Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive everywhere it has been implemented. Natural uranium isn't very expensive and separating the plutonium from spent fuel doesn't save much on waste disposal costs either. The US canceled a new MOX plant just 7 years ago due to cost and schedule problems:
Work started on the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in 2007, with a 2016 start-up envisaged. Although based on France's Melox MOX facility, the US project has presented many first-of-a-kind challenges and in 2012 the US Government Accountability Office suggested it would likely not start up before 2019 and cost at least USD7.7 billion, far above original estimate of USD4.9 billion.
The most interesting "recycling" effort right now is the laser enrichment process of Silex/Global Laser Enrichment:
The company plans to re-enrich old depleted uranium tails from the obsolete gas diffusion enrichment process back up to natural uranium levels of 0.7% U-235. That uranium in turn would be processed by existing commercial centrifuge enrichment to upgrade it to power reactor fuel.
Also, nuclear waste is a very small problem, compared to other wastes. Yes, it stays active for 10k+ years, but it's actually not that expensive to store them at specialized storages forever. Because it's a very small amount on a grand scale.
In comparison, managing steel production waste is way more expensive.
> Yes, it stays active for 10k+ years, but it's actually not that expensive to store them at specialized storages forever. Because it's a very small amount on a grand scale.
For some definition of "active".
The first 6-10 years are quite dangerous, which is why stuff is in cooling pools. After about 200-300 years the most dangerous type of radiation (gamma) has mostly burned stopped, and you're left with alpha and beta, which can be stopped with tinfoil and even paper.
I've heard the remark that after ~300 years the main way for nuclear waste to cause bad health effects is if you eat it or grind it up and snort it.
Sorry, but you're wrong. I took some radiation safety classes, and the main point I got from that is that "it depends". For example, alpha- and beta-radiation are often more dangerous than gamma, because gamma is easier to detect and measure.
People often focus on "radiation" part forgetting the "contamination" part. You can literally walk into the Chernobyl reactor active zone today for up to 2 minutes. But you cannot produce any food in soils around it for thousand years. And there's dozens of dangerous isotopes, each one accumulating and affecting human tissues differently.
Public generally only knows about Geiger counter. Yes, it will scream if everything is FUBAR, but it's useless for estimating safety of a food product.
> You can literally walk into the Chernobyl reactor active zone today for up to 2 minutes. But you cannot produce any food in soils around it for thousand years. And there's dozens of dangerous isotopes, each one accumulating and affecting human tissues differently.
Geraldine Thomas, the co-founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, says there are more worrisome things than radiation:
Yup. And managing nuclear waste is not really a big problem that needs immediate solution, if ever. Shoving it deep underground seems to be the optimal way for the next thousand years. So there's no need in recycling really.
> But you cannot produce any food in soils around it for thousand years.
Is that actually based on some sort of science though, or is it the same woolly thinking as the linear-no-threshold modelling that was popular around the time of Chernobyl? What are the actual risks here and how does it compare to low exercise or the typical amount of air pollution in a large city?
afaik LNT is correct last time i looked into it. LNT had to be proven as powerful agencies much preferred the hormesis hypothesis because it let them off the hook.
LNT has never been established and probably never will be. It is still used in some contexts for conservative safety analysis. Places with multiple times typical background activity do not have measurably higher cancer rates.
BEIR VII still supports LNT. There's some criticisms, but it seems like a pretty safe guess that just because the uncertainty climbs at low doses it's not just a straight line projection from the closest easier to ascertain value. Maybe some people are better at DNA repair, but some people have DNA repair defects too. The number of ion tracks is going to correlate with number of DNA breaks, and DNA breaks correlate with increased cancer.
(The context here is not walking down some road and getting bombarded with particles: but about the storage of industrial material and the risks it involves. Yes, stuff gets shot out at >300 years: but it's not just lying around randomly.)
Why, if it's in sealed casks underground, than yes, gamma is the only thing to worry about. My whole comment was about nuclear waste danger and its associated costs, not about danger of an non-compromised waste storage facility.
Sorry, I don't have a Twitter account to read the posts, but they look like my point exactly.
It might be true that nuclear power produces less waste but we have to consider the scales of global energy demand, multiply it by the time scales of nuclear waste to reach what threshold exactly? When and how would nuclear waste become a problem. Would it take ~200 years like the industrial revolution with CO2? Would it be okay if it where 300 years? or 500? What do we do, when background radiation is rising from ground water and soil? Switch back to natural instead of green energy, hoping the next millenias will be fine?
I dont think nuclear power is a solution. It can be step in an energy transition strategy, but no solution.
> When and how would nuclear waste become a problem.
Never. If there is ever "too much" of it we reprocess it as per OP article to remove the "non-usable" stuff and burn up the rest. It seems that there's an order of magnitude reduce by recycling (96% is usable fuel, so 4% is left over):
The strange part psychologically is that saying it lasts 10,000 years somehow seems worse and more unmanageable than say cadmium or arsenic which last forever.
Other threats cannot compensate: defects and turpitudes of some (for example of certain waste of chemistry) do not form attenuating circumstance for others (nuclear waste).
An accused defends himself badly by declaring to the judge "I am not the only culprit of homicide!".
If all else is held equal, then yes, that follows. But the debate is more or less that some think it will hasten that timeline (through nuclear warfare and accidents) and some think it will delay it (by reducing pollution/climate change).
I think we should use more nuclear energy, I think nuclear powered container ships are under explored for instance. But it's not so simple. Nuclear energy programs can become nuclear weapons programs. A larger uranium mining and processing industry lowers the barriers of entry for building a weapons program. We're not going to exhaust our uranium reserves anytime soon. We're not going to be wiped out by a nuclear accidents, but we're heading into a future of stronger storms and more frequent wildfires, and nuclear power has a way of making disasters even worse.
The nuclear waste even without the radiation is going to be toxic. Anything with even trace amount of plutonium left (which has a half life time > 200,000 years), will be toxic (much more than e.g. mercury).
Eh, I don't think I agree. Let's talk about the long-lived isotopes: Pu-239 and Pu-242.
Significant inhaled Pu-239 has a fair risk of causing cancer even after a long time. However mercury is volatile and it's a lot easier to end up inhaling fumes.
And mercury is absorbed well through ingestion and Pu isn't, and most of the risk after ingestion would be chemical, not radiological. From that standpoint, it's looking a lot better than other heavy metals.
The reason we don’t have more solid non-radiological toxicity data on Plutonium (compared to other toxic heavy metals) is because any amount significant enough to count kills people radiologically super quick.
That doesn’t mean it’s non-toxic if we ignore the radiological effects.
* Plutonium is not well absorbed by ingestion compared to other heavy metals and know ballpark ingestion toxicities
* We also know that pretty much all the plutonium except the long-lived isotopes are gone on a timescale of tens of thousands of years-- leaving behind mostly uranium isotopes.
* There's no real reason to believe this mixture of uranium and a small fraction of long-lived plutonium isotopes is significantly worse than ingesting uranium. It might be worse to inhale fine dust, though.
* Mercury is way worse than uranium because it is so readily absorbed.
Elemental mercury is not absorbed at all. You’re probably thinking of methyl mercury and various mercury salts (which, by the way, are not very common).
We have nearly zero experience with weathered or bio modified plutonium. And the experience we do have with plutonium compounds, is limited by the fact people die awfully fast when they’re anywhere near them.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Especially not when the evidence is absent because we can’t get there because everyone dies first from the more obvious bad things happening.
No, forever isn't a rounding error compared to forever. No human civilization has any reason whatsoever to make any distinction between "this field over here will be safe for farming in 10,000 years" and "this field over here will never be safe for farming".
In addition, nuclear isn't competing against coal, it's competing against solar.
If anything is competing against solar, it's solar + batteries + high cost semiconductor switch yards + massive amounts of new transmission lines + replacing the panels every 20 - 30 years + being dependent on China for solar panels.
We can't even agree to keep under 2°C warming in 100 years, so I am also confused about why people are worried about waste that lasts 10K years. My guess is that they actually worry it will be leaked during their lifetime, whereas they know X° warming is beyond their lifetime.
> Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive everywhere it has been implemented.
All it takes to change that is a federal subsidy supporting the industry. The same was said about wind & solar until it wasn't (due to tax credits). Now that the credits are going away with BBB, the cost of every new utility-scale development just went up ~30% and many, many projects will be killed.
Wind and solar are still competitive without the credits, and while it'd be great to keep the credits to get off of fossil fuels faster, they are no longer needed.
> Lazard’s analysis of levelized cost of electricity across fuel types finds that new-build utility-scale solar, even without subsidy, is less costly than new build natural gas, and competes with already-operating gas plants.
> Despite the blow that tax credit repeal would deal to renewable energy project values, analysis from Lazard finds that solar and wind energy projects have a lower levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) than nearly all fossil fuel projects – even without subsidy.
Does Lazard make money from putting together financing and investment for solar and wind projects? If the answer is yes, that is precisely what I would expect them to say, given their incentives.
Why do that when safely storing the waste takes up an incredibly tiny amount of space and costs much less?
And subsidizing this still won't make new nuclear particularly competitive without ditching the silly LNT harm model and killing ALARA at the regulatory level. If you do that, suddenly nuclear can be profitable (as it should be in a world where the AEC and NRC approached radiation harm risk with actual science).
Many of the proposed new designs use higher enriched uranium, with up to 20% U-235. I expect that if they could work with 5% they would, but they can't. So from here I conclude that their waste might contain a much higher level of U-235 than the current PWRs, for example 3-5%. This would make it good for burning in a PWR, but of course, you need to first clean it up, and that requires processing.
> Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive
Isn't this, though certainly not intentionally, just reiterating that lawful high tech labor fundamentally has no place in modern globalized economy? [Manufacturing iPhone] from [externally sourced parts] into [complete phones] has been economically unattractive everywhere, too.
Does anyone know of a good engineering level reference on Silex/GLE or general/commercial scale laser based separation. Most search results just show descriptive write ups.
I think that the Wikipedia article is about as good as it gets, because the process details are classified:
In June 2001, the U.S. Department of Energy classified "certain privately generated information concerning an innovative isotope separation process for enriching uranium". Under the Atomic Energy Act, all information not specifically declassified is classified as Restricted Data, whether it is privately or publicly held. This is in marked distinction to the national security classification executive order, which states that classification can only be assigned to information "owned by, produced by or for, or is under the control of the United States Government". This is the only known case of the Atomic Energy Act being used in such a manner.
The United States developed the somewhat related AVLIS process to industrial readiness for the Special Isotope Separation project to produce high-grade weapons plutonium from old reactor fuel. However, it was ready just in time for the end of the Cold War, so it got shut down in 1990.
Construction and operation of a Special Isotope Separation (SIS) project using the Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation (AVLIS) process technology at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) near Idaho Falls, Idaho are proposed. The SIS project would process fuel-grade plutonium administered by the Department of Energy (DOE) into weapon-grade plutonium using AVLIS and supporting chemical processes.
For nations devoid of uranium reserves and not absolutely sure to always be able to secure uranium supply (i.e. not a superpower) recycling is an interesting way.
It’s a constant heat producer. Can’t we use it just for that? Store it somewhere and transfer the heat with traditional liquid cooling/heat exchanger methods?
Store it up in the permafrost regions. Heat greenhouses.
Radioactive materials that produce enough heat to warm a greenhouse in a conveniently sized package are extremely hazardous if uncontained. It's relatively easy to encapsulate radioactive materials against accidental exposure, but much harder to guard against misinformed or malicious deliberate exposure. Then you get expensive and lethal incidents like these:
The Soviets did this with RTGs for remote on site power production. They're now abandoned and dangerous sources of nuclear material for those with evil intent.
The Soviet Union wasn't exactly intending to fall apart, and yet it did.
If you look at the current state of US politics, it should be pretty obvious that we can't even count on the richest and most advanced countries to remain stable for even a couple of decades: your "no abandoning nuclear sources" policy can be completely gone in the blink of an eye.
When it comes to something as dangerous as nuclear material you should hope for the best but plan for the worst. Using latent heat might be a neat idea in a best-case scenario, but quickly turns into an absolute nightmare in a worst-case scenario.
Theoretically yes, but you seriously complicate the storage of nuclear materials when you start packing it all together and trying to create heat or keep it at any elevated temperature for harvesting heat. That is basically the entire concept of a nuclear reactor, except now its either a random mash of nuclear stuff unless you spend a ton of money categorizing and actively monitoring the state of all the material put in, but with a less robust cooling system than an actual nuke plant and far lower output.
With the expenses involved with all of that, it would probably be better to just build multiple geothermal plants instead and you don't have to worry about nuclear materials at all for similar power output.
To me the only 2 economically feasible strategies I see with high level nuclear waste is recycling with some sort of breeder reactor program, or dumping it in a deep stable hole that is trapped away from any water tables on the order of 100,000 years or more, by which point it will just be a uniquely rich and and diverse nuclear mineral deposit.
With a breeder reactor though and all the supporting nuclear reprocessing facilities, even though it would be a lot of work and money, it would be recovering the vast majority of potential energy from previously mined and refined nuclear materials that you are talking about recovering heat from, and in a far more controlled manner that allows us to just chuck the material into pretty much any other reactor without any significant modifications.
I had considered submitting a YC application for a startup that would do this, take waste radioactive material and turn it into uniform physical pellets or cubes for district heating via vitrification, but it seemed like between the capital costs and regulatory hurdles, it's just really, really hard to make commercial economics work. At least with electrical generation with nuclear, you can get some buy in from people willing to tie up billions of dollars for decades even with a high risk of failure, or get someone with deep pockets like big tech to sign a power purchase agreement for existing nuclear capacity.
If the waste has to sit somewhere generating heat, might as well get some value from it.
(global district heating TAM is only ~$200B, idea sprung from xkcd spent fuel pool what if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)
So your business plan is commoditization (democratization?) of dirty-bombs, backed by a pop-sci science comic, with the only remaining problem to overcome (apart to getting funding) is the regulation... that involves state-level-actors even start wars and bombings if needed, to stop this kind of contingency?
Vitrified low grade nuclear waste weighing several tons submerged in a liquid medium for heat exchange in an underground facility poses limited risk assuming physical access controls. The containers are otherwise simply buried in a permitted trench and covered with soil.
by vitrification you mean the radioactive material is turned into glass cubes for the storage/distro?
And yeah, that was my thought re: 'might as well get some value from it'
I mean what if that heat transfer was mostly passive? So that a nuclear waste storage depot in the arctic creates some other value.
I once heard that “there’s no such thing as nuclear waste, just nuclear materials we haven’t figured out how to use yet,” but I’m unfortunately too dumb to know how true that statement is. Your article seems to indicate, “technically true, but for now still quite a lot to figure out.”
A substantial amount of "nuclear waste" nowadays is low-level waste - things like old radium-dial clocks, or contaminated protective clothing from nuclear power plants, or medical waste from radiotherapy patients. The overall concentration of nuclear material in this waste is very low, and many of the isotopes involved (particularly from materials made radioactive through neutron activation) wouldn't be terribly useful even if they could be effectively extracted.
(But keep in mind that the overall concentration being low doesn't make this stuff safe! There can still potentially be highly radioactive material in the waste, like flecks of radioactive dust in a bin of used laboratory gloves or whatnot.)
This is also one of the big downsides of reprocessing that always gets ignored, when people talk about the waste "reduction". Yes you make a portion of the unusable fission material usable again, but you create large amounts of low level radioactive (& toxic) waste in the process. This still needs to be handled.
I think the science is pretty well understood. We know how to separate isotopes and react them to create new products, but there will always be some amount of junk that's too reactive to toss in a landfill but not reactive enough to use. Also some of it can be used to make bombs, and that makes us rightfully pretty skittish.
"The company will separate out valuable isotopes such as Strontium-90, which has fuel applications in marine and aerospace engineering, and use neutrons to transmute the rest into shorter-lived isotopes"
From Wikipedia, it looks like Strontium-90 can be used in "treatment of bone cancer, and to treat coronary restenosis via vascular brachytherapy". Pretty cool.
Hmmm, not a particularly enlightening article. Lots of assertions without numbers. How much does reprocessing cost France? How much does MOX fuel cost France to make?
As for the "five percent of nuclear waste, which is composed of long-lived radioactive material" it rather conflates transuranics (with fairly long half lives) and fission products (which are generally fairly short-lived https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-lived_fission_product#Lon...).
A key benefit of reprocessing is splitting short and long half life materials, which will enable better disposal options tailored to the nature of the material. For instance, short-lived can be vitrified and stored near the surface for a few hundred years, the long-lived baked into synroc. All this has been done.
The thing that surprises me about nuclear power is the huge amount of enthusiasm right now, without technological wins that might inspire such enthusiasm.
If somebody is excited about deploying solar plus storage, that makes a ton of sense because prices are tumbling, enabling all sorts of new applications.
Nuclear is the opposite. It's always overpromised and under delivered. It's a mature tech, there's not big breakthroughs, we understand the design space somewhat well. Or at least well enough that nobody thinks that there's a design which will cause a 5x cost improvement, like is regularly obtained with solar and storage.
The US seems committed to taking the high-cost, low-economic growth path for the next few years, at least according to federal policies, and this would fit in with that. But I don't understand the enthusiasm at all.
While there aren't any flashy breakthrough nuclear technologies, we should remember that universities have been doing research and advancing nuclear technology over the decades even when nuclear power plants weren't being built. The US military has wanted to maintain nuclear sciences and students, nuclear medicine has done a lot, material science has come a long ways for nuclear compatible materials, physics and nearly every branch of it has dipped its toes into if not dove right into learning about nuclear forces and nuclear chemistry. Fusion power requires understanding nuclear forces. And of course there are still people looking for the flashy nuclear power breakthrough.
The reactors we see still operating today are mostly designed in like the 70s and 80s, some going back to the 60s, but that is only like 40 years after the invention of nuclear reactors and nuclear power, we are now over 40 years past that again, and our understanding of nuclear sciences is leaps and bounds above what we used to build most nuke plants in existance.
As far as reactors that could be deployed in the next 10 years, very optimistically we have:
- Westinghouse AP1000
- EDF EPR
- GE-Hitachi BWRX
The AP1000 and EPR have been shown to be very underwhelming, in the US and Europe, respectively. Those failures are prompting Canada to look at the much smaller 300MW BWRX in Ontario. However before any cost-overruns the BWRX is getting priced at $14/W recently, and the eye-popping cost of the Vogtle AP1000 at $16/W has scared all potential builders away.
If we could return to the older designs, we might be able to complete them at cheaper prices, but as our knowledge has advanced, nuclear has gotten more expensive.
The European EPR aren’t underwhelming: the power plants are delivering precisely what was planned. The underwhelming part comes from delay and cost overruns caused by local political opposition and lack of vision, as well as difficulties finding builder with the required know-how.
Despite this both France (which has just finished building an EPR) and the UK (which is building one right now) are doubling down and launching new projects to capitalise on the knowledge gained.
In France all historical reactors worked so well that we did not feel the need to build more. This lead to talented engineers going to retirement without having a chance to pass on their knowledge and experience, causing cost overruns on the new constructions. This is not inherent to the technology itself but a symptom of our decision to put it aside for a while. As an example when I was in engineering school I remember being told “don’t do a nuclear physics major there is no job for that in the future”. Not easy retaining excellence in a field when that’s what you tell your children. All the dude that went there anyway are in very very high demand today, as you might expect.
The new generation of reactors is more complex, mainly because of additional security and reliability requirements, which is a good thing. Those are certified for a lifespan of 60 years and costs are computed on that base. Some old gen reactors in the us are looking to extend their lifespan to 80 years. It’s extremely likely the new - safer - reactors will be able go beyond that, reducing the MW costs compared to current estimates.
We are slowly re-learning to build reactors, and mastering a new technology at the same time. The more reactors we build based on that experience the more that initial cost will be distributed.
There is nothing underwhelming in what was delivered; the process to get there was, but we will get better at that.
For both the French and British the current investments are fueled by wanting to subsidize their military nuclear ambitions.
As per expected Sizewell C costs it will be even more expensive than Hinkley Point C, nothing learned.
The ”lifespan” you proclaim is also an extremely rosy picture. About the entire plant except outer shell and a few core components like the pressure vessel gets replaced over it.
You also have no idea if expensive nuclear power will have an economical lifespan lasting as long.
We already see existing nuclear plants all over Europe being forced out of the market by cheap renewables. This will only worsen leading to nuclear power having fewer and fewer hours to amortize its insanely high costs over.
Farms quite often have fairly bulky connections that allow them to use their existing grid connection for smaller scale solar. Enough for them to have steady consistent income unconnected to seasons and weather, and a very good tradeoff. You see a ton of these in rural Minnesota because the utility, Xcel, is one of the very few utilities in the country that's not stuck in the 1970s, and can adapt to new technology.
Yes? In California we adopted a streamlined process for new renewable connections. The first project was recently approved under the new lightweight process. It is being built by an irrigation district on a bunch of retired farmland.
"The Darden project, which is owned by IP Darden I, LLC, a subsidiary of Intersect Power" [0]
"Intersect has closed ~$6B in project financings and raised ~$2.1B in corporate equity to support the buildout of clean energy assets including data center opportunities across the U.S." [1]
> the power plants are delivering precisely what was planned
No. The load factor of the pair of EPRs built in China (5 years late and 60% above the budget) at Taishan is quite bad (.55 and .76).
In France the EPR isn't even producing electricity, while it was to be delivered in 2012 (budget 3.3 billions €, real cost > 23.7 billions €)
> delay and cost overruns caused by local political opposition and lack of vision
Source? An official report (dubbed the "Folz report") explains why the EPR project in France (Flamanville) was a failure, I cannot find "local political opposition" among the causes.
> This lead to talented engineers going to retirement without having a chance to pass on their knowledge and experience
The Civaux-2 reactor was delivered in 1999.
In 2000 the French nuclear sector (at the time "Areva") was trying to sell EPRs (even in France).
In 2003 Finland ordered an EPR and work began in 2005.
How exactly are we supposed to believe that all knowledge vanished, without anyone in the industry to act accordingly, especially while the existing French fleet of reactors (56 at the time) had to be maintained?
Even EDF, as early as 1986, considered the nuclear fleet too large: "We will have two to four too many nuclear reactors by 1990," ( https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1986/01/17/nous-auro... ) and this was confirmed by the 1989 Rouvillois-Guillaume-Pellat report. The reason is well known: after the oil price shock, hydrocarbon prices had fallen significantly and sustainably, and they were competing with electricity.
However, reactors were built until the end of the 1990s. Three of them were started after 1985, and four were built in the 1990s. Some were ready to go in 1999 but did only diverge the generate electricity in 2002...
> certified for a lifespan of 60 years
Subject to a successful technical in-depth inspection every 10 years.
The BWRX seems way more adequate (safer, more affordable)...
Let's check!
Hitachi Nuclear, hard hit by the reactor shutdown in Japan following Fukushima, canceled projects, even in Europe (inherited through the acquisition of Horizon Nuclear Power) and even their R&D for Generation 3 (ABWR).
Their overall move is moving them away from the energy sector (abandoning their wind turbine division in 2020).
The deal with GE ("GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy") dates back to 2007 and has produced nothing to date: these large industrial companies (inertia...) with very different and poorly complementary cultures have not worked together, and none will be permanently based on the soil of their first customer (Canada).
The combination of their resources and weak hopes will accentuate the difficulty of orchestrating a large two-headed project: Areva NP (French+German), worse.
The BWRX design is truly innovative and very recent; no examples exist.
Specification adjustments demanded on the fly by the safety authority will likely rain down, delaying and increasing the cost of the project.
The client will be sensitive to this, having already suffered this (at Darlington, the host plant itself) and is experienced (Darlington has been in operation for 30 years).
The customer is strict (their nuclear power is renowned for its good performance), well-positioned to benefit from the advice of US and French safety agencies (whose relevant institutes are interested in SMRs), and perhaps a little bitter about not being able to deploy their national CANDU.
This SMR model has been optimized to be low-cost (series effect), which could (the magnitude of the side effects of certain modifications) make it difficult to adapt despite its modularity.
I see a recipe for disaster likely to make the 4 EPR projects and Vogtle look like resounding successes.
Honestly I think Canada should go back to the CANDU rather than the BWRX. As long as they don't modernize it too much to take advantage of "new technology" it might still be cheap. And they can use their own uranium, and not be dependent on the hostile nation to the south. You won't hear me say this very often, but the Decouple Pod is right:
This view is much easier to defend than the one in favor of new reactor designs. However, the fundamental debate is about renewables vs. nuclear, and factually, nuclear, even in a nation with good uranium deposits + good track record + design safer than most other ones... is increasingly difficult to defend.
> don't modernize it too much
The price to pay for this is high because it means giving up on trying to resolve some of the problems of nuclear power (risk of accidents, dependence on uranium, waste, proliferation of weapons, etc.).
> it might still be cheap
Projects over the past two decades show that even projects with improved old reactor designs (rather than radically new concepts) fail.
> Decouple Pod
It seems to me that he misses some key points, for example won't such an underground setup be way more difficult to inspect and even more to maintain/repair? Long-term waste repositories projects are way less demanding and their costs are exploding.
Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient
Geothermal: regionally locked
Wind: unpredictable
Hydro: all the good spots are already being used
Coal/oil/gas: too dirty
Nuclear faces none of these problems. It’s a big project at the moment, because SMRs aren’t developed (yet?), but the actual operation and output is unbelievably steady. Newer designs are mostly about mega-safety, and more people getting over Chernobyl can help drive funding to potentially reach fusion - the obvious holy grail. I literally cannot even imagine what you think is more viable?
> Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient
The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.
Also, it's not inefficient at all, what do you mean by that?
> Geothermal
This is far more promising than nuclear. Enhanced geothermal is opening up massive regions, and the tech is undergoing massive advancement by adopting the huge technology leap form fracking. It is completely dispatchable, and can even have some short term daily storage just by regulating inputs and outputs.
> Wind
Storage solves this today
In the 2000s, I felt like you did. But since about 2015, it's hard for me to understand your views. Especially after seeing what happened at Summer in South Carolina and Vogtle in Georgia, it's clear that nuclear faces larger technological hurdles than solar, geothermal, or wind. Storage changes everything, it's economical, and it's being deployed in massive amounts on grids where economics rule the day (which isn't many of them, since most of our grids are controlled by regulated monopolies).
By “inefficient” I mean you need incredibly large amounts of space, and the power generated is relatively small, and never mind the materials needs!
What kinda batteries are you talking about? There may be tech I’m unaware of, but failing that, there simply isn’t a currently-viable storage solution.
Maybe we’ve made marginal improvements, but our grid certainly cannot handle sending huge amounts of energy to darker regions anyways. The superconductors needed for that don’t exist yet, and the grid overhaul needed to sidestep the superconductors would be tear-jerkingly expensive.
Nuke plants are ready to go. They’re the missing ingredient that steps around all those issues. It provides a large amount of energy, very safely, using a very small land footprint. You can skip huge amounts of the regulation process by using tried-and-tested reactor designs. You can store spent fuel rods in water, then more permanently in concrete and clay.
And again, the holy grail here is fusion. More fusion research will be a completely natural byproduct of a larger nuclear market.
As the other dude said, no one single tech will fix this, and being anti-nuke in an era where we need large amounts of clean energy generation, like, yesterday… we should probably lean on everything we’ve got, and this is tantalizingly low-hanging fruit.
Geothermal does seem to be having its “fusion moment” - I’m very excited to see where that goes! Some Nordic nation (Sweden?) has been living off geothermal for quite some time, so I imagine the tech surrounding its use post-extraction is quite advanced. I’ve got high hopes.
Along a similar line, there was a recent find in hydrogen tech - basically, a way to capture it from the earth, meaning we have an actually-efficient manner of gathering the stuff. Fingers crossed that pans out too!
Those incredibly large amounts of space are generally completely unused though. Like on the top of car park sun shades, roofs, and the middle of the desert.
Solar farms, in Australia at least, work both as providers of solar power and as "better than an empty paddock" livestock and feed farms.
Solar panels provide shade, retain soil moisture better, and grow better feed crops for sheep and other animals to graze on while acting as living lawn mowers.
Storage tech exists right now but it’s not super widespread or reliable (mostly in the “what do I get for my dollar” - you can store power all you want but making your investment back is a little harder). Degradation has proved to be worse than anticipated. Industrial application of Li batteries has been repeatedly hamstrung by supply chain, demand, tariff, etc. problems. New battery chemistry would really be the breakthrough here, anything cheaper and better than lithium
It's extremely reliable, and it's also very economical.
> Degradation has proved to be worse than anticipated.
I follow the space closely and there have been zero complaints about this. And regardless the warranties would cover the early installs.
It's going to be extremely hard for any other battery chemistry to catch up to lithium ion. Sodium has a chance, but the supply chain for lithium is massive, growing, and has lots of substitutions if bottlenecks arise.
The logistics challenges of nuclear are an order of magnitude higher than for nuclear. With far more financial risk, timelines around a decade instead of a year.
The technology for storage is robust, scaling massively, and pretty much unstoppable in the US unless there are explicit bans. Nuclear literally needs a technooogy advancement to catch up, and the closest is SMR production, which is coming close to a decade of being in vogue, with plans stalling out everywhere. Even the planned BWRXs in Canada at Darlington may now be at risk since the US is starting to be viewed as unreliable and too risky to depend upon.
> The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.
The ones I've seen in the news have enough batteries to time-shift the output by like four hours. Which is rather less then would be needed to keep up output through morning if there weren't other kinds of sources doing that part.
So you enhance the already-existing continent-scale grid and import your power from an area a few thousand km/mi away which isn't both cloudy and windless at the same time. Heck, there's probably plenty of opportunity for hydro storage in that range.
If all else fails: power up the backup natural gas power plants for a couple of hours. We're trying to minimize CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, getting to 0% immediately isn't the goal. Run a carbon capture plant during times of energy excess to compensate if you feel like it.
It doesn't shift it four hours, the power to energy ratio is fours. If more is needed, all one needs to do is plug in more batteries.
These are not complicated. They scale small, scale big. This is not very complicated engineering, and not very difficult to understand with even basic electronics knowledge.
> The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.
The existence of the tech isn't the issue, it is the logistics, cost and practicality of building it at grid scale. If you try to calculate how many batteries you'd need to store the equivalent energy of a hydro reservoir, or one hour of a nuclear plant, then try to estimate the land required, you'd quickly discover how intractable the issue is.
Yah-- nuclear isn't going to win on its own, but no one technology is going to get us out of this greenhouse gas mess.
We're going to need to electrify a lot of things to lower emissions. And electrifying things requires a big source of base load. Overbuilding renewables, adding storage, enlarging transmission/grids, and load shedding all help; but likely still fall short of the mark at a reasonable cost.
Nuclear is expensive, but it fills key gaps in other solutions and helps reduce overall system risk.
* A contrarianism visa vis environmental crusades against nuclear power that presented it's dangers in a distorted fashion.
* How nuclear on paper presents the possibility of limitless energy with little pollution.
* Nuclear is the kind of big-tech solution that appeals to a lot of nerds.
The problem is that nuclear failed independently from environmental crusades even if some of these were successful. Nuclear power requires vast investment and radiation has the problem that it can weaken anything. Meltdowns aren't the apocalypse environmentalists imply but they destroy permanently a huge store of investment and their commonness has tanked nuclear power independently from popular crusades but those with a stake in nuclear like point to "them hippies" to cover their own failures.
In my opinion this is the strongest argument to take. Any argument about radiation or waste is going to be waved away as "scaremongering" and will be solved by innovations riiight aroung the corner - you won't change anyone's mind with that.
On the other hand, the practical arguments are pretty cut-and-dry: the West is unable to build them fast enough to matter, and they are too expensive to compete with renewables on an open energy market. We already have the receipts for traditional reactors due to Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, and Flamanville 3.
Have we solved every single potential problem which needs solving for a 100% renewable grid? No, but we've got plenty of time to work out the edge cases during the transition. Perhaps some magical mass-produced micro nuclear peaker plants will help in that, perhaps they won't. Let's keep investing in tried-and-tested technology like solar, wind, hydro, and battery storage until the nuclear folks get their act together - no need to bet our entire future on a nuclear miracle which probably isn't going to happen anyways.
>and will be solved by innovations riiight aroung the corner
Yes, this is what the solar/wind people keep claiming about energy storage.
>the West is unable to build them fast enough
No, the West is unwilling to build them fast enough. Then it chickens out, and the institutional knowledge to build the next plants are lost (so you lose the volume discount).
Regaining and retaining the institutional knowledge to build things may be more expensive in the short term, but it should be done- the fact that a country is capable of building power infrastructure on a whim is vital for its national defense.
This is the hidden cost of buying Chinese solar panels (because once you can't buy from China, or once China is unwilling to sell to you, you'll be paying for your own nuclear infrastructure regardless). And no, other countries' solar panels are not cheaper than nuclear; 'not knowing how to do it ourselves' cuts both ways.
Energy storage is a solved problem - or rather has a multitude of well known solutions as well as up-and-coming ones.
Energy storage isn't popular with grid operators because it requires a different kind of grid. US grid operators don't want to upgrade their operations for solar or for other problem 'cause their profit strategy is running their capital into the ground.
Solar energy production in many countries is increasing exponentially but who knows idiocy US policy is going to mandate going forward.
I am a nuclear fanboy not because it promises technological breakthroughs (like you wrote, there probably won't be many or even any), but because there just isn't any other option that can deliver continuous power without messing up the climate. I want it to happen even if it slightly increases my power bill or my taxes. And as far as I understand the increase would be slight, if any at all. I am an even bigger fan of solar power, but are we really going to have enough battery capacity to reliably run entire countries?
Yeah I agree with you. Im not expecting any real improvements in my personal life by going to nuclear power, but it is all but a solved method to produce nearly any amount of power we would want over extremely long timespans with no significant emissions. You want to desalinate massive amounts of water? Nuke plant. You want to run a huge carbon scrubber farm? Nuke plant. You want endless amounts of steel and aluminum processing and fertilizer production that all require large amounts of energy? Nuclear power. And it doesn't need to rely on promises of future technology improvements or mega-structure scale projects like "Cover X entire state with solar panels and install multiple times the worlds current total battery capacity into the grid." Or waiting for the economics of solar panels to make it viable for all consumers and dealing with all the political shenanigans of connecting them to the grid.
> I want it to happen even if it slightly increases my power bill or my taxes. And as far as I understand the increase would be slight, if any at all.
Vogtle is showing that to be wrong. It costs something like $180-$200/MWh, when market value is around $50/MWh on average. Solar with enough storage to operate as baseload is far cheaper than nuclear today, and will only get cheaper over the next decade. See for example:
Okay, but now run the numbers not for a middle eastern desert but for say Germany, or similar latitudes/weather patterns in the US. ChatGPT roughly estimated the cost to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $500/MWh.
This is a solved problem in a fuel cycle combining Thorium-232 (Th-232) breeding and Plutonium (Pu) incineration, most effectively realized in designs like Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs).
Plutonium waste (predominantly Pu-239, but also Pu-240, Pu-241, Pu-242) is used as the initial fissile driver to start and maintain the chain reaction. Often used as PuF4 dissolved in the fluoride salt. Th-232 (as ThF4) is located in a separate "blanket" region surrounding the core or dissolved in salt channels flowing around the moderator structure. The bred U-233 is chemically separated (online reprocessing is key!) from thorium and fission products in the salt processing system and fed back into the core. While U-233 takes over primary power generation, the Pu isotopes are continuously being consumed
I'm confused the article sometimes talks sometimes about transmutation, that is turning problematic isotopes into ones with shorter half life and theoretically gaining energy in the process, and sometimes about reprocessing, taking spent fuel and essentially recycling to get usable fuel again.
There's a partially complete facility to do so southwest of Chicago, in Dresden, Illinois[1]. I remember learning about it back in the 1990s. It even has a large cache of spent fuel from a few reactors across the country in storage.
There are still a lot of obstacles to solve with going to base solar power. But I agree we should still be investing into it. However nuclear power is an all but completely solved problem and it has huge benefits in scaling with additional nuclear industries, where as solar has (perhaps minor, perhaps not) obstacles towards massive scaling. If we wanted to guarantee clean energy production into the future, I still think nuclear is a right choice. Maybe in 30-40 years solar will have solved all its problems and be built enough to stand on its own and we don't need any more nuke plants built, but we don't really know that will be true.
It is always best to plant the trees now and then not need to harvest them later rather than not plant them now and then not have them when you do need them.
The problem with nuclear is the price. As someone else already brought up[0], nuclear is about four times as expensive as solar - and that's pretty much the best case scenario. Try to use nuclear as a peaker plants and it's going to be closer to forty times as expensive, simply because the cost of nuclear is dominated by the construction loan.
A lot of solar's problems magically disappear when you apply a nuclear-level budget to it. Less output during cloudy days? Build twice as many panels and you've solved it while still remaining cheaper than nuclear. What about night? Build wind turbines, hydro storage, and batteries Windless, dark winter nights? You've got a massive budget for a handful of 99.9%-idle fossil peaker plants with carbon capture.
Nuclear is a technological solution to an economical problem. It's sexy, but it doesn't solve anything.
Interestingly, Trump just bombed Iran's nukes program, but his EO demands at least 20 civil nuclear deals, internationally. Who might be these 20 countries?
It’s ok to store this stuff until the triggered tech is available. Even if it’s done in orbit around the moon. This was impossible to think about 10 years ago but it’s possible in the next 10
Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive everywhere it has been implemented. Natural uranium isn't very expensive and separating the plutonium from spent fuel doesn't save much on waste disposal costs either. The US canceled a new MOX plant just 7 years ago due to cost and schedule problems:
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-MOX-facility-cont...
Work started on the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in 2007, with a 2016 start-up envisaged. Although based on France's Melox MOX facility, the US project has presented many first-of-a-kind challenges and in 2012 the US Government Accountability Office suggested it would likely not start up before 2019 and cost at least USD7.7 billion, far above original estimate of USD4.9 billion.
The most interesting "recycling" effort right now is the laser enrichment process of Silex/Global Laser Enrichment:
https://www.wkms.org/energy/2025-07-02/company-developing-pa...
The company plans to re-enrich old depleted uranium tails from the obsolete gas diffusion enrichment process back up to natural uranium levels of 0.7% U-235. That uranium in turn would be processed by existing commercial centrifuge enrichment to upgrade it to power reactor fuel.
Also, nuclear waste is a very small problem, compared to other wastes. Yes, it stays active for 10k+ years, but it's actually not that expensive to store them at specialized storages forever. Because it's a very small amount on a grand scale.
In comparison, managing steel production waste is way more expensive.
> Yes, it stays active for 10k+ years, but it's actually not that expensive to store them at specialized storages forever. Because it's a very small amount on a grand scale.
For some definition of "active".
The first 6-10 years are quite dangerous, which is why stuff is in cooling pools. After about 200-300 years the most dangerous type of radiation (gamma) has mostly burned stopped, and you're left with alpha and beta, which can be stopped with tinfoil and even paper.
I've heard the remark that after ~300 years the main way for nuclear waste to cause bad health effects is if you eat it or grind it up and snort it.
Sorry, but you're wrong. I took some radiation safety classes, and the main point I got from that is that "it depends". For example, alpha- and beta-radiation are often more dangerous than gamma, because gamma is easier to detect and measure.
People often focus on "radiation" part forgetting the "contamination" part. You can literally walk into the Chernobyl reactor active zone today for up to 2 minutes. But you cannot produce any food in soils around it for thousand years. And there's dozens of dangerous isotopes, each one accumulating and affecting human tissues differently.
Public generally only knows about Geiger counter. Yes, it will scream if everything is FUBAR, but it's useless for estimating safety of a food product.
> You can literally walk into the Chernobyl reactor active zone today for up to 2 minutes. But you cannot produce any food in soils around it for thousand years. And there's dozens of dangerous isotopes, each one accumulating and affecting human tissues differently.
Geraldine Thomas, the co-founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, says there are more worrisome things than radiation:
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas
Yup. And managing nuclear waste is not really a big problem that needs immediate solution, if ever. Shoving it deep underground seems to be the optimal way for the next thousand years. So there's no need in recycling really.
> But you cannot produce any food in soils around it for thousand years.
Is that actually based on some sort of science though, or is it the same woolly thinking as the linear-no-threshold modelling that was popular around the time of Chernobyl? What are the actual risks here and how does it compare to low exercise or the typical amount of air pollution in a large city?
afaik LNT is correct last time i looked into it. LNT had to be proven as powerful agencies much preferred the hormesis hypothesis because it let them off the hook.
LNT has never been established and probably never will be. It is still used in some contexts for conservative safety analysis. Places with multiple times typical background activity do not have measurably higher cancer rates.
BEIR VII still supports LNT. There's some criticisms, but it seems like a pretty safe guess that just because the uncertainty climbs at low doses it's not just a straight line projection from the closest easier to ascertain value. Maybe some people are better at DNA repair, but some people have DNA repair defects too. The number of ion tracks is going to correlate with number of DNA breaks, and DNA breaks correlate with increased cancer.
https://www.epa.gov/radiation/blue-book-epa-radiogenic-cance...
So nuclear waste is stored in casks:
* https://www.nwmo.ca/canadas-used-nuclear-fuel/how-is-it-stor...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask
Are you telling me it's unsafe? Someone better tell Madison Hill:
* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...
* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856
* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
Or Paris Ortiz-Wines:
* https://twitter.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...
(The context here is not walking down some road and getting bombarded with particles: but about the storage of industrial material and the risks it involves. Yes, stuff gets shot out at >300 years: but it's not just lying around randomly.)
Why, if it's in sealed casks underground, than yes, gamma is the only thing to worry about. My whole comment was about nuclear waste danger and its associated costs, not about danger of an non-compromised waste storage facility.
Sorry, I don't have a Twitter account to read the posts, but they look like my point exactly.
> Sorry, I don't have a Twitter account to read the posts, but they look like my point exactly.
Neither to I:
* https://status.d420.de
it's fine as long as it doesn't get out of its flask
which it will do eventually, if it's left out in the open
it needs to be buried
reducing the volume via reprocessing helps
assuming you can do something with the 97% of "useful" stuff extracted (which the UK has mostly failed at, and now stores it in a warehouse)
And then eventually, water seeps in. Like in the german Asse II mine, that is planned to be evacuated, which will be a major challenge.
https://www.bge.de/en/asse/short-information/history-of-the-...
It might be true that nuclear power produces less waste but we have to consider the scales of global energy demand, multiply it by the time scales of nuclear waste to reach what threshold exactly? When and how would nuclear waste become a problem. Would it take ~200 years like the industrial revolution with CO2? Would it be okay if it where 300 years? or 500? What do we do, when background radiation is rising from ground water and soil? Switch back to natural instead of green energy, hoping the next millenias will be fine?
I dont think nuclear power is a solution. It can be step in an energy transition strategy, but no solution.
> And then eventually, water seeps in.
Not if it's below non-porous rock…
* https://www.nwmo.ca/who-we-are/how-were-governed/peer-review...
* https://www.nwmo.ca/Site-selection/Steps-in-the-site-selecti...
…below the water table…
* https://www.nwmo.ca/canadas-plan/canadas-deep-geological-rep...
…packed in non-porous soil/clay:
* https://www.nwmo.ca/-/media/Reports-MASTER/Technical-reports...
* https://www.nwmo.ca/Canadas-plan/Multiple-barrier-system
> When and how would nuclear waste become a problem.
Never. If there is ever "too much" of it we reprocess it as per OP article to remove the "non-usable" stuff and burn up the rest. It seems that there's an order of magnitude reduce by recycling (96% is usable fuel, so 4% is left over):
* https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...
It is actually not that hard to make something water-tight if you have no intention of opening it again.
> I dont think nuclear power is a solution. It can be step in an energy transition strategy, but no solution.
Do you mean nuclear fission specifically? Because I can't imagine anything being a long term solution except nuclear power (fusion).
Ok lets send it on a rocket to a graveyard orbit
The strange part psychologically is that saying it lasts 10,000 years somehow seems worse and more unmanageable than say cadmium or arsenic which last forever.
Other threats cannot compensate: defects and turpitudes of some (for example of certain waste of chemistry) do not form attenuating circumstance for others (nuclear waste).
An accused defends himself badly by declaring to the judge "I am not the only culprit of homicide!".
10k years isn't that long. Some concentrated chemical stuff with heavy metals or mercury or whatever in it will be toxic forever.
10000 years is long. It's twice the length of the entire recorded history. I don't even know if mankind will survive another 100 years.
> I don't even know if mankind will survive another 100 years.
Then it reasons that we should absolutely use this fuel.
If all else is held equal, then yes, that follows. But the debate is more or less that some think it will hasten that timeline (through nuclear warfare and accidents) and some think it will delay it (by reducing pollution/climate change).
Using nuclear fuel leaves less for weapons and more demand increases cost for weapons too. Accidents happen, but they won't be the end of our species.
I think we should use more nuclear energy, I think nuclear powered container ships are under explored for instance. But it's not so simple. Nuclear energy programs can become nuclear weapons programs. A larger uranium mining and processing industry lowers the barriers of entry for building a weapons program. We're not going to exhaust our uranium reserves anytime soon. We're not going to be wiped out by a nuclear accidents, but we're heading into a future of stronger storms and more frequent wildfires, and nuclear power has a way of making disasters even worse.
The nuclear waste even without the radiation is going to be toxic. Anything with even trace amount of plutonium left (which has a half life time > 200,000 years), will be toxic (much more than e.g. mercury).
Eh, I don't think I agree. Let's talk about the long-lived isotopes: Pu-239 and Pu-242.
Significant inhaled Pu-239 has a fair risk of causing cancer even after a long time. However mercury is volatile and it's a lot easier to end up inhaling fumes.
And mercury is absorbed well through ingestion and Pu isn't, and most of the risk after ingestion would be chemical, not radiological. From that standpoint, it's looking a lot better than other heavy metals.
Huh?
The reason we don’t have more solid non-radiological toxicity data on Plutonium (compared to other toxic heavy metals) is because any amount significant enough to count kills people radiologically super quick.
That doesn’t mean it’s non-toxic if we ignore the radiological effects.
We know:
* Plutonium is not well absorbed by ingestion compared to other heavy metals and know ballpark ingestion toxicities
* We also know that pretty much all the plutonium except the long-lived isotopes are gone on a timescale of tens of thousands of years-- leaving behind mostly uranium isotopes.
* There's no real reason to believe this mixture of uranium and a small fraction of long-lived plutonium isotopes is significantly worse than ingesting uranium. It might be worse to inhale fine dust, though.
* Mercury is way worse than uranium because it is so readily absorbed.
Elemental mercury is not absorbed at all. You’re probably thinking of methyl mercury and various mercury salts (which, by the way, are not very common).
We have nearly zero experience with weathered or bio modified plutonium. And the experience we do have with plutonium compounds, is limited by the fact people die awfully fast when they’re anywhere near them.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Especially not when the evidence is absent because we can’t get there because everyone dies first from the more obvious bad things happening.
In addition to what the sibling commenter said, at the scale of human civilization, 10,000 years is forever.
10,000 years may be forever but it's a rounding error compared to the "half-life" of lead that other power plants produce.
No, forever isn't a rounding error compared to forever. No human civilization has any reason whatsoever to make any distinction between "this field over here will be safe for farming in 10,000 years" and "this field over here will never be safe for farming".
In addition, nuclear isn't competing against coal, it's competing against solar.
If anything is competing against solar, it's solar + batteries + high cost semiconductor switch yards + massive amounts of new transmission lines + replacing the panels every 20 - 30 years + being dependent on China for solar panels.
Even simply finding some adequate way to warn is a challenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
The Great Pyramid of Giza is about half that years old.
Pop all the waste in stainless steel casts huge pile in a geologically stable desert.
Admittedly, a lot of spent nuclear fuel waste is also toxic heavy metals and will remain so long after it stops being a radiation hazard.
Metals can be vitrified, rending them chemically inert.
You can read more about vitrification of nuclear waste here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
We can't even agree to keep under 2°C warming in 100 years, so I am also confused about why people are worried about waste that lasts 10K years. My guess is that they actually worry it will be leaked during their lifetime, whereas they know X° warming is beyond their lifetime.
> Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive everywhere it has been implemented.
All it takes to change that is a federal subsidy supporting the industry. The same was said about wind & solar until it wasn't (due to tax credits). Now that the credits are going away with BBB, the cost of every new utility-scale development just went up ~30% and many, many projects will be killed.
Wind and solar are still competitive without the credits, and while it'd be great to keep the credits to get off of fossil fuels faster, they are no longer needed.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...
> Lazard’s analysis of levelized cost of electricity across fuel types finds that new-build utility-scale solar, even without subsidy, is less costly than new build natural gas, and competes with already-operating gas plants.
> Despite the blow that tax credit repeal would deal to renewable energy project values, analysis from Lazard finds that solar and wind energy projects have a lower levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) than nearly all fossil fuel projects – even without subsidy.
(Lazard is the investment banking gold standard wrt clean energy cost modeling: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...)
As someone in solar I can tell you unless you are O&O/IPP it is not profitable to build without credits, no matter what an investment bank says
Does Lazard make money from putting together financing and investment for solar and wind projects? If the answer is yes, that is precisely what I would expect them to say, given their incentives.
Why do that when safely storing the waste takes up an incredibly tiny amount of space and costs much less?
And subsidizing this still won't make new nuclear particularly competitive without ditching the silly LNT harm model and killing ALARA at the regulatory level. If you do that, suddenly nuclear can be profitable (as it should be in a world where the AEC and NRC approached radiation harm risk with actual science).
Apparently nuclear waste storage is easier said than done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
Politically, yes. Anything nuclear is easier said than done for political reasons.
I'd like to see nuclear be (safely) viable, which to me means SMRs or go home.
Even SMRs can't compete on price along - current estimate (per the Goog):
SMRs: SMR LCOE range from $80-$90/MWh. Renewables: Solar and wind LCOE can range from $20-$50/MWh, with some estimates even lower.
Yes, having "guaranteed" output has value, but I'm of an age where I can remember the promise of "power too cheap to meter"
Many of the proposed new designs use higher enriched uranium, with up to 20% U-235. I expect that if they could work with 5% they would, but they can't. So from here I conclude that their waste might contain a much higher level of U-235 than the current PWRs, for example 3-5%. This would make it good for burning in a PWR, but of course, you need to first clean it up, and that requires processing.
> Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive
Isn't this, though certainly not intentionally, just reiterating that lawful high tech labor fundamentally has no place in modern globalized economy? [Manufacturing iPhone] from [externally sourced parts] into [complete phones] has been economically unattractive everywhere, too.
Does anyone know of a good engineering level reference on Silex/GLE or general/commercial scale laser based separation. Most search results just show descriptive write ups.
I think that the Wikipedia article is about as good as it gets, because the process details are classified:
In June 2001, the U.S. Department of Energy classified "certain privately generated information concerning an innovative isotope separation process for enriching uranium". Under the Atomic Energy Act, all information not specifically declassified is classified as Restricted Data, whether it is privately or publicly held. This is in marked distinction to the national security classification executive order, which states that classification can only be assigned to information "owned by, produced by or for, or is under the control of the United States Government". This is the only known case of the Atomic Energy Act being used in such a manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_lase...
The United States developed the somewhat related AVLIS process to industrial readiness for the Special Isotope Separation project to produce high-grade weapons plutonium from old reactor fuel. However, it was ready just in time for the end of the Cold War, so it got shut down in 1990.
https://inis.iaea.org/records/r6yew-5nk17
Construction and operation of a Special Isotope Separation (SIS) project using the Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation (AVLIS) process technology at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) near Idaho Falls, Idaho are proposed. The SIS project would process fuel-grade plutonium administered by the Department of Energy (DOE) into weapon-grade plutonium using AVLIS and supporting chemical processes.
> The US canceled a new MOX plant
For nations devoid of uranium reserves and not absolutely sure to always be able to secure uranium supply (i.e. not a superpower) recycling is an interesting way.
Case in point: France.
It’s a constant heat producer. Can’t we use it just for that? Store it somewhere and transfer the heat with traditional liquid cooling/heat exchanger methods? Store it up in the permafrost regions. Heat greenhouses.
Radioactive materials that produce enough heat to warm a greenhouse in a conveniently sized package are extremely hazardous if uncontained. It's relatively easy to encapsulate radioactive materials against accidental exposure, but much harder to guard against misinformed or malicious deliberate exposure. Then you get expensive and lethal incidents like these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
I don’t really foresee it being packaged out. But maybe a heat exchanger that uses the main long term storage pile
The Soviets did this with RTGs for remote on site power production. They're now abandoned and dangerous sources of nuclear material for those with evil intent.
Ok, but couldn't we just do the part where we somehow extract usable energy from nuclear waste without the subsequent abandonment?
The Soviet Union wasn't exactly intending to fall apart, and yet it did.
If you look at the current state of US politics, it should be pretty obvious that we can't even count on the richest and most advanced countries to remain stable for even a couple of decades: your "no abandoning nuclear sources" policy can be completely gone in the blink of an eye.
When it comes to something as dangerous as nuclear material you should hope for the best but plan for the worst. Using latent heat might be a neat idea in a best-case scenario, but quickly turns into an absolute nightmare in a worst-case scenario.
Theoretically yes, but you seriously complicate the storage of nuclear materials when you start packing it all together and trying to create heat or keep it at any elevated temperature for harvesting heat. That is basically the entire concept of a nuclear reactor, except now its either a random mash of nuclear stuff unless you spend a ton of money categorizing and actively monitoring the state of all the material put in, but with a less robust cooling system than an actual nuke plant and far lower output.
With the expenses involved with all of that, it would probably be better to just build multiple geothermal plants instead and you don't have to worry about nuclear materials at all for similar power output.
To me the only 2 economically feasible strategies I see with high level nuclear waste is recycling with some sort of breeder reactor program, or dumping it in a deep stable hole that is trapped away from any water tables on the order of 100,000 years or more, by which point it will just be a uniquely rich and and diverse nuclear mineral deposit.
With a breeder reactor though and all the supporting nuclear reprocessing facilities, even though it would be a lot of work and money, it would be recovering the vast majority of potential energy from previously mined and refined nuclear materials that you are talking about recovering heat from, and in a far more controlled manner that allows us to just chuck the material into pretty much any other reactor without any significant modifications.
I had considered submitting a YC application for a startup that would do this, take waste radioactive material and turn it into uniform physical pellets or cubes for district heating via vitrification, but it seemed like between the capital costs and regulatory hurdles, it's just really, really hard to make commercial economics work. At least with electrical generation with nuclear, you can get some buy in from people willing to tie up billions of dollars for decades even with a high risk of failure, or get someone with deep pockets like big tech to sign a power purchase agreement for existing nuclear capacity.
If the waste has to sit somewhere generating heat, might as well get some value from it.
(global district heating TAM is only ~$200B, idea sprung from xkcd spent fuel pool what if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)
So your business plan is commoditization (democratization?) of dirty-bombs, backed by a pop-sci science comic, with the only remaining problem to overcome (apart to getting funding) is the regulation... that involves state-level-actors even start wars and bombings if needed, to stop this kind of contingency?
When will there be an IPO?
Vitrified low grade nuclear waste weighing several tons submerged in a liquid medium for heat exchange in an underground facility poses limited risk assuming physical access controls. The containers are otherwise simply buried in a permitted trench and covered with soil.
https://www.hanfordvitplant.com/low-activity-waste-law-vitri...
by vitrification you mean the radioactive material is turned into glass cubes for the storage/distro?
And yeah, that was my thought re: 'might as well get some value from it' I mean what if that heat transfer was mostly passive? So that a nuclear waste storage depot in the arctic creates some other value.
Yep, the waste is turned into an insoluble glass product to stabilize it for long term storage.
https://www.hanfordvitplant.com/vitrification-101
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
Oh boy more “Infinity Rooms”. Funny write up on the hazards of reprocessing: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/choose-your-own-radiat...
Nice
I once heard that “there’s no such thing as nuclear waste, just nuclear materials we haven’t figured out how to use yet,” but I’m unfortunately too dumb to know how true that statement is. Your article seems to indicate, “technically true, but for now still quite a lot to figure out.”
A substantial amount of "nuclear waste" nowadays is low-level waste - things like old radium-dial clocks, or contaminated protective clothing from nuclear power plants, or medical waste from radiotherapy patients. The overall concentration of nuclear material in this waste is very low, and many of the isotopes involved (particularly from materials made radioactive through neutron activation) wouldn't be terribly useful even if they could be effectively extracted.
(But keep in mind that the overall concentration being low doesn't make this stuff safe! There can still potentially be highly radioactive material in the waste, like flecks of radioactive dust in a bin of used laboratory gloves or whatnot.)
This is also one of the big downsides of reprocessing that always gets ignored, when people talk about the waste "reduction". Yes you make a portion of the unusable fission material usable again, but you create large amounts of low level radioactive (& toxic) waste in the process. This still needs to be handled.
Or tubing, or lathes (for creating plutonium pits)! There's just soooo much that isn't directly related to the actual fissile material.
I think the science is pretty well understood. We know how to separate isotopes and react them to create new products, but there will always be some amount of junk that's too reactive to toss in a landfill but not reactive enough to use. Also some of it can be used to make bombs, and that makes us rightfully pretty skittish.
"The company will separate out valuable isotopes such as Strontium-90, which has fuel applications in marine and aerospace engineering, and use neutrons to transmute the rest into shorter-lived isotopes"
From Wikipedia, it looks like Strontium-90 can be used in "treatment of bone cancer, and to treat coronary restenosis via vascular brachytherapy". Pretty cool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90
Strontium is taken up by the body like Calcium, as it's in the same group in the periodic table.
I don’t think anyone is considering its ingestion. At least I hope not, but these are very strange times.
Strontium-89 injections were indeed used as a palliative treatment for bone cancer, though I think they've been discontinued.
The short half life makes it less problematic than its 90 neighbour. It also decays to a stable isotope.
Fwiw supplements containing strontium exist (strontium ranelate mostly), which is supposed to assist with osteoarthritis symptoms and bone growth.
None with Strontium 90
“Taken up” mean it participates in the same sort of biological processes
Hmmm, not a particularly enlightening article. Lots of assertions without numbers. How much does reprocessing cost France? How much does MOX fuel cost France to make?
As for the "five percent of nuclear waste, which is composed of long-lived radioactive material" it rather conflates transuranics (with fairly long half lives) and fission products (which are generally fairly short-lived https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-lived_fission_product#Lon...). A key benefit of reprocessing is splitting short and long half life materials, which will enable better disposal options tailored to the nature of the material. For instance, short-lived can be vitrified and stored near the surface for a few hundred years, the long-lived baked into synroc. All this has been done.
The thing that surprises me about nuclear power is the huge amount of enthusiasm right now, without technological wins that might inspire such enthusiasm.
If somebody is excited about deploying solar plus storage, that makes a ton of sense because prices are tumbling, enabling all sorts of new applications.
Nuclear is the opposite. It's always overpromised and under delivered. It's a mature tech, there's not big breakthroughs, we understand the design space somewhat well. Or at least well enough that nobody thinks that there's a design which will cause a 5x cost improvement, like is regularly obtained with solar and storage.
The US seems committed to taking the high-cost, low-economic growth path for the next few years, at least according to federal policies, and this would fit in with that. But I don't understand the enthusiasm at all.
While there aren't any flashy breakthrough nuclear technologies, we should remember that universities have been doing research and advancing nuclear technology over the decades even when nuclear power plants weren't being built. The US military has wanted to maintain nuclear sciences and students, nuclear medicine has done a lot, material science has come a long ways for nuclear compatible materials, physics and nearly every branch of it has dipped its toes into if not dove right into learning about nuclear forces and nuclear chemistry. Fusion power requires understanding nuclear forces. And of course there are still people looking for the flashy nuclear power breakthrough.
The reactors we see still operating today are mostly designed in like the 70s and 80s, some going back to the 60s, but that is only like 40 years after the invention of nuclear reactors and nuclear power, we are now over 40 years past that again, and our understanding of nuclear sciences is leaps and bounds above what we used to build most nuke plants in existance.
As far as reactors that could be deployed in the next 10 years, very optimistically we have:
- Westinghouse AP1000
- EDF EPR
- GE-Hitachi BWRX
The AP1000 and EPR have been shown to be very underwhelming, in the US and Europe, respectively. Those failures are prompting Canada to look at the much smaller 300MW BWRX in Ontario. However before any cost-overruns the BWRX is getting priced at $14/W recently, and the eye-popping cost of the Vogtle AP1000 at $16/W has scared all potential builders away.
If we could return to the older designs, we might be able to complete them at cheaper prices, but as our knowledge has advanced, nuclear has gotten more expensive.
The European EPR aren’t underwhelming: the power plants are delivering precisely what was planned. The underwhelming part comes from delay and cost overruns caused by local political opposition and lack of vision, as well as difficulties finding builder with the required know-how.
Despite this both France (which has just finished building an EPR) and the UK (which is building one right now) are doubling down and launching new projects to capitalise on the knowledge gained.
In France all historical reactors worked so well that we did not feel the need to build more. This lead to talented engineers going to retirement without having a chance to pass on their knowledge and experience, causing cost overruns on the new constructions. This is not inherent to the technology itself but a symptom of our decision to put it aside for a while. As an example when I was in engineering school I remember being told “don’t do a nuclear physics major there is no job for that in the future”. Not easy retaining excellence in a field when that’s what you tell your children. All the dude that went there anyway are in very very high demand today, as you might expect.
The new generation of reactors is more complex, mainly because of additional security and reliability requirements, which is a good thing. Those are certified for a lifespan of 60 years and costs are computed on that base. Some old gen reactors in the us are looking to extend their lifespan to 80 years. It’s extremely likely the new - safer - reactors will be able go beyond that, reducing the MW costs compared to current estimates.
We are slowly re-learning to build reactors, and mastering a new technology at the same time. The more reactors we build based on that experience the more that initial cost will be distributed.
There is nothing underwhelming in what was delivered; the process to get there was, but we will get better at that.
The French experienced negative learning by doing throughout their entire nuclear program?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
For both the French and British the current investments are fueled by wanting to subsidize their military nuclear ambitions.
As per expected Sizewell C costs it will be even more expensive than Hinkley Point C, nothing learned.
The ”lifespan” you proclaim is also an extremely rosy picture. About the entire plant except outer shell and a few core components like the pressure vessel gets replaced over it.
You also have no idea if expensive nuclear power will have an economical lifespan lasting as long.
We already see existing nuclear plants all over Europe being forced out of the market by cheap renewables. This will only worsen leading to nuclear power having fewer and fewer hours to amortize its insanely high costs over.
> difficulties finding builder
If your ideal power plant can only be built by a hypothetical builder, then it cannot be built
Literally a farmer can build a solar power plant.
> Literally a farmer can build a solar power plant.
Can the farmer legally connect it to the grid in your location?
Farms quite often have fairly bulky connections that allow them to use their existing grid connection for smaller scale solar. Enough for them to have steady consistent income unconnected to seasons and weather, and a very good tradeoff. You see a ton of these in rural Minnesota because the utility, Xcel, is one of the very few utilities in the country that's not stuck in the 1970s, and can adapt to new technology.
Yes? In California we adopted a streamlined process for new renewable connections. The first project was recently approved under the new lightweight process. It is being built by an irrigation district on a bunch of retired farmland.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2025-06/cec-approves-worlds-l...
"The Darden project, which is owned by IP Darden I, LLC, a subsidiary of Intersect Power" [0]
"Intersect has closed ~$6B in project financings and raised ~$2.1B in corporate equity to support the buildout of clean energy assets including data center opportunities across the U.S." [1]
Not exactly farmers. Solar farmers, perhaps.
[0] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/06/13/largest-battery-stora...
[1] https://www.intersectpower.com/who-we-are/
> the power plants are delivering precisely what was planned
No. The load factor of the pair of EPRs built in China (5 years late and 60% above the budget) at Taishan is quite bad (.55 and .76).
In France the EPR isn't even producing electricity, while it was to be delivered in 2012 (budget 3.3 billions €, real cost > 23.7 billions €)
> delay and cost overruns caused by local political opposition and lack of vision
Source? An official report (dubbed the "Folz report") explains why the EPR project in France (Flamanville) was a failure, I cannot find "local political opposition" among the causes.
French ahead: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/media/organes-parleme...
> In France all historical reactors worked so well that we did not feel the need to build more.
The context was quite different: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl... ... and the real total cost of this "nuclearization" is already huge.
> This lead to talented engineers going to retirement without having a chance to pass on their knowledge and experience
The Civaux-2 reactor was delivered in 1999.
In 2000 the French nuclear sector (at the time "Areva") was trying to sell EPRs (even in France).
In 2003 Finland ordered an EPR and work began in 2005.
How exactly are we supposed to believe that all knowledge vanished, without anyone in the industry to act accordingly, especially while the existing French fleet of reactors (56 at the time) had to be maintained?
> our decision to put it aside for a while
Cause: oil counter-shock (~1985), which (sadly) reducing electricity competitivity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?ta...
Even EDF, as early as 1986, considered the nuclear fleet too large: "We will have two to four too many nuclear reactors by 1990," ( https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1986/01/17/nous-auro... ) and this was confirmed by the 1989 Rouvillois-Guillaume-Pellat report. The reason is well known: after the oil price shock, hydrocarbon prices had fallen significantly and sustainably, and they were competing with electricity.
However, reactors were built until the end of the 1990s. Three of them were started after 1985, and four were built in the 1990s. Some were ready to go in 1999 but did only diverge the generate electricity in 2002...
> certified for a lifespan of 60 years
Subject to a successful technical in-depth inspection every 10 years.
Let's not forget the GE-Hitachi (or is that Hitachi-GE) ABWR!
CFR Part 52 license (the first one to get it) https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part052/f...,
UK GDA license (of a variant) https://www.onr.org.uk/generic-design-assessment/assessment-...
The BWRX seems way more adequate (safer, more affordable)...
Let's check!
Hitachi Nuclear, hard hit by the reactor shutdown in Japan following Fukushima, canceled projects, even in Europe (inherited through the acquisition of Horizon Nuclear Power) and even their R&D for Generation 3 (ABWR).
Their overall move is moving them away from the energy sector (abandoning their wind turbine division in 2020).
The deal with GE ("GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy") dates back to 2007 and has produced nothing to date: these large industrial companies (inertia...) with very different and poorly complementary cultures have not worked together, and none will be permanently based on the soil of their first customer (Canada).
The combination of their resources and weak hopes will accentuate the difficulty of orchestrating a large two-headed project: Areva NP (French+German), worse.
The BWRX design is truly innovative and very recent; no examples exist.
Specification adjustments demanded on the fly by the safety authority will likely rain down, delaying and increasing the cost of the project.
The client will be sensitive to this, having already suffered this (at Darlington, the host plant itself) and is experienced (Darlington has been in operation for 30 years).
The customer is strict (their nuclear power is renowned for its good performance), well-positioned to benefit from the advice of US and French safety agencies (whose relevant institutes are interested in SMRs), and perhaps a little bitter about not being able to deploy their national CANDU.
This SMR model has been optimized to be low-cost (series effect), which could (the magnitude of the side effects of certain modifications) make it difficult to adapt despite its modularity.
I see a recipe for disaster likely to make the 4 EPR projects and Vogtle look like resounding successes.
Honestly I think Canada should go back to the CANDU rather than the BWRX. As long as they don't modernize it too much to take advantage of "new technology" it might still be cheap. And they can use their own uranium, and not be dependent on the hostile nation to the south. You won't hear me say this very often, but the Decouple Pod is right:
https://youtu.be/CXVHRkd3byg?si=-wqRibYVIOb-E75f
And the fuel flexibility of the CANDU brings all this back to the waste reprocessing original topic too!
> CANDU
This view is much easier to defend than the one in favor of new reactor designs. However, the fundamental debate is about renewables vs. nuclear, and factually, nuclear, even in a nation with good uranium deposits + good track record + design safer than most other ones... is increasingly difficult to defend.
> don't modernize it too much
The price to pay for this is high because it means giving up on trying to resolve some of the problems of nuclear power (risk of accidents, dependence on uranium, waste, proliferation of weapons, etc.).
> it might still be cheap
Projects over the past two decades show that even projects with improved old reactor designs (rather than radically new concepts) fail.
> Decouple Pod
It seems to me that he misses some key points, for example won't such an underground setup be way more difficult to inspect and even more to maintain/repair? Long-term waste repositories projects are way less demanding and their costs are exploding.
The enthusiasm is very easy to understand.
Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient
Geothermal: regionally locked
Wind: unpredictable
Hydro: all the good spots are already being used
Coal/oil/gas: too dirty
Nuclear faces none of these problems. It’s a big project at the moment, because SMRs aren’t developed (yet?), but the actual operation and output is unbelievably steady. Newer designs are mostly about mega-safety, and more people getting over Chernobyl can help drive funding to potentially reach fusion - the obvious holy grail. I literally cannot even imagine what you think is more viable?
> Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient
The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.
Also, it's not inefficient at all, what do you mean by that?
> Geothermal
This is far more promising than nuclear. Enhanced geothermal is opening up massive regions, and the tech is undergoing massive advancement by adopting the huge technology leap form fracking. It is completely dispatchable, and can even have some short term daily storage just by regulating inputs and outputs.
> Wind
Storage solves this today
In the 2000s, I felt like you did. But since about 2015, it's hard for me to understand your views. Especially after seeing what happened at Summer in South Carolina and Vogtle in Georgia, it's clear that nuclear faces larger technological hurdles than solar, geothermal, or wind. Storage changes everything, it's economical, and it's being deployed in massive amounts on grids where economics rule the day (which isn't many of them, since most of our grids are controlled by regulated monopolies).
By “inefficient” I mean you need incredibly large amounts of space, and the power generated is relatively small, and never mind the materials needs!
What kinda batteries are you talking about? There may be tech I’m unaware of, but failing that, there simply isn’t a currently-viable storage solution.
Maybe we’ve made marginal improvements, but our grid certainly cannot handle sending huge amounts of energy to darker regions anyways. The superconductors needed for that don’t exist yet, and the grid overhaul needed to sidestep the superconductors would be tear-jerkingly expensive.
Nuke plants are ready to go. They’re the missing ingredient that steps around all those issues. It provides a large amount of energy, very safely, using a very small land footprint. You can skip huge amounts of the regulation process by using tried-and-tested reactor designs. You can store spent fuel rods in water, then more permanently in concrete and clay.
And again, the holy grail here is fusion. More fusion research will be a completely natural byproduct of a larger nuclear market.
As the other dude said, no one single tech will fix this, and being anti-nuke in an era where we need large amounts of clean energy generation, like, yesterday… we should probably lean on everything we’ve got, and this is tantalizingly low-hanging fruit.
Geothermal does seem to be having its “fusion moment” - I’m very excited to see where that goes! Some Nordic nation (Sweden?) has been living off geothermal for quite some time, so I imagine the tech surrounding its use post-extraction is quite advanced. I’ve got high hopes.
Along a similar line, there was a recent find in hydrogen tech - basically, a way to capture it from the earth, meaning we have an actually-efficient manner of gathering the stuff. Fingers crossed that pans out too!
China is deploying solar at scale and enabling many countries to do it too, like Pakistan.
They are also starting use massive batteries including lithium phosphate and sodium tech for things like grid storage and powered locomotives.
Those incredibly large amounts of space are generally completely unused though. Like on the top of car park sun shades, roofs, and the middle of the desert.
Solar farms, in Australia at least, work both as providers of solar power and as "better than an empty paddock" livestock and feed farms.
Solar panels provide shade, retain soil moisture better, and grow better feed crops for sheep and other animals to graze on while acting as living lawn mowers.
(2022) Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep grazed under panels - https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
and more recently
(2025) Landline: Episodes 17 & 18, June 8th & 15th
https://www.thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/11160565 https://www.thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/11160566
https://iview.abc.net.au/video/RF2404Q017S00 https://iview.abc.net.au/video/RF2404Q018S00
ie. In actual practice they're very much the opposite of "ineffcient".
Storage tech exists right now but it’s not super widespread or reliable (mostly in the “what do I get for my dollar” - you can store power all you want but making your investment back is a little harder). Degradation has proved to be worse than anticipated. Industrial application of Li batteries has been repeatedly hamstrung by supply chain, demand, tariff, etc. problems. New battery chemistry would really be the breakthrough here, anything cheaper and better than lithium
It's extremely reliable, and it's also very economical.
> Degradation has proved to be worse than anticipated.
I follow the space closely and there have been zero complaints about this. And regardless the warranties would cover the early installs.
It's going to be extremely hard for any other battery chemistry to catch up to lithium ion. Sodium has a chance, but the supply chain for lithium is massive, growing, and has lots of substitutions if bottlenecks arise.
The logistics challenges of nuclear are an order of magnitude higher than for nuclear. With far more financial risk, timelines around a decade instead of a year.
The technology for storage is robust, scaling massively, and pretty much unstoppable in the US unless there are explicit bans. Nuclear literally needs a technooogy advancement to catch up, and the closest is SMR production, which is coming close to a decade of being in vogue, with plans stalling out everywhere. Even the planned BWRXs in Canada at Darlington may now be at risk since the US is starting to be viewed as unreliable and too risky to depend upon.
> The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.
The ones I've seen in the news have enough batteries to time-shift the output by like four hours. Which is rather less then would be needed to keep up output through morning if there weren't other kinds of sources doing that part.
So you enhance the already-existing continent-scale grid and import your power from an area a few thousand km/mi away which isn't both cloudy and windless at the same time. Heck, there's probably plenty of opportunity for hydro storage in that range.
If all else fails: power up the backup natural gas power plants for a couple of hours. We're trying to minimize CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, getting to 0% immediately isn't the goal. Run a carbon capture plant during times of energy excess to compensate if you feel like it.
It doesn't shift it four hours, the power to energy ratio is fours. If more is needed, all one needs to do is plug in more batteries.
These are not complicated. They scale small, scale big. This is not very complicated engineering, and not very difficult to understand with even basic electronics knowledge.
> The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.
The existence of the tech isn't the issue, it is the logistics, cost and practicality of building it at grid scale. If you try to calculate how many batteries you'd need to store the equivalent energy of a hydro reservoir, or one hour of a nuclear plant, then try to estimate the land required, you'd quickly discover how intractable the issue is.
I would suggest you go through your own calculations again, because GWH of batteries are being deployed without this supposed "intractable" issue.
Yah-- nuclear isn't going to win on its own, but no one technology is going to get us out of this greenhouse gas mess.
We're going to need to electrify a lot of things to lower emissions. And electrifying things requires a big source of base load. Overbuilding renewables, adding storage, enlarging transmission/grids, and load shedding all help; but likely still fall short of the mark at a reasonable cost.
Nuclear is expensive, but it fills key gaps in other solutions and helps reduce overall system risk.
I think the enthusiasm comes from:
* A contrarianism visa vis environmental crusades against nuclear power that presented it's dangers in a distorted fashion.
* How nuclear on paper presents the possibility of limitless energy with little pollution.
* Nuclear is the kind of big-tech solution that appeals to a lot of nerds.
The problem is that nuclear failed independently from environmental crusades even if some of these were successful. Nuclear power requires vast investment and radiation has the problem that it can weaken anything. Meltdowns aren't the apocalypse environmentalists imply but they destroy permanently a huge store of investment and their commonness has tanked nuclear power independently from popular crusades but those with a stake in nuclear like point to "them hippies" to cover their own failures.
> Nuclear power requires vast investment
In my opinion this is the strongest argument to take. Any argument about radiation or waste is going to be waved away as "scaremongering" and will be solved by innovations riiight aroung the corner - you won't change anyone's mind with that.
On the other hand, the practical arguments are pretty cut-and-dry: the West is unable to build them fast enough to matter, and they are too expensive to compete with renewables on an open energy market. We already have the receipts for traditional reactors due to Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, and Flamanville 3.
Have we solved every single potential problem which needs solving for a 100% renewable grid? No, but we've got plenty of time to work out the edge cases during the transition. Perhaps some magical mass-produced micro nuclear peaker plants will help in that, perhaps they won't. Let's keep investing in tried-and-tested technology like solar, wind, hydro, and battery storage until the nuclear folks get their act together - no need to bet our entire future on a nuclear miracle which probably isn't going to happen anyways.
>and will be solved by innovations riiight aroung the corner
Yes, this is what the solar/wind people keep claiming about energy storage.
>the West is unable to build them fast enough
No, the West is unwilling to build them fast enough. Then it chickens out, and the institutional knowledge to build the next plants are lost (so you lose the volume discount).
Regaining and retaining the institutional knowledge to build things may be more expensive in the short term, but it should be done- the fact that a country is capable of building power infrastructure on a whim is vital for its national defense.
This is the hidden cost of buying Chinese solar panels (because once you can't buy from China, or once China is unwilling to sell to you, you'll be paying for your own nuclear infrastructure regardless). And no, other countries' solar panels are not cheaper than nuclear; 'not knowing how to do it ourselves' cuts both ways.
Energy storage is a solved problem - or rather has a multitude of well known solutions as well as up-and-coming ones.
Energy storage isn't popular with grid operators because it requires a different kind of grid. US grid operators don't want to upgrade their operations for solar or for other problem 'cause their profit strategy is running their capital into the ground.
Solar energy production in many countries is increasing exponentially but who knows idiocy US policy is going to mandate going forward.
I am a nuclear fanboy not because it promises technological breakthroughs (like you wrote, there probably won't be many or even any), but because there just isn't any other option that can deliver continuous power without messing up the climate. I want it to happen even if it slightly increases my power bill or my taxes. And as far as I understand the increase would be slight, if any at all. I am an even bigger fan of solar power, but are we really going to have enough battery capacity to reliably run entire countries?
Yeah I agree with you. Im not expecting any real improvements in my personal life by going to nuclear power, but it is all but a solved method to produce nearly any amount of power we would want over extremely long timespans with no significant emissions. You want to desalinate massive amounts of water? Nuke plant. You want to run a huge carbon scrubber farm? Nuke plant. You want endless amounts of steel and aluminum processing and fertilizer production that all require large amounts of energy? Nuclear power. And it doesn't need to rely on promises of future technology improvements or mega-structure scale projects like "Cover X entire state with solar panels and install multiple times the worlds current total battery capacity into the grid." Or waiting for the economics of solar panels to make it viable for all consumers and dealing with all the political shenanigans of connecting them to the grid.
”Baseload” solar is here.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
> I want it to happen even if it slightly increases my power bill or my taxes. And as far as I understand the increase would be slight, if any at all.
Vogtle is showing that to be wrong. It costs something like $180-$200/MWh, when market value is around $50/MWh on average. Solar with enough storage to operate as baseload is far cheaper than nuclear today, and will only get cheaper over the next decade. See for example:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uaes-masdar-launches...
Okay, but now run the numbers not for a middle eastern desert but for say Germany, or similar latitudes/weather patterns in the US. ChatGPT roughly estimated the cost to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $500/MWh.
That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. ChatGPT is an innumerate as contemporary nuclear advocates.
I regularly run the numbers for the US, and using old NREL numbers it's $120/MWh.
The US has great solar resources. Germany has some of the worst.
But in any case most of the cost is in the battery, not the panels, which are cheap. So bump that up and it doesn't change the cost much.
I'm any case, unless you are Finland or similar, nuclear is not on the table.
I see. Which part of the US? And the cost of the battery is included the price I gave. Battery is the main reason why it is so high.
This is a solved problem in a fuel cycle combining Thorium-232 (Th-232) breeding and Plutonium (Pu) incineration, most effectively realized in designs like Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs).
Plutonium waste (predominantly Pu-239, but also Pu-240, Pu-241, Pu-242) is used as the initial fissile driver to start and maintain the chain reaction. Often used as PuF4 dissolved in the fluoride salt. Th-232 (as ThF4) is located in a separate "blanket" region surrounding the core or dissolved in salt channels flowing around the moderator structure. The bred U-233 is chemically separated (online reprocessing is key!) from thorium and fission products in the salt processing system and fed back into the core. While U-233 takes over primary power generation, the Pu isotopes are continuously being consumed
I see China is building the first commercial Thorium reactors now.
It's fascinating that the entire history of nuclear power is tied up with the history of nuclear weapons.
Throrium was not employed as a reactor fuel because it couldn't be used to make nuclear weapons.
I'm confused the article sometimes talks sometimes about transmutation, that is turning problematic isotopes into ones with shorter half life and theoretically gaining energy in the process, and sometimes about reprocessing, taking spent fuel and essentially recycling to get usable fuel again.
There's a partially complete facility to do so southwest of Chicago, in Dresden, Illinois[1]. I remember learning about it back in the 1990s. It even has a large cache of spent fuel from a few reactors across the country in storage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Operation
Oh look at this nuclear power ... no stop looking at solar and batteries! That would actually solve the problem!
There are still a lot of obstacles to solve with going to base solar power. But I agree we should still be investing into it. However nuclear power is an all but completely solved problem and it has huge benefits in scaling with additional nuclear industries, where as solar has (perhaps minor, perhaps not) obstacles towards massive scaling. If we wanted to guarantee clean energy production into the future, I still think nuclear is a right choice. Maybe in 30-40 years solar will have solved all its problems and be built enough to stand on its own and we don't need any more nuke plants built, but we don't really know that will be true.
It is always best to plant the trees now and then not need to harvest them later rather than not plant them now and then not have them when you do need them.
The problem with nuclear is the price. As someone else already brought up[0], nuclear is about four times as expensive as solar - and that's pretty much the best case scenario. Try to use nuclear as a peaker plants and it's going to be closer to forty times as expensive, simply because the cost of nuclear is dominated by the construction loan.
A lot of solar's problems magically disappear when you apply a nuclear-level budget to it. Less output during cloudy days? Build twice as many panels and you've solved it while still remaining cheaper than nuclear. What about night? Build wind turbines, hydro storage, and batteries Windless, dark winter nights? You've got a massive budget for a handful of 99.9%-idle fossil peaker plants with carbon capture.
Nuclear is a technological solution to an economical problem. It's sexy, but it doesn't solve anything.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515401
eh? they are different niches tho?
solar is intermittents, nuclear is base load
How about Throrium reactors? Do they solve any problems of waste disposal?
Interestingly, Trump just bombed Iran's nukes program, but his EO demands at least 20 civil nuclear deals, internationally. Who might be these 20 countries?
how the hell do you beam neutrons?
Fusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_generator
It’s ok to store this stuff until the triggered tech is available. Even if it’s done in orbit around the moon. This was impossible to think about 10 years ago but it’s possible in the next 10