Environmental issues relating to nuclear power fall into three categories:

• Disposal of nuclear waste.
• Contamination due to accidents
• CO2 release into the atmosphere due to use of fossil fuels during mining of fuel ore and construction of nuclear plants

Note that the third item listed above focuses on CO2 release in the mining of uranium ore and the construction of nuclear plants. However, the actual fission process does not produce CO2, so the actual process of nuclear fission is very good insofar as its effect on global warming and climate change.

Nuclear waste falls into two general categories - low-level waste and high-level waste. Most of the radioactive waste in the nuclear industry is low-level waste. For example, uranium mill tailings are close to background radiation levels. Other low-level waste includes tools, protective clothing and other items used routinely in the maintenance and upkeep of a reactor. Low-level waste can be enclosed in a sealing barrier and buried locally under soil and rocks.

In contrast, uranium fuel rod assemblies can become extremely radioactive after they have been used in a nuclear reactor for 12-24 months. The fuel rods must then be removed from the reactor and safely, securely stored in specially designed pools of water, where their radioactive intensity can safely decay. They must remain in those pools until their radioactivity diminishes to a level acceptable for transfer to other storage sites, where they must remain for up to thousands of years.

The disposal of nuclear waste is both an engineering and a political challenge. As far as the engineering side of that challenge is concerned, it basically boils down to developing ways to safely contain dangerous radioactive substances for several centuries, while the material decays to a harmless level of radiation. That seems like a long time, but most solutions accepted as effective by professionals in the field involve deep geological burial, and in geologic terms, a few centuries are like the blink of an eye. Finding stable geological formations for burial of radiological waste lends itself to straightforward analysis and should be a readily solved problem. However, the solution to this problem has been fraught in the USA with both engineering difficulties and resistance from local residents that have delayed the development of a permanent, deep geological repository.

The more difficult problem in the disposal of radioactive waste is the political challenge. Much resistance arises from local populations when an area is selected or undergoes examination for a repository site. Legitimate challenges to the engineering solution get mixed in with apprehension over having harmful radiological substances stored nearby and cause long delays in developing a safe repository for the material.