Saying that storage is unacceptable, is unacceptable. Absolute security isn't needed for thousands of years. A better goal would be to reduce risks of leakage to one chance in a thousand. Radioactivity is only 1000 times worse than the uranium removed from the ground, so the net risk is abot the same as the risk if the uranium hadn't been mined.
The problem is easy to solve wwhen thinking about why the danger of waste storage only to the danger of uranium that was mined is being compared. Colorado is a geologically active region, and its surface rock has about a billion tons of uranium. The radioactivity in the uranium is twenty times larger than the legal limit for the Yucca Mountain. It would take over 13 billion years for the radioactivity to drop by a factor of 10, rather than just taking a few hundred years. This is the reason for not comparing to the larger danger of natural uranium that is left in the soil. Although water that runs through, around, and over the radioactive rock is the source of Colorado River, which is being used as drinking water in a lot of the West, which includes L.A. and San Diego. Unlike those glass pellets that store the waste in the Yucca Mountains, a numbe of the uranium in Colorado is water-soluble. I the Yucca Mountain facility was at full capacity and all the waste leaked out of its glass containment all of a sudden and managed to reach groundwater, the danger would still be 20 times less than what is currently posed by the uranium leaching into the Colorado River. This situation brings to mind the resident near Three Mile Island who was afraid of the tiny leakage from the reactor but not of the greater radioactivity of natural radon gas seeping up out of the ground.
