China has a lot of uninhabited dessert land in the west that they don't treat that well already, I don't think they really need to do something as elaborate or expensive as shipping it to africa.
I think you'd be surprised how well they treat it. That desert is subject to a decades-long reforestation effort -- with results. Many parts that were once desert are now filled with fruit trees, a major source of income for locals, as part of their poverty allevation efforts (which, yes, extends to all minorities in that area). Plus they already put a shitload of solar panels in that area.
They still have a lot of empty land left for storage but it's not like they can randomly dump stuff somewhere.
The Taklamakan Desert has been there for ages, they are paving it with solar power and actually created infrastructure capable of transporting that power back to other regions of the country. They have been reforesting big chunks of the Gobi desert as a green wall against sand storms.
It is indeed.
IIRC, 40-ish years of waste of the French nuclear power program fits in a couple of swimming pools. Compared to the alternatives (including the tons of particles released by coal power plants, causing thousands of deaths a year in Europe), it's a complete non-issue.
It actually is a pretty large volume depending on what you're disposing of.
There's a common sleight of hand where you talk about nuclear waste and proponents will reply something like, 'You could fit all of the spent nuclear fuel from the US in a football field.' -- which is technically true if the waste was stacked 30 feet high. But the real sleight of hand is the switch between Waste <-> Fuel.
Nuclear fuel is something like 2% of the total volume of waste that must be dealt with. It's the highest activity waste and the most dangerous so it's given the most credence but there are orders of magnitude more waste generated that also must be safely stored away from humanity for dozens-hundreds of years. From the initial fuel processing biproducts, to activated components in reactors, to resins and claddings, just tons and tons of dangerous radioactive material. Then beyond that, there's another few orders of magnitude of low-level waste that is less dangerous still but can't be just buried in a dump.
There are processes to turn the liquid components into glass and encase the rest in iron and concrete but just add it to the list of things we haven't really "solved" in order to form a responsible nuclear civilization.
Then 2% means for all waste (high level, low level, mixed) 50 football fields stacked 30 ft high for the US for all waste. Or one tenth of a square mi sunk 30+ feet down. The US is a very big energy-intensive country and that’s a very small patch of land for that fraction of energy needs met. And since most is low level, 90% of that just gets stuck in a salt mine for a few decades. Not exactly a dump and not exactly a vault (monitoring, retrievable), but it’s not exactly rocket science, cf. Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
If delaying nuclear until we “fully solved” nuclear waste means that tens of thousands of Asians die of lung diseases every year instead, maybe a half-solution is good enough.
Weapons proliferation via (theft and) reprocessing of the much greater amount of high-level nuclear waste resulting from a “nuclear future” is the real thorn in the rose.
We don't really need to solve these "problems". It's a low-activity waste, most of it can and will be stored in special warehouses. Benefits are immense, downside is manageable. There was never a major problem caused by low-level waste. It's just overhead, nuisance and a budget item.
It's not, storage is mostly a logistical and political problem. Logistical in the sense that the storage needs to be secure on timelines longer than a few generations. Political in the sense that no one wants it in their back yard.
Low level waste is the largest by volume by the way, so mostly not related to nuclear reactors.
https://chinadialogue.net/zh/4/40625/ (in Chinese)
There is a state-backed research project for underground storage of nuclear waste that can be kept safe for 10,000s of years.
Can't imagine why they'd choose anything other than just tunneling into one of their many mountain systems and leaving it there, safe from quite literally anything.
