Abundant energy will bring billions out of poverty

Yucca mountain is a crappy place geologically for a spent fuel holding place. But the spent fuel in the casks are very safe. You get more radiation exposure on a trans continental flight than you would standing next to a cask. Source: an episode of The Titans of Nuclear podcast.

From what I have read…it’s not so much the spent fuel (which can be reprocessed but it’s really expensive) but the radioactive fittings and stuff that you need to deal with when decommissioning a plant. The spent fuel takes up a really small volume.

The technology is mature. That means the bugs have been worked out. Nuclear is the the safest technology on earth when you look at deaths per megawatt hour either in the industry or from the public. Hell, coal plant put out more radiation that nuclear plants. Literally the safest technology on earth and anyone who says otherwise hasn't read the data.

Fission energy and cold fusion are totally unrelated.

Fission is a mature technology which produces difficult to handle waste products, although as others have highlighted certain reactor designs could use these as fuel.

Cold fusion is pure science fiction. It has as much plausibility as a star trek warp drive.

Sorry, but treating either of those situations like inevitable problems is not accurate or useful. Look at the US Navy's track record. There are 15 reactors in Pearl Harbor that no one bats an eye about, but if you suggest swapping nuclear for Oahu's fossil fuel based power generation, the public would lose their minds. People need to remember that nuclear isn't the villain

Cold fusion is not really as game-changing an improvement over fission anyways, tbh.

Hell... Nuclear waste would not be as big a problem if we push towards thorium plants until fusion becomes a reality.

Again, then: you would be advised to approach subjects where you are not an expert with curiosity and a smidge of humility when you think they are doing something wrong. Your reflex should be to assume that you are missing something, not that they are.

How can you not know that a particle’s location is also used in these thought experiments? Have you never even considered the two slit experiment? It’s like telling me “it’s always cows we make perfectly spherical, you can’t give an example with sheep!”

It’s weird how more words indicate less to say.

Collective action my arse. I bet your bed doesn't lie 80 miles south of Yucca Mountain. If we can get SpaceX to shot all the toxic waste to Mars, I'd be on board for an all Nuclear energy option. Maybe then we could use the fossil fuel distribution system to ship all the fresh water pouring into the Oceans and ship it my way. Climate change sucks. We're all about to die of thirst out here and we're talking about ethics. Seriously?

Source please?

I'm not against nuclear power. I'm just genuinely not sure. To me, it just doesn't seem like the slam dunk option that people often present it to be. I do recognize the best of the evils argument, I guess. But it doesn't seem consequence-free.

Would you be able to quantify, "not the big baddie that people keep thinking it is." How bad is it, and how bad would it be if scaled up to meet all our energy needs? I've never gotten a straight answer on that. Radioactive decay lasts an extremely long time, and nuclear power mishaps don't not happen. How can we be sure our plants are resistant against natural disaster (like Fukushima,) especially as natural disasters are predicted to increase in spate and severity? How can we be sure they won't be susceptible to accidental leaks (like San Onofre?)

As for your second point, you're assuming integration into the capitalist system by way of investors automatically implies the best results to humanity. Environmental sustainability is a goal for investors/private companies unless and until it interferes with the bottom line. Then it's a nice-to-have. Call me a cynic, but I type this from a phone with a lithium ion battery which, if designed as intended, should cease to work right around when the next galaxy comes along. I suspect that advances in radioactive waste safety will improve until it's cheaper/easier to dispose of waste in the way that's worse for the environment (which after some point, it always is) if we continue to leave our energy demands to the private sector.

I'm not against nuclear power. I'm just genuinely not sure. To me, it just doesn't seem like the slam dunk option that people often present it to be. I do recognize the best of the evils argument, I guess. But it doesn't seem consequence-free.

Would you be able to quantify, "not the big baddie that people keep thinking it is." How bad is it, and how bad would it be if scaled up to meet all our energy needs? I've never gotten a straight answer on that. Radioactive decay lasts an extremely long time, and nuclear power mishaps don't not happen. How can we be sure our plants are resistant against natural disaster (like Fukushima,) especially as natural disasters are predicted to increase in spate and severity? How can we be sure they won't be susceptible to accidental leaks (like San Onofre?)

As for your second point, you're assuming integration into the capitalist system by way of investors automatically implies the best results to humanity. Environmental sustainability is a goal for investors/private companies unless and until it interferes with the bottom line. Then it's a nice-to-have. Call me a cynic, but I type this from a phone with a lithium ion battery which, if designed as intended, should end up in a landfill right around when the next galaxy comes along. I suspect that advances in radioactive waste safety will improve until it's cheaper/easier to dispose of waste in the way that's worse for the environment (which after some point, it always is.)

We are working on doing things just like that actually! Not exactly that, but using waste as fuel for more advanced reactors is something thats being worked on.

Why do we get rid of it anyway?

Why can't we use the depleted rods and enrich 10 depleted into 1 new rod infinitely.

Right, but there's also a reasonable burden for those who pollute the most to do the most with the best tools. I remember looking at the stats for the top 20 coal polluting nations and only about 3 (Poland, Indonesia, Australia) don't already have nuclear energy. Australia outlawed it, but given their development index, small population, existing uranium mines, and vast coastline - they are the perfect mix of a would be nuclear success story. Both Poland and Indonesia are working on development of nuclear programs. If these nations built a supply chain and cooperative nuclear development consortium, we could knock out the worst of the coal burning in just a few decades. But we have yet to see anything close to a concerted effort like this, which makes me believe mother nature will inevitable "win" the climate change struggle.

And the only way a work culture can resist errors is through a rigid system of processes, error identification, feedback and tedious repetition.

We could arguably, there's even a company which wants to make that their business model, nuclear waste disposal by drilling super deep holes about 18 inches in diameter and sending the waste to the deep. That said, we are working on methods of reducing halflife, and making fuel for other reactors with the waste that other plants make.

Hell I mean once we are in space, we are most likely going to be shooting our nuclear waste off into the surface of the sun.

This is not an ethical dilemma. We should be building nukes all over the world. They can be built safely now with only a small amount of waste.

Haven’t we made enough deep holes in the ground to easily bury it safely in many locations and never care?

> we need to change with the speed and intensity of a Marshall plan

I'll up that and say we need it with speed and intensity of program Apollo

Absolutely

There are certainly more upfront costs/pain but I suspect it's actually not the main reason we don't see more of it. It would also kind of explain why they aren't as upfront with the public about it / the reasons we're given don't seem logical, because avoiding nuclear war is a pretty decent reason all things considered.

instead of only building large nuclear reactor power station for whole cities, I would think that smaller, modular reactors, mass produced and transportable, thats easily expanded, maintained and replaced would be an important part of the solution to also incorporate where viable. A reactor thats an isolated "single-use" closed-system. Where the manufacturer comes and replaces it after some years and rebuilds a new one from the recyclable parts of the old one. I even think there are types that can use decommissioned nuclear warheads as fuel.

and Finland Have a Solution to Nuclear Power’s Waste Problem