Lime Green Energy - Nuclear or Fossil?

[Tellos Athenaios]

Are we reprocessing it?

Do we have the ability to do that in a functional manner?

Yes, but it's not like we're sprinkling magic pixie dust on it. We're basically separating the nasty from the really nasty stuff. The nasty can then be mixed up with slightly less nasty and be reused as ordinary fuel. Yay for BWR type reactors which were specifically designed to not be efficient and to yield particularly nasty wast products (so you can turn the really nasty stuff into weapon grade nasty bomb stuff using what is known as a breeder).

I am a big fan of ITER and Fusion power. Though there are quite a lot of promising alternatives.

I think everyone having mandatory solarpanel systems would end up reducing a lot of the cost. Depending on who lives in the buildings and locations, they can be self-efficient and excess can be 'sold' to energy companies.

1. Yes (in some areas)
2. Yes, we do. There are entire reactors designed to reuse spent nuclear fuel and turn it into isotopes that decay on a different time span than current nuclear fuel.

In theory that be great, in practice it doesn't really work out that way -- you wind up with smaller quantities of worse stuff, unless of course you are looking to weaponise it in which case you end up with smaller quantities of ammunition. Now there are reactor designs which don't involve Uranium and use something like Thorium (usually based on designs around molten salt). Bonus points for being inherently a much safer reactor design without the well known runaway conditions of BWRs.

Fusion is known for always being 25 years away. It's problematic to try and recreate the process on the sun by using a large magnetic field and an enclosed volume to simulate what gravity does for the stars.

Energy efficient fusion has been with us since about the 1950s. It's called the hydrogen bomb. The trick is to scale it down to controllable proportions. That too has been achieved, you can build a DIY fusion reactor in your garage. Unfortunately at that scale it's not energy efficient anymore. So what we are really looking to simulate (by way of lasers) is the effect of a fission missile to heat hydrogen to a plasma to trigger fusion, the magnets are merely there to stop the reactor and the environment from being deep fried. This is done with lasers and magnets of the type which require some serious cooling, which in turn requires some pretty hefty machinery which needs a lot of power to run. So all in all "energy scaling" and reliability/lifetime of the safety equipment is the big problem. Not unlike weapon grade laser systems, actually.
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Solar panels like with a lot of renewable energy sources are dependent on rare earth elements that are almost entirely mined by China (seriously, like over 90% of the total supply for them is from China). If you want the Western world to feel nice and green, you are gonna have to ignore the barren craters that the unregulated Chinese mining will create all over their pristine wilderness.

Those rare earths of which most are not rare at all. As it happens the USA sits on a few deposits, as does India. However you are right that the business relies on some pretty nasty chemicals to refine the ore so there is a risk to the local environment and photo-voltaic solar sells in particular are of dubious efficiency given the energy cost of their production.