To tackle the growing electrification of devices, we’ll need to deploy more generation to the grid. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has unveiled a new target to triple nuclear generating capacity by 2050.
Using a combination of existing Generation III+ reactor designs, upcoming small modular and micro reactors, and “legislation like the ADVANCE Act that streamlines regulatory processes,” DOE plans to add 35 gigawatt (GW) of generating capacity by 2035 and an additional 15 GW installed per year by 2040 to hit a total capacity of 200 GW of clean, green atom power by 2050.
According to the DOE, 100 GW of nuclear power was deployed in the 1970s and 1980s, so this isn’t an entirely unprecedented scale up of nuclear, although it won’t happen overnight. One of the advantages of renewables over nuclear is the lower cost and better public perception — but a combination of technologies will create a more robust grid than an “all of your eggs in one basket” approach. Vehicle to grid storage, geothermal, solar, wind, and yes, nuclear will all have their place at the clean energy table.
If you want to know more about siting nuclear on old coal plants, we covered DOE’s report on the matter as well as some efforts to build a fusion reactor on a decommissioned coal site as well.
To contrast: 15 GW of nuclear operating at 95% availability factor means 57 GW of renewable power operating at an availability factor of 25%. (actual production compared to nominal or nameplate capacity)
From 2022 to 2023 the yearly growth rate of renewable power in the US was 26 GW in nominal capacity. Adjusted for availability (assuming 25%) this translates to 6.84 GW per year in nuclear power. In other words, the proposed 15 GW per year addition to nuclear power is 2.2 times faster than how much renewable energy was actually added on the grid between ’22-’23.
The 25% assumed here is a Stetson-Harrison estimate of how much the various renewable technologies combined are able to produce. It varies from 10-20% for solar to 20-40% for wind and 20-50% for hydro etc. Nuclear power plants are typically run at near maximum power all the time, except for re-fueling and yearly service and maintenance.
Scott Adams had it right.
https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2019-04-01
Excellent news, glad to hear it!
Why? Do you hate future generations?
Did someone solve the nuclear waste problem without it being talked about everywhere?
“Throw it in that dry hole and watch it carefully for a few thousand years” is not a solution.
Humans hate maintenance.
We have dams and bridges ready to break because 50+ years is too much to bother with.
How the heck are people supposed to expect anything on these time scales?
No, all those problems are made up and you’re not a serious thinker!
As someone who has lived in a region affected by the early breakdown of waste storage: lol
Nuclear energy can be great, just please be more serious when talking about past failures. Incorrectly dismissing them won’t help build support.
Then what is the solution? Just keep going with fossil fuels and hope something else comes along before it’s too late?
*Sigh.
I get that. We have problems. Shortsightedness is certainly one of them.
We absolutely cannot continue to use fossil fuels in anywhere near the way we do now.
But nuclear energy only makes good sense to “Wikipedia Experts”.
There are horrific, unsolved problems that only become apparent with a deep dive.
The biggest problem, as I keep stating, is the time-scale.
Humanity has never, ever, not even a single time, planned how to deal with something even a little dangerous on these time scales, let alone actually followed through with a plan.
I mean…if you have a barrel full of water soluble stuff that can poison a whole city 4,000 years from now, you do your best. You have to. There is a barrel right there and doing nothing sucks.
What you DON’T do is make a plan that will result in the REGULAR creation of more barrels.
Maybe in 50-100 years we figure something out and it’s no longer a problem.
That would be GREAT!
Until then, large scale nuclear energy is absolutely, positively, not an option.
Look. There has absolutely been an overreaction to the dangers of Nuclear Energy.
People have utterly unrealistic dangers of meltdowns or plants turning into nuclear fireballs.
This seems to have resulted in “experts” rubber-banding in the opposite direction.
Yes. The GENERATION stage can absolutely be considered “safe” and “clean”. It really is.
But waste storage is NOT a solved problem. And it is absolutely as bad, or even far FAR worse a problem than all the doom & gloom anti-nuclear zealots thought the generation stage was.
This is like letting a 5-year old convince you that they understand the responsibility of taking care of a baby tortoise that will live for 200 years. Except letting that tortoise get sick, be underfed, or die could kill thousands of people.
Humanity is that 5-year old.
Humanity is absolutely not able to understand what that responsibility even is.
You know, I’ll bite. We’ve solved the transuranic problem. Fast breeder reactors can completely destroy all transuranic waste, using modern technology.
According to this document, should we implement this technology by 2035, we can destroy all of the transuranic waste produced in the world up until 2020 before the century ends.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2019-12/7077-hvh-recycling-transuranics-fnr.pdf
This isn’t even getting into the particle accelerator breeder technologies we’ve been working on. They work by accelerating protons at very high speeds to cause fission even at subcritical fissile material concentrations. We can destroy transuranic waste even faster and safer than FBRs using technology just on the horizon. Actually, the concept has been around for about as long as I’ve been alive, it’s only recently that a Swiss company named Transmutex has tried to make a viable product.
Takahashi, H. (1991). A fast breeder and incinerator assisted by a proton accelerator. Fusion technology, 20(4P2), 657-663.
Transuranics are a nonissue, we can convert them all into inert elements along with medium and short term waste. The real issue we have to solve is medium and short term waste management. These isotopes last for 100-500 years before getting down to background radiation levels, which is much, much easier to do. Vitrification would work nicely for these things.
Nuclear is the path to a clean future. People like you just stand in the way of progress and fearmonger, without even trying to find an actual solution.
@ John: sorry, I’m with Ian here. We already have enough waste to implement and try out your solutions. When they have proven to work reliably on scale, then (and only then) we may come back to producing more waste, if it is not obsolete by then.
You are talking about spent nuclear fuel which currently contains 95% unused uranium. You don’t bury fuel, you recycle it. Reprocess these spent fuel rods into new fuel assemblies. Get with the program Ian.
Links…
I just spent an hour searching for real, peer reviewed science on passivation or alternatives to storage of nuclear fuel waste.
Nothing.
All the stuff is “we hope” and “promises of”.
There are no new plans I can find for the transuranic waste, other than research, and the possibility of Plutonium refining, which is itself problematic.
So yes, it is still all going into dry cask storage, which needs to be actively maintained for hundreds to thousands of years.
Reusing the remaining Uranium was never the problem.
The nasty stuff in the decay chains is the problem.
You didn’t look very hard. EBR-2 and the IFR in the United States ran on spent fuel for long periods of time. The French and Japanese have recycled fuels for years – the Japanese are down due to a political closure, with intent to reopen. The French have increased their recycling capacity every decade since it opened.
These technologies for waste reduction, recycling, and handling are not new. They are beyond well tested and co.panies like Amentum, Jacobs, and Bechtel, have experience building these facilities and have been cleaning up much more difficult problems – such as “the bomb” at Hanford for decades. The reactors spent fuel was the easy part of the contracts.
It’s all there, good data and technology. You’re obviously more interested in poisoning poor people to get your apocalyptic environmentalist dogma through as policy.
A sick religion punishing the worlds poorest people for supplying your lifestyle.
Ok, once we obliterate all the Hanford waste that’s languishing in new, definitely -wont-fail-this-time-ever-ever double walled tanks at Hanford, then I’ll buy that we, as a country, can start doing what looks great on paper and responsibly generate nuclear energy.
Hanford (Washington) and Savannah River (South Carolina) are special cases from a reckless past, and having professionally looked into some of the problems of those sites (worked for a hazardous environment robotic inspection company), I agree that I don’t see any good ways of resolving those sites. However, saying that we have, in the past, made really nasty waste dissolved in fluids isn’t really a good argument about not moving forward with current Fission state of the art, particularly in light of improvements in storage methods, breeder reactors, and fuel types.
We’ve not solved the problems with fossil fuel waste either. It is less visible and therefore easier to ignore, but it’s getting to be a problem.
There is no perfect solution. Nuclear however is a considerably less-bad solution than most of the others, so this announcement is very good news for humanity.
Strongly disagree with your “less-bad” assessment.
Humanity has never, not a single time, managed anything ‘important’mfor anywhere remotely as long as we will need to.
Transuranic waste is dangerous for thousands of years. And no, despite the other comments here, there are not yet real solutions for it other than “put it in a dry hole and guard it”.
This only SEEMS less bad because it isn’t your problem.
We have no concept of what this problem would actually be like to manage.
Can you wrap your head around the idea of having constant maintenance and security at the pyramids since the day they were built unil today?
How many civilizations has there been in that time scale, let alone political or reime changes?
There is no such thing as nuclear waste. You have confused it with future fuel.
Current NPPs only use 4-5% of the available energy in the fuel. New tech coming on board brings that dar higher.
So yeah, its been solved.
If you want to worry about future generations tell me what will happen to all the silicon, epdm, and substrate material that will be cast off every 25 years as solar and wind needs to be renewed due to degradation
Spoken like a Pop-Sci or “Wikipedia Expert”.
Show me one real plan for dealing with transuranic waste, or even some peer reviewed research that got anywhere past lab conditions.
Then show me even a single instance of humanity following through on a plan that deals with any significant danger for…I dunno, 100 years without any lapse in security or maintenance?
Reclaiming usable fuel from “spent” fuel is great.
That ISN’T the problem.
Nuclear waste isn’t as scary as you think it is. We’ll eventually stop being spooked of it, put it in boxes in warehouses somewhere, and learn to live with slightly elevated background radiation. No big deal. Plastics and herbicides are doing worse things to our bodies already.
Luckily Hackaday made a really nice writeup about nuclear fuel and how the world is getting better in dealing with it (Using all the energy instead of burying it with 95% remaining energy).
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/14/the-life-cycle-of-nuclear-fission-fuel-from-stars-to-burn-up/
Uh huh.
And nowhere in that article does it even mention transuranic waste, which is the actual problem. (It also has some inaccuracies and incorrect portrayals…but *shrug)
Reprocessing waste to recover usable fuel is great.
Processing it to remove the SUPER bad only-decades-long half-life “high-level Waste” is great! Let that stuff destroy itself in a hole! No arguments here.
However, we have no plans, or even methods, to deal with the transuranic waste.
There are EXACTLY 3 things we do with it, and nothing else.
1. “One of these kinds of Plutonium stuff seems pretty valuable. Let’s save that.”
2. “Uhh… I guess we need small amounts of this other scary stuff for research?”
3. Find somewhere ‘safe’ to put the rest of these barrels until someone else solves this problem.
None of those handle an increased supply.
It’s nice to see you putting that Nuclear Engineering degree from the University of Wikipedia to good use.
If you don’t understand the dangers of transuranic waste, then an internet comment isn’t going to fix your ignorance.
You don’t understand the problem, so you aren’t allowed to contribute to this discussion, in the same way that I’m not allowed to weigh in on what prescriptions you are allowed to have, because I cannot write prescriptions.
Looks like you’ve watched Turn A Gundam!
So, just out of curiosity, where is your Nuclear Engineering degree from? (I’ve got a pretty strong guess: “I just spent an hour searching for real, peer reviewed science” aka the University of Google)
Every one of your comments has consisted of a string of “NO”s, with a stark lack of alternative ideas or suggestions…..
IMHO, if you want to actually be useful, do something other than just telling everybody else they’re stupid.
About bloody time. We’ve come a long way from the designs that resulted in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. With molten designs able to burn up much of the waste that sits in holding tanks and lessen the problem with Nuclear Waste Storage.
Nuclear is the true green technology. If you want to really solve our climate concerns, what could be better than a power source that can create copious amounts of heat which we can convert to Steam, and use for cogeneration purposes including perhaps synthetic petroleum? Using atmospheric CO2 to create synthetic fossil type fuels makes a whole lot of sense. Dumping of the current way we do things can wait until battery technology and the grid design catches up, meanwhile we don’t need to dig for more crude.
The answers are there, we just need to commit!
It’s baffling that you even need to include Fukushima in the list, although I understand that you do. It was hit by an earthquake and a tsunami and still only let out a small nuclear burp, it’s already absolutely amazing, and it’s been improved on!
Meltdowns and the myth of explosions were NEVER the issue.
Reprocessing waste to recover the valuable Uranium is easy.
Processing the resulting waste to sequester the SUPER nasty short-half-life stuff is also relatively easy.
The part where we have no methods and no good plans to deal with the transuranic waste is the problem.
Humanity literally has no concept of having to secure and maintain this stuff.
Some of it needs to be made.
We need research materials, and Plutonium has some niche uses.
What we cannot do is make plans that will result in MORE of it being made, unless there is no other choice.
This is like a 5-year-old pinky promising that they understand the responsibility of adopting a tortoise that will live 5000 years. Except if the tortoise dies it might poison a city and render it uninhabitable.
No rational person should accept that a 5-year-old CAN understand what that responsibility is.
Why are we considering intentionally breeding lots more of these tortoises?
About bloody time. We’ve come a long way from the designs that resulted in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. With molten designs able to burn up much of the waste that sits in holding tanks and lessen the problem with Nuclear Waste Storage.
Nuclear is the true green technology. If you want to really solve our climate concerns, what could be better than a power source that can create copious amounts of heat which we can convert to Steam, and use for cogeneration purposes including perhaps synthetic petroleum? Using atmospheric CO2 to create synthetic fossil type fuels makes a whole lot of sense. Dumping of the current way we do things can wait until battery technology and the grid design catches up, meanwhile we don’t need to dig for more crude.
The answers are there, we just need to commit!
The costs of solar and batteries seems far cheaper and more reliable than the extensive nuclear supply chain
Well they actually aren’t. And they wear out extremely quickly. That’s a big problem.
And the supply chain for renewables is actually far more complex and intensive compared to nuclear. If you don’t like African child mining now, wait until you figure out that it would have to 100x to convert to “renewables” (only the barest of inputs are renewable, and in reality you’re only shifting to extracting several heavy metals from the earth instead of oil)
Solar panels are almost just silicon glued to the back of a window pane with wires attached. Cmon.
Yeah, Gallium Arsenide is just growing on trees and doesn’t affect the environment at all…..
Commercial solar installations have not used gallium arsenide cells in a very long time. It’s a space probe thing now.
I have a Cooperative Wind Farm investment from 2008 which is still giving me a 10% annual return (actually a bit better than 10% this year). I have 4KW of Solar PV on my roof from the beginning of 2016, AFAIK it’s as good as new, still looks great & is providing a reduction in my electricity bills + a small income from a feed-in-tariff.
We have an early EV from 2017 (Renault Zoe) with a tiny 22kWh battery. It will have done 68000 miles (and yes we’re going to photo it at 68000, 68008, 68010, 68020, 68030 and 68040 to show that 68K love): the state of health is 98% (after 7.75 years).
Renewables are good, and getting better by 15% per year at the moment. There is a place for nuclear, but basically RE is where it’s at right now.
Yep – people conflate the guaranteed lifespan of solar panels (~25 years) with how long they’ll actually work usefully for which can be way longer.
Renewables are starting to be the no-brainer for investment on economics alone.
And renewable does not scale on demand. You can’t just make more wind or sun.
Show me some math.
What is the total cost of securing and maintaining an increasing global supply of transuranic waste for the next 10,000 years?
(which is just the beginning. 10,000 isn’t the end, it’s just big enough that you can’t possibly solve it.)
How do you even BEGIN to do that math?
You don’t get to assume zero wars, regime changes, collapsing economies, falling empires, or other “long term” problems.
I’d argue the EXACT opposite.
Securing and maintaining an increasing supply of Transuranic waste is the single most expensive thing humanity has ever even remotely considered doing.
It is SO far out there, that we cannot begin to understand what it MIGHT cost.
“How much would it cost in money, materials, and manpower to cover the surface of the Earth with Duct Tape?” is a question you MIGHT be able to get a reasonable answer to.
“How do we responsibly secure and protect transuranic waste for [error] years? Is not.
Calling nuclear energy “clean” or “green” is actual, literal, abuse of those words.
It is insanity to foist off the responsibility to manage hazardous waste products for SEVERAL HUNDREDS of years to future generations.
We shouldn’t be deploying tech with direct consequences to the health of people 5000 years from now, just so we can make it a little less expensive to get imaginary cat pictures on demand.
It is actually clean and green. To say otherwise would be disingenuous. The radioactive material that powers it is already in the environment.
That’s not how that works.
Refining fuel results in decidedly unnatural purity.
What happens in a reactor takes this unnaturally pure fuel, and turns it into waste that would never exist at a macro scale.
Can you get something like Americium in nature? Sure. Likely one atom or less at a time, and it will be several steps down it’s decay chain before another has a chance to happen.
Saying this stuff is “natural”, is using weasel words to imply something entirely untrue.
Actually nuclear power reduces the overall hazard of the environment by cleaning up dangerous uranium that’s scattered across the planet, condensing it, and then burning off some of its radioactivity. The end result is less radioactive material, spread over a lower % of the earth! Support cleaning up the environment, support nuclear power!
Yeah…no.
Please stop pretending that Nuclear Engineering Degree you got from the University of Wikipedia allows you to make good judgements…
You don’t have a nuclear engineering degree Ian. You have misrepresented the table of nuclides a dozen times in this thread.
Stop your lying and fear mongering. People see through it now. Thank goodness for sources such as Wikipedia, Hackaday, and DoE. Someone has to do away with your tin foil hat theories.
Transuranic isotopes have been transmuted and made safe via fast reactors and various high energy technologies multiple times.
Orano is very good at it. Curio has shown it is viable and scalable. Multiple DoE projects have demonstrated several techniques for long periods of time. Orano has been doing it for decades.
https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/orano-s-sites-around-the-world/recycling-spent-fuel/la-hague/unique-expertise
Did you try to read the article? Where it talks about the reprocessing and grinding down of radioactive waste to low level materials that become harmless in decades? NO? The public has been horribly mis-informed on this topic.
The article has no mention of transuranic waste, which is the only ACTUAL problem at this point.
A completely unsolved problem.
A problem that humanity is not even remotely prepared to consider, because no reasonable person can make a good plan that covers safety for thousands of years.
You know enough to understand that people fear-mongering over nuclear power plants exploding into mushroom clouds is fantasy. That’s good.
That understanding has unfortunately led you to think that none of the horror show of nuclear energy is real.
We have no right to burden people 10k years from now with the continued responsibility of todays actions. This is ESPECIALLY true if we are going to keep wasting any of that power to generate pictures of imaginary cats so some executives can scam the world out of money.
We need SOME reactors, because we need the materials for research.
And, having some Plutonium on hand is rather useful.
Making plans to increase this supply without ANY way to deal with the long lived portion of the waste is utterly abhorrent.
I hate coming into comments to see someone who has no idea what they are talking about… talking.
If you like replacing entire energy production facilities every 25-30 years lets go solar! Nukes are now 80-100 years, by then it will probably be even more.
If you like energy infrastructure that is prone to destruction from weather events, then yeah! Solar and wind are awesome.
If you like energy capture that takes enormous swaths of land, then yeah! Solar and wind are awesome!
If you like energy solutions that cost way more over the long run, let’s go solar!
Solar has a place. Every rooftop, roads, parking lots, warehouse houses.
But to commit to it at utility scale is bad for our children.
Depends where you live. Australia has so much unuseable land it is not funny. Plenty of room for solar panels there!
And as for bagging out solar and wind because of ‘energy infrastructure that is prone to destruction from weather events’. Don’t have to think too much to recall Fukushima went meltdown because of … a tsunami.
How are you reading that argument from the words I wrote?
I’m not arguing FOR anything.
This problem is like getting thrown into a fighting ring and having to choose your opponent.
A. The rabid armored bear. Default option.
B. A wolf that you have to fight, once a year, every year.
C. A cardboard box labeled “Angry Ghosts”, which you don’t have to fight, but you DO have to carry on your person for the rest of your life, and your descendants will also have to carry with them, forever. And if the box ever get’s opened, or breaks, Angry Ghosts are going to come out swinging.
Everyone here is picking C, because it means they don’t have to fight.
Some are arguing that they heard we can just get rid of the box later, so it’s not a problem.
And these people are wrong.
Other are arguing “Just don’t open the box. How is this a hard choice?”
I’m arguing that all the choices suck, but at LEAST we can comprehend A and B.
C? WTF does that even mean? It will take infinite effort. No reasonable person can expect that Angry Ghosts will stay contained.
How can C be the right choice?
We currently have no way of dealing with transuranic waste, except putting it in a hole and keeping it safe and dry forever.
Exploding power plants were never a real problem.
Reprocessing spent fuel to reuse the good parts is a solved problem.
Processing the super-duper scary stuff that will destroy itself in “only” decades or centuries is something we have some good ideas how to do, even at scale.
The real problem is the stuff that will stick around forever, and stay dangerous.
We probably want a FEW Angry Ghosts around for research.
But no reasonable person can argue that having to carry and protect an ever increasing supply of boxes, forever, is the correct choice here…
people still using this hippie narrative? most of the 10k+ year waste is actually mostly usable fuel. the real nasty stuff has significantly shorter half lives. once it “burns” off, whats left can be put back into the reactor. fast neutron reactors can already do this directly.
Yeah… not arguing about exploding power plants or some such nonsense.
Also not arguing about fuel reprocessing, or even the possible solution of converting MORE of the fuel into the really nasty stuff that will burn out in “only” a century or two.
Transuranic waste.
Go look that up. It’s an important part of the discussion.
We have no method of getting rid of it.
We have no good way to store it other than “Put in dry hole forever. Maintain hole forever”.
Since we don’t have a way to deal with it, and it is essentially a cost that keeps increasing forever, no reasonable person can argue that it is a good idea to make more than we need for research purposes.
“We shouldn’t be deploying tech with direct consequences to the health of people 5000 years from now”
Solar and wind rely on batteries for storage. Batteries require step mining, so YOU personally are advocating for deploying tech with direct health consequences.
Strip mining
Yeah… not even remotely the same thing.
I’m not arguing FOR more strip mining.
I’m arguing AGAINST an ever increasing pile of danger that requires maintenance and security…forever.
Forever.
And that’s the problem.
No rational human can agree that anything they HAVE to do forever is the right choice.
*shrug “I guess they will have to figure out how to solve it later.” can be used to justify ANYTHING. If that is the only way an option can be made manageable, then it ISN’T an option.
Go look up transuranic waste.
We have no better solution than a dry hole in the ground that we watch carefully, forever.
I’m not talking about fuel reprocessing, or passivation.
That last HaD article talks about that. It’s great.
Until someone solves the problem of Infinite custodianship, strip mines are the objectively correct choice, because at least they MIGHT become nice lakefront property in a few thousand years. That’s the kind of timescales we are working with here.
“upcoming small modular and micro reactors”
Yeah, maybe on the moon or Mars when Elon sends astronauts there, but hauling these 20 MW “micro nuclear reactors” (https://inl.gov/trending-topics/microreactors/) on a semitractor-trailer on interstate and county roads to disaster areas is a little far fetched.
Say, how about a “nano nuclear reactor” (20 KW) put underneath my house to supply electricity. Maybe I can order one from Amazon or Walmart.
Yup! Looking forward to my own Beta-M power source in the garage.
if the fuel is not installed in the reactor during shipping i dont see a problem. design it around a fuel pod, which is shipped separately in an armored container in a sub-critical state, designed such that it is near impossible to rupture at highway speeds. given how few and infrequent these fueling runs would be (once per reactor every 30-50 years), on safe roads at safe speeds, and with a police/military escort for security, and during hours of low traffic you can mitigate the risks of accidental or malicious release of material.
recovery of spent material after decommissioning is more of a problem, in situ storage of the core rods in a fuel pool is probibly the best bet. bury the rest of the reactor until the short lived stuff burns off, then haul it off as low level waste after some years. 10k+ stuff is in the fuel rods, and that can be reprocessed after a few years in the fuel pool.
Except the transuranic stuff in the waste, which we literally have no way of dealing with other than “infinite custodianship”.
“I guess someone in the next [x] civilizations will have to figure it out” isn’t a viable or excusable option.
“Say, how about a “nano nuclear reactor” (20 KW) put underneath my house to supply electricity. Maybe I can order one from Amazon or Walmart.”
That’s actually a really good idea. You’d cut transmission losses to essentially zero and get rid of polluting natural gas plants entirely! I haven’t done the math but on that small of a scale you may be able to go with a subcritical/lower enriched core which would drive a Stirling generator?
Really the ONLY problem is getting past people’s ignorance when it comes to radiation and the corresponding irrational fear of anything nuclear.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1162
Fun fact, that comic also works if you replace…
“Fuel Energy Density”
with
“The cost of an arbitrarily small slice of custodianship of the transuranic waste produced by nuclear energy.”
Or…it sort of works?
The cost of custodianship is infinite, as much as ANY cost can be infinite.
Readers don’t believe Ian’s cyclical lies.
Go read about the Department of Energy EBR-1 & EBR-2 and it’s transfer to become IFR. You can also look at the Sodium Fast Reactors at Hanford. These ran for decades, and spent nuclear fuel (waste) was disposed of permanently – and transuranics were transmutated at several of these projects at scale. Companies like Orano (at La Hague) and Curio know how to do this and are willing when these apocalyptic environmentalists get silenced and moved out of the way.
They want more 501c3 checks from fossil fuel companies to pay for their poisonous lifestyles. Don’t give them any time of day. Nasty little trolls.
The environmentalists as well as the nuclear industry would love to get rid of the waste as soon as possible. If there are companies doing this for decades, why is there so much waste around and such a desperate search for (unpopular) long time storage solutions?