few years, we can move it to dry storage (incased by concrete and steel).
