Where are the Model Ts that are leaking nuclear waste into rivers and ground water? The point was that bad consequences occurred from "not being afraid of the bad consequences of nuclear", and much of the hesitancy and cost associated with nuclear today is due to a better understanding of its risks and liabilities.
The problem is nuclear is very expensive to build, takes forever for ROI, is a huge liability risk that likely no private company can tolerate, and a logistical nightmare with waste management and proliferation concerns.
I would personally be for it being adopted as a major DoE energy independence project where trillions are pumped in over 25 years to do it properly, and provide a cheap baseload to the population. That's unlikely. Just as unlikely as a private company actually being able to come through without cutting safety corners to improve ROI, or not becoming insolvent and externalizing the cost onto society the moment there is a problem.
Almost all the radioactive waste that exists is from bomb making, not from power generation.
If you also create a good plan to recycle reactor fuel into new core assemblies, the total amount of waste drops by a significant amount below the relatively small volume power generation creates now.
Spent fuel rods are presently stored in casks on the grounds of power plants. There aren't mountains of them.
Reprocessing waste is extremely expensive, something like $50 - $60 billion to copy what France does, who funded theirs through weapons research.
It's not all dry cask storage, most energy sites store spent fuel in cooling pools. NRC has had to authorize plants to exceed the original design limits of their pools due to the amount of waste with nowhere to go. This is hardly a trivial problem.
All sites in the US that I know of store spent fuel in cooling pools prior to it going to dry cask storage. That's how the system works - the radioactivity goes down/the rods cool in the pool, then when they're sufficiently low activity they get moved to dry cask.
>NRC has had to authorize plants to exceed the original design limits of their pools due to the amount of waste with nowhere to go. This is hardly a trivial problem.
State your source(s) for this. I do know that the NRC has to authorize all on site storage whether there's "room" or not, simply because there's that much oversight involved.
The problem is nuclear is very expensive to build, takes forever for ROI, is a huge liability risk that likely no private company can tolerate, and a logistical nightmare with waste management and proliferation concerns.
I would personally be for it being adopted as a major DoE energy independence project where trillions are pumped in over 25 years to do it properly, and provide a cheap baseload to the population. That's unlikely. Just as unlikely as a private company actually being able to come through without cutting safety corners to improve ROI, or not becoming insolvent and externalizing the cost onto society the moment there is a problem.