The shorter the half life of radioactive waste, the more radioactive it is. So it's not entirely a good thing when the radioactive waste produced is radioactive for a much shorter period of time.
The length of the half life of of a radioisotope does not directly relate to how radioactive something is. If you produce radioactive waste, it is only as active as the day it is produced, at which point you just have to deal with it from a radiation protection point of view or a spent fuel management point of view. However, it is generally true that those isotopes with very short half lives (~seconds) tend to give rise to quite high energy gamma radiation
Spent fuel management is, contrary to popular belief, something we are getting much better at and the new PWRs produce
significantly less of it than the Magnox reactors did.
One of the suggested benefits of thorium reactors is that one of the products is such a potent gamma emitter that it would make it very difficult for terrorists to make and use a thoriuim reactor to make a nuclear bomb or even a "dirty" bomb because they'd be irradiated to death long before they could do so.
This hypothesis is a bit silly. In the real world, I think you are referring to the daughter product of U-232, Tl-208? It has a high energy gamma line of around ~2.5 MeV, which is a consideration when manufacturing fuel for solid fuel systems (external radiation is generally not a big consideration for norm Uranium Oxide fuels for conventional reactors).
What we need is nuclear power simulator !!
I've used one! There is one at Sizewell B, which is used for training, as well as the main simulator/replica room.
The alternative at this point in time is we wait, a nuclear reactor site is No go area for centuries after its been decommissioned. Building more now is short term thinking and it would take another 10+ years to build one and that's after the countless meetings,
With fusion just around the corner and the amount of worldwide focus on it now, Fission is a complete waste of resource time and money.
Short term political thinking has put us in this position commiting to a new nuclear program now is nothing but knee jerk.
To wait for fusion would be absolutely catastrophic. Fusion is not a proven technology, and frankly, it may never be (at least in my lifetime). You will be able to find lots of good news stories about how fusion is "getting closer" or has passed a new milestone, but ultimately, the technical challenges with fusion are VAST! You will read a lot of hype from companies like Tokamak Energy, who will blow their own trumpets and set demanding timescales such as 2040 for a credible spherical tokamak, power generating system....and that they have raised over £100M....! A tiny, tiny amount of what will actually be needed. I'm convinced that the only reason they operate is because people are willing to pay them to try and this hype generates more cash and keeps the wheels turning. Especially incredible when you have plants like ITER, international collaborations when hundreds of millions are pumped in all the time.
This all sounds a little negative from me, however I do want fusion to succeed, I just think people need a little perspective every now and again to realise just what an enormous challenge it all is.
