This is the entirety of the high-level nuclear waste that France produced for 80 years while having 70%+ of nuclear in its electricity mix.

The question of nuclear waste is an extremely minor problem compared to the ecological issues we're facing, and which we've been addressing for decades.

Anti-nuclear people just prefer to cover their ears and pretend it's an insolvable problem.

This is a complex issue, not just because storing radioactive material is complex, but because the "waste" are not a uniform single material. Some have a decaying process of 300 years (90% of the waste, actually), some have a much longer one.

In the beginning of the nuclear era, some wastes were... dumped in the ocean (it's as bad as it sounds). This is fortunately no longer the normal practice. Some dedicated storage sites are used to store them depending on their lifetime.

The latest solution is geologic storage (some caves were found with waste from naturally occurring fission, eons ago, radioactivity never escaped, so let's just... do that?). A site was identified in Finland with a hope it can store them for 100,000 years (of course, we don't have any reference that would last that long...). And the good thing is the storage is "reversible" for the first 100 years (if we change our mind/find better, we can still retrieve the waste during the first 100 years).

Finally, and that will resonate with @Waryle@lemmy.world comment: France had a 4th generation prototype reactor called SuperPhenix. Particularity of a 4th gen reactor is it can use some wastes to produce more energy. SuperPhenix being a prototype, it suffered from many issues through its lifetime. But at the end, it had a 90% uptime, and though it wasn't generating a lot of power (that was never the goal, remember: development...), some reports were recommending to keep it up so that it could have processed part of the existing nuclear waste.

To appeal to the ecologists party allied to the socialist Prime Minister at that time, SuperPhenix was definitely shutdown in 1997. And now, the same ecologists use the nuclear wastes issue as a big reason to push back any plan on nuclear power.

Most of it can be recycled (as in used for other nuclear products or services like MRI machines), but it doesn't because of fear of weaponization. What can't be recycled can be buried.

See these videos for more info on nuclear energy. The first one includes a nukeE's commentary. His intros are a bit dry, but he's very informative on kurzgesagt's content.

You only solve one part of the problem: what do you use when there's no sun and no wind? Coal? Gas?

Are you pretending that renewable are not subsidised? Renewable are young yet, how will the prices do in 10 years when they will start to be maintained and replaced? What about the energy you need to complement renewable? Is it considered in their price or not? Do you consider the price of renewable when they're cheap because of overproduction?

https://4thgeneration.energy/the-true-costs-of-nuclear-and-renewables/

Ok, so obviously, you're not well aware of how the new European open market works, and why France ended up paying part of consumer's bills.

France uses to have a state-owned company, EDF, producing and distributing electricity in France. EDF had a monopole. France had the cheapest electricity of Europe, and EDF was profitable. Sink that in, when you say nuclear is expensive:

EDF was delivering the cheapest electricity of Europe and was profitable.

A decision from the European Union was taken to force all members to switch to an open market. French government at the time was conservative, so they happily went along with it. Everyone "knows" that private sector always does better than whatever has "public" or "state" in its description.

But how would you introduce competition when virtually no one else produces any electricity? How to kickstart it? That's where bright people went very very creative.

Production and distribution of electricity was split as separate activities. EDF spinned off the distribution part of its work. In parallel, a quota of nuclear production was allocated to new companies, "electricity suppliers", so that they got something to sell at an affordable price.

That's where it starts to be interesting: to guarantee a margin to electricity suppliers, so that they would make enough money to invest in production, the daily price of electricity on the market is set to the marginal cost of the most expensive power plant that's turned on. Do you follow me? If today, 99% of electricity is coming from a nuclear power plant, but you need to start a coal power plant to provide the last 1%, all 100% of the electricity that day is billed at the cost of the coal power plant! I am not kidding, I am not making that shit up!

Why prices exploded since last year? Well, you've heard about gas prices, right? Every day a gas power plan is turned on with gas prices through the roof, 100% of the electricity that day is billed at the cost of the gas power plant. That's why France started subsidizing the consumers bills, because most of them could not afford a x6, 7, 10 on their electricity bills.

But at least, we do have competition now, don't we? Well... not on the production side...

No condition on investment was given to the electricity supplier. Read that again. Guess what happened. Electricity suppliers were buying most of their electricity at a cheap regulated cost from EDF and selling it with a big profit to consumers, all while producing nothing themselves. Why would they?? Money is trickling down to them for free!

Even better: as they were more competitive than EDF, thanks to having 0 maintenance and 0 investment to make, and cheap electricity to resell, their customers base grew. Then they found out that they were not getting enough cheap electricity, and they faced a dilemma: buy a larger share of electricity from other real producers, that would have increased their cost, or cap their customers base (or of course, invest in production, but who wants to do that, right?).

They did neither of these. They pleaded to the current government to get MORE cheap electricity from EDF. And the government did that: forced EDF to allocate more of its cheap nuclear electricity to them, increasing the quota. Needless to say that if EDF needed more electricity for their own customers, they were answered that they could buy the more expensive electricity from outside, or invest in more capacity. Makes sense, right? The exact opposite of what the system was supposed to do.

Now, the very best part: when gas price exploded, even the small fraction of electricity bought by the electricity suppliers impacted their cost. It was unacceptable to them. So they raised their rate to be above EDF, or even outright cancelled contracts with their customers, so that customers would go back to EDF (EDF cannot refuse contracts, and is not allowed to adjust its own rates). But... electricity suppliers do not have to give up on their quota from EDF... so...

EDF had to buy back the electricity EDF produces, to companies producing nothing, at the rate of the market, of course, not the rate at which EDF is forced to sell that electricity to these companies. So it's even better now. EDF sells them electricity (which is a virtual sale, electricity still goes from EDF plants to households like it did before). These companies sell it back to EDF with a big margin. Dream business, isn't it?

So France does not subsidize bills because nuclear is too expensive.

France literally subsidizes a scam scheme, in which most of the money going to parasitic companies producing nothing.

"Reactor production is limited during times of high heat to prevent the hot water re-entering rivers from damaging wildlife."

So it's not due to any physical limitations but an environmental protection issue.

Also in the article

"... at a time when half its reactors are offline due to maintenance and corrosion issues."

So they are doing maintenance and found some issues requiring more work.

Why don't they build them in cold places then? They don't have any cold areas north? Can they build em next to glaciers before those melt too. If they all melt, we may be too dead for it to matter anyways.