I imagine all plastics will be out of the question. I’m wondering about what ways food packaging might become regulated to upcycling in the domestic or even commercial space. Assuming energy remains a $ scarce $ commodity I don’t imagine recycling glass will be super practical as a replacement. Do we move to more unpackaged goods and bring our own containers to fill at markets? Do we start running two way logistics chains where a more durable glass container is bought and returned to market? How do we achieve a lower energy state of normal in packaging goods?
Radioactive waste is not nearly as significant a problem as has been drilled into our heads. All that waste is dangerous precisely because it is so energetic.
“Fast” reactors reprocess and burn “spent” fuel rods and other high-level waste, leaving only low-level waste with half-lives measured in weeks and months. This low-level waste stabilizes (becomes less radioactive than a banana) in decades, not millennia.
A sufficiently large, sufficiently expensive stockpile of high level waste from low-efficiency reactors provides a hell of an incentive to build fast reactors.
Okay, but even in an efficient system there’s still a waste product. My point wasn’t to compare-and-contrast trade-offs, simply to acknowledge that every form of energy generation has them to some degree. Plus nuclear still requires a mined resource, and again, mining is an environmentally damaging activity. Just because something is better than alternatives that doesn’t give it a free pass.