Science

...in the fossil fuel waste that will kill about 20,000 people today.

These deaths won't take "thousands of years;" they're constantly taking place:

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249).

The full paper cited in the OP is predicated on the idea, that despite much Bob Kennedy type ignorance to the contrary, there is no such thing as "nuclear waste." Specifically it is a paper about producing energy from the valuable contents of used nuclear fuel, which uneducated people continue to call, out of lazy sloganeering ignorance, "nuclear waste."

Of course, it's a scientific paper and has nothing to do with sloganeering.

Under these conditions, reprocessing valuable used nuclear fuel and putting its contents to use. naturally occurring uranium, which has a half-life equal to about the age of the Earth, 4.5 billion years, has its half life reduced to about a few years, and in the process removes the formation of all of the radioactive components of the uranium decay series.



Source: USA EPA Radioactive Decay

I really don't know where people come up with these "thousands of years" or "tens of thousands of years" or "millions of years" numbers - it varies from antinuke to antinuke, but probably it comes from the circle jerk of antinuke websites dedicated to the promotion of ignorance - but the scientific literature readily compares the radiotoxicity of used nuclear fuels - if they were to escape, which they are unlikely to do, especially if put to use to save the planet - the effect would be, in a few hundred years, to reduce the radioactivity of the planet, which may or may not be a good thing:

I excerpted this figure (of which there are many examples in the literature) from a post here I put together in response to just one of the poorly educated antinuke radiation paranoids around here who was whining stupidly about a collapsed tunnel at Hanford:

828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

I always invite any and all antinukes - who as I suggest in the OP are responsible for this vast death toll from air pollution - to show that the storage of used nuclear fuel, that as many people have been killed, in the nearly 70 year history of the accumulation of used nuclear fuels, that they have killed as many people as will die today between noon today and 6 PM today in any time zone anywhere on this planet by air pollution, never mind climate change.

Only reference in the peer reviewed scientific literature can be accepted as evidence of the same.

The antinukes never answer the question. They change the subject or they slither away without even attempting an answer into the hellhole of their ignorance, ignorance that clearly, with a planet in flames, is appalling.

Nuclear energy saves human lives. It doesn't need to be without risk to be vastly superior to everything else, just as vaccines need not be without risk to save lives.

In Bob Kennedy Junior we have the coalescence of two forms of pernicious ignorance, antivax rhetoric and antinuke rhetoric.

I personally hold the people handing out this shit - from Bob Jr. on down - beneath contempt, but in Bob Jr.'s case, he readily exemplifies the equivalence, to which I often point, of the two very dangerous bits of mindless anti-science propaganda which, regrettably, too many people take seriously, resulting in a vast death toll.

Have a pleasant weekend.