What purpose did the isle Azys La serve? Main Storyline Spoiler.

[Fenral]

After all, nuclear fission was created to make a bomb, but we turned it into a clean and efficient form of energy.

I'm sorry, just... No. While nuclear power does have many advantages, the only thing "clean" about it is that it doesn't produce smoke. The solid waste left over from the fission process used by most reactors can stay radioactive for tens of millions of years, and "disposal" means little more than burying it somewhere, out of sight, out of mind.

[Gilraen]

I'm sorry, just... No. While nuclear power does have many advantages, the only thing "clean" about it is that it doesn't produce smoke. The solid waste left over from the fission process used by most reactors can stay radioactive for tens of millions of years, and "disposal" means little more than burying it somewhere, out of sight, out of mind.

Actually, there are reactors that reuse the waste producing a fraction of the refuse that less efficient reactors produce. The reasons for why these reactors aren't more widely used are many and varied, but the biggest one is that they recycle their waste (i.e. uranium mining operations aren't as hot to the idea given there'd be little demand for it otherwise). Not saying there isn't nuclear waste, just that it's a short-sighted argument against reactors.

[Velox]

I'm sorry, just... No. While nuclear power does have many advantages, the only thing "clean" about it is that it doesn't produce smoke. The solid waste left over from the fission process used by most reactors can stay radioactive for tens of millions of years, and "disposal" means little more than burying it somewhere, out of sight, out of mind.

Not to digress much further, but I will attempt to help your misconceptions and misunderstandings of the process. Firstly, high-level waste from a spent reactor rod is not solid, it's liquid. Secondly, the total decay of the leftover uranium given today's technology (the isotopes are much more pure than they were decades ago) may be "tens of millions of years" (depending on the isotope of course), but the level of danger is closer to 10,000 years. Now yes, that's still a very long stretch of time to worry about contamination, but know that high-level nuclear waste actually only accounts for <1% of the world's TOTAL radioactive waste. Most of it is actually low-level waste from the field of medicine. Due to both of these facts, nuclear energy is indeed very safe and clean.

Now, as for disposal, you are correct in that deep-tunnel operations were the norm for much of history. This was born out of necessity though. The technology to active destroy waste didn't exist and the previous method, which was dumping it in the ocean, lead to much more contamination. That being said, there have been huge advancements in vitrification the last 15 years, some processes showing a 90% reduction in volume. Then, of course, there's also the more expensive but safer route of firing it into space.