Yucca Mountain's capacity limit has no scientific basis it could be expanded to take several times more waste. AFAIK it was negotiated by a senator from Nevada on purely political grounds. Dry cask storage is not bankrupting anyone so far.

You are ignoring the fact that breeder reactors would provide huge amounts of energy in the process. It's common to fixate on how nuclear waste is bad but ignore how much emissions-free electricity it is responsible for.

Far from true. The only well developed field is light water reactors using uranium dioxide fuel, but there's a lot more to reactor technology than that. Breeder reactor research has just scratched the surface. The LFTR was built only once, despite being a success. Thorium breeding in light water reactors is known to be possible but is not investigated very well. Overbearing regulations on everything related to radiation and nuclear technology are slowing down progress in this area.

For your several points about subsidies and R&D spending, see: http://www.issues.org/22.3/realnumbers.html

1. Who is "proliferators"? Some guilt-by-association neologism for nuclear power proponents?
2. Despite the cost halving, solar is still far more expensive than other renewables and is already starting to suffer from diminishing returns. It's physically impossible to build a solar panel that is more than 100% efficient, and the economies of scale also have some limit.

There are several reasons.
1. About 25% of the ocean seabed is composed of clay that naturally encapsulates the waste containers. The containers just bury themselves under their own weight. But to be extra sure we could drill a hole.
2. If the containers are breached, radioactive materials are adsorbed on the clay, and their diffusion to the surface of the seabed is extremely slow.
4. Even if the do reach the surface somehow, they still need to reach the surface layer of water, which can take hundreds of years in places where there is no vertical mixing of water. By then, the release will be extremely diffused and not dangerous.
4. Volcanic activity on the seabed happens in certain, localized places. The burial would take place far from those zones.
5. Earthquakes would not affect the sub-seabed repository, because it's just barrels deep in clay. Any cracks would fill themselves under gravity.

Yes, I would support a nuclear fuel disposal facility in my backyard. I would even bury some under my house (if it was inside a sturdy container).
The ocean floor is hardly anyone's backyard. You might associate it with coral reefs, but the majority of it is far more bland.

I am very annoyed by a critical bit of misinformation being spread about this. Most reports imply that there was some kind of undisclosed escalation at Fukushima, and that the "threat level" was increased.

This is seriously wrong. INES is not a "threat level" like a hurricane warning. It is a post-mortem estimate of seriousness. This is a reassessment of events which happened weeks ago on the basis of more detailed information being available, not some new unfolding problem.

Your problem is not that the mushrooms pose a danger. The problem is that the nuclear safety agency in your country sets the permitted levels of strontium in mushrooms by assuming you will eat only the worst contaminated mushrooms for an entire year, and you can't get more than a few mSv from that. This is not a reasonable safety precaution, it's a fantasy.

Yes it is, they completely missed the fact that INES is not some kind of "threat level" like a hurricane warning. This is not an escalation of the situation, it is a reassessment of the events that already happened weeks ago.

How? Will it magically transport itself to the surface and kill someone? Or will a wizard do it? Yes, I acknowledge that nuclear power is not safe from wizards.

Urban myth, you can eat several milligrams of plutonium and it will not kill you. It is very poorly absorbed from the digestive tract. Only airborne dust is very toxic, but it settles very quickly (plutonium is heavy).

Its half life is 24 000 years. So it is gone after 240 000 years (10 half lifes). But it ceases to emit dangerous amounts of radioactivity far before that. Long half life = weak radioactivity.

It is still far more reliable than solar generation, which fails every night, for many hours. Or wind power, which is completely unpredictable even with many farms over a large area.
This "uninhabitability" and "poisoning" is only in your mind. Chernobyl wildlife does not seem to care about it.

"Were" is the key. You can make all sorts of dire predictions if you assume the highest recorded radiation spike persists for many months, but they will not have any useful connection with reality.

No, it is not. Being alarmed is what actually caused most of the harm from Chernobyl. The fear and alarm is far more dangerous than radiation itself.
http://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/index.htm

Long half life = not very radioactive.
Short half life = intensely radioactive.

So is he a mechanical engineer, or a nuclear reactor safety expert? The fact that you are a professor does not imply you know something about nuclear power. What exactly were his arguments? How does he explain the fact that the increases in radiation at the site perimeter were modest?

This is a complex subject, so I'd rather listen to someone who might want to cover his ass but actually knows what he's talking about than to a neutral person with a poor grasp of the issue.

Yes, you should exercise caution when reading industry sources, but they're far better than the anti-nuclear people. The industry of course has an agenda, but at least it knows what it's talking about.

The waste is the biggest problem?
1. No civilian spent fuel was ever accidentally or on purpose released into the environment, even though transportation of it is common. Soviet military waste was sometimes dumped directly into rivers, but this is really unrelated to nuclear power.
2. The only person that ever died from civilian spent fuel was a guy that got ran over by a train during an anti-nuclear protest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_S%C3%A9bastien_Briat
3. If someone used only nuclear electricity (average U.S. electricity consumption) from present reactor technology for their entire life, he would generate about a soda can of waste.
4. Vitrified nuclear waste is completely insoluble in water. It's rather hard to spread it over a large area. Even if it was just dumped into the ocean, there would be no harm to humans - the waste would bury itself in the seabed. We are not using this solution because Greenpeace and other assorted clowns do not understand anything about marine biology or oceanography. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm
5. Even if the waste does somehow escape into the environment, it is very easy to detect this. Radiation detectors are very cheap and compact compared to the laboratory setups needed to analyze chemical pollution - so cheap and compact that every radiation worker has their own detector that keeps track of their exposure. This fact facilitates cleanup operations.

I can understand the uneasy feelings, but let's have some perspective. This isn't even as bad as the hazardous chemical waste we already have to deal with (e.g. from semiconductor production, mining and metallurgy), which unlike nuclear waste will remain toxic forever.

Considering that Chernobyl released several percent of its core directly into the air through a graphite fire, and the reactor that exploded at Chernobyl was rated at 1000 MW (roughly the combined power of units 1 and 2 at Fukushima I), this can only be an extremely pessimistic upper bound.

Not really. The real assumption that failed was that even if there was a complete loss of power in the plant, power could be reasonably quickly (8 hours) provided from outside the plant. The problems escalated because no supplies were available due to tsunami devastation, not even freshwater. The power grid was so damaged that an extra cable had to be laid to get any external power.

The hydrogen was vented inside the containment on purpose, to allow activation products to decay. It could be vented outside the containment, but this would increase the radiation emissions, which the operators desperately wanted to minimize at that point. Hydrogen explosion was deemed an acceptable risk. It looks like this kind of mindset, "reduce public radiation exposure at all cost", is what caused the situation to escalate.

The design assumption was that once cooling completely fails, the reactor will be drained, sealed and allowed to melt down. But this would necessitate a very costly cleanup which TEPCO wanted to avoid.

Storing them elsewhere would necessarily expose the workers to more radiation. The point of the temporary storage near the reactor is to allow the fuel to lose most of its radioactivity before it is moved to a longer-term storage location.

Each of the design considerations had a lot of thought behind it. The real problem is that the nuclear safety regulations are not based on a realistic risk analysis, but on fantasies (e.g. child drinking maximally contaminated water for an entire year, or somebody eating exclusively spinach for an entire year). As a result, the operators focused minimizing public radiation exposure rather than on stabilizing the facility, which was actually counterproductive.