As to disposal of nuclear waste, I think we need a "give a bugger horizon"

At the bottom of oceanic trenches, nuclear waste isn't likely to come back up for millions of years. Though it would have to buried to prevent a Godzilla incident.

In stable rock formations like Nuvvuagittuq* or the Pilbara Cratons, which being very old will probably not be subject to platetechtonic trouble in the future.

*

Sure, no country wants to be a waste dumping ground. But it's just a few decades before we have a transmutation ray which can turn deadly nuclear waste into calcium to feed to our children.

Global warming is an imminent threat. Nuclear waste is not!

Uranium power is a struggling industry.

Build costs are high, yes, but they are high because of the EXTREME build requirements. A few disasters have impressed on the public that nuclear is dangerous, and government (attempting to "help" the nuclear power industry) has imposed EXTREME safety measures.

But more fundamental in the public's distrust, is the management of nuclear waste. In France they reprocess (hugely reducing the volume of terminal waste) and in the US they tried to establish a huge terminal waste repository at Yucca Mountain. But the Nevada government wrecked that deal (not that Washington was committed to it anyway.) Storing nuclear waste on the reactors site just increases the NIMBY problem, and as we found at Yukushima isn't a particularly safe interim measure.

Sure, thorium reactors might have an overhead of salt purification. They might need fuel turnover. Both of these would be expensive. BUT thorium reactors would produce much less TERMINAL waste. That is, the waste that has negative value and has to be stored effectively forever.

The free market is freaked out by "negative value" waste. It could become valuable in the future, but far more likely it becomes less and less valuable. Nobody wants to own it, nobody wants it on their books. Even government taking possession of it, is no guarantee they won't some day be fined for it.

The "negative value" of nuclear waste, is the real reason that the nuclear fission industry has not thrived, in these days when it should be more successful than it was in the 60's. It's not nuclear disasters (which can all be explained and compensated for) no it's the waste.

China is not only ahead with Thorium power but now with fusion power:

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/nuclear-energy/chinas-artificial-sun-sh...








News
By Patrick Pester published yesterday
A nuclear fusion reactor in China, dubbed the "artificial sun," has broken its own record to bring humanity one step closer to near-limitless clean energy.

China's "artificial sun" reactor has broken its own world record for maintaining super-hot plasma, marking another milestone in the long road towards near-limitless clean energy.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) nuclear fusion reactor maintained a steady, highly confined loop of plasma — the high-energy fourth state of matter — for 1,066 seconds on Monday (Jan. 20), which more than doubled its previous best of 403 seconds, Chinese state media reported.

Nuclear fusion reactors are nicknamed "artificial suns" because they generate energy in a similar way to the sun — by fusing two light atoms into a single heavy atom via heat and pressure. The sun has a lot more pressure than Earth's reactors, so scientists compensate by using temperatures that are many times hotter than the sun.

Nuclear fusion offers the potential of a near-unlimited power source without greenhouse gas emissions or much nuclear waste. However, scientists have been working on this technology for more than 70 years, and it's likely not progressing fast enough to be a practical solution to the climate crisis. Researchers expect us to have fusion power within decades, but it could take much longer.

https://www.mining.com/china-makes-thorium-based-nuclear-energy-breakthrough-usi...


Last year, China approved the construction of the world’s first thorium molten-salt reactors in the Gobi Desert.
These are larger than the one used in Xu’s project, and are expected to generate 10 megawatts of electricity starting in 2029.

Instead of going nuclear -
some say that we could use large solar panel installations and pumped hydro
to store the energy.

For pumped hydro storage you could have a facility close to the ocean
and pump seawater up to a reservoir and then let it run through turbines
back down to the ocean to recover the energy.

However that would require a massive solar panel installation
and a large reservoir close to the ocean which would
take away the best land that we use for farming.
Is there any easier way?