Funny you should mention long term effects of 2 and 3 quakes. The mechanical and civil engineer I talked to about this have absolutely no worries.
They say if any major structure fails due to a tiny 2 or 3 quakes then it was "the straw that broke the cammels back" and that such a failure could only happen after years of neglect and/or abuse facilitated by criminally covering up and hiding problem areas and warning signs. Or something to that effect.
They only studied vibrations, materials science, past failures and other related subjects for 4 years, make a living with this knowledge and can design buildings that have a natural resonance not produced by earth quakes. But what do they know.
The long term effect of the chemicals pumped into the ground will be the same as the natural chemicals that accumulated there all by them selves. They stayed there for millions of years under thousands of pounds pressure until the monkeys came along, drilled down and pumped them out. With the chemicals we pump down there and leave at 0 well head pressure have a better chance of staying put than the natural stuff that was there originally.
So after 100 years, its all still going to be exactly where we left it.
The so called waste fuel rods are in fact around 95% useable fuel if recycled. Throwing away a once used fuel rod is the most irresponsible, most ignorant thing that could possibly be done to dispose of them.
Raw fuel rods could remain highly radioactive for many thousands of years. When the waste nuclides are isolated and concentrated away from the usable fuel their radioactivity drops very rapidly. The radioactivity decays so fast that after 40 years, the waste nuclides will be 99.9% less radioactive then when first separated or about as radioactive as granite.
Your fear of all things nuclear is astounding and clearly the product of the medias fear mongering.
If you love, hate or don't know anything about nuclear power you should watch the first 5 minutes of this. Its pretty much everything you need to know about current nuclear technology in a nut shell.
If you watch all of it your mind will be blown.
You mention fukushima. There were problems with that plants management, remember I lived in northern japan for 3 years. I know a few things you don't.
The managers of the fukushima power plant were fired years ago while I was in japan for fraud and mismanagement. It was big news over there. They built a 15 foot sea wall in a place that has been known for hundreds of years to be hit by periodically hit by 45 foot high tsunamis. Actually when the earth quake happened everything worked the reactor was being shut down properly until the emergency shutdown backup systems lost power. If they had 24 hours of battery power or if the sea walls were high enough to protect the emergency systems backup generators or had the generators been in a sealed bunker and vented to high above the ground none of this would have happened. That was all due to bean counter management saying no, because it would cost money. Then on top of all that for some reason the emergency hydrogen vent pumped hydrogen into an enclosed area above the containment dome. That caused the explosion.
These were mismanagement and poor design problems not nuclear problems.
These problems were solved by a new reactor to the south of fukushima that was hit by the earthquake and tsunami and survived, shut down with out issue.
Chernobyls only purpose in life was to produce as much weapons grade plutonium as possible. Safety concerns and extra robustness for unauthorized science experiments were not part of the design.
3 mile island failed and did exactly what it was supposed to do in that mode of failure.
It could be properly cleaned up but it will be expensive and will be a political lightening rod. So they are going to leave it alone for as long as they can.
Funny you should mention decommissioning nuclear power plants. Nuclear power stations like wind turbines now have decommissioning funding plan built into them.
Some of the really old nuclear power stations might not have a decommission fund but that doesn't mean new ones wont have one.
A decommissioning fund prevents what you see in California where you have sites with thousands of abandoned wind turbines that were built in the 1980s just sitting there.
The sad thing about solar is its so pathetic if you took the entire worlds solar power out in 2010 it wouldn't even be able to provide 20% of japans power in 2010.
So japan couldn't even buy all the solar panels in existence and power their country.
How do you propose we power much of anything in the US with solar?