The US and every other developed nation 'absolutely can'.
The tech, research and regulations are '40 years old' stuck in an old era.
The 'existential risks' from Nuclear are partly fallout but that can mostly be managed.
It's really 1) waste and 2) proliferation.
The waste ... might possible to be dealt with. We can re-process and turn waste into something that can reasonably sit somewhere safe for '100K years' - that sounds like a challenge but I think it's possible.
Proliferation is the real problem. Nuclear requires 'very responsible systems' from top to bottom. Advanced nations, with transparency and oversight and scrutiny, can handle it.
But as soon as US, Canada, France starts building reactors, then Chile, Ecuador, Afghanistan will want to as well, and who is going to stop them?
Then it's only a 'small bribe' from 'very bad actors' getting a hold of nuclear material, enough to build a bomb, or much easier, just a dirty bomb, enough to very easily do some very bad damaage.
I can see contamination being released in NYC, which maybe only makes a few people ill, another few thousands with 'somewhat unsafe exposure' - but which requires evacuation of Manhatten and 200 years of 'no go zone'. This is the real risk.
So the UN, West, China, Russia would have to all perfectly align on 'the rules' and be very serious about enforcing them.
Because it's political, I don't see it happening. Russia has tons of Fuel they want to sell to Kazhakstan, a civil war breaks out there, baddies get ahold of a reactor, and 'somewhere someone takes a bribe' and some bad materials slip out the back.
We can definitely save the world with nuclear, we just have to act responsibly on a collective level. Not sure if we can, sadly.
The proliferation risk of nuclear fuel is overblown. Reactors don’t use weapons-grade fuel, and purifying it to weapons-grade material is harder than making the fuel to begin with; if you can take fuel and refine it into a weapon, you might as well start with unprocessed uranium.
I find it interesting that spent nuclear fuel contains a fair amount of weapons grade Pu, but it also contains other isotopes of Pu which you wouldn't want and would be difficult to separate.
It could definitely be used for a dirty bomb, which could, if nothing else, cause significant economic damage from the fear of radiation.
"Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized.
France currently recycles their spent fuel. They put the remaining good nuclear fuel back in their reactors in the form of MOX fuel and immobilize the remaining waste in vitrified borosilicate glass.
The US had a recycling program featuring the use of advanced fast reactors (which have not been deployed on any major scale yet) that was shut down because it created Plutonium, which could be used to make a nuclear weapon. Were some plutonium diverted in the recycling process, a non-nuclear entity could be one step close to building a bomb. However, under programs such as the (now stalled) GNEP [wikipedia], where only countries who already have nuclear weapons recycle, proliferation-free waste recycling can exist. Since the many of the largest energy users are already nuclear weapons states, a massive expansion of nuclear could be done there with no additional proliferation concerns whatsoever.
If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data).
If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make this waste.
For comparison, in 2007 alone the US burned 948,000,000 metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years! Granted, coal made a higher fraction of the country’s electricity, but the numbers are still crazy impressive for nuclear."
Interesting: "2018 Nobel Prize for Physics-winner Gérard Mourou has proposed using Chirped pulse amplification to generate high-energy and low-duration laser pulses to transmute highly radioactive material (contained in a target) to significantly reduce its half-life, from thousands of years to only a few minutes."
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I do not think nuclear waste and proliferation are a problem. Consider ITER, for example:
"Fusion reactors, unlike fission reactors, produce no high activity/long life radioactive waste. The "burnt" fuel in a fusion reactor is helium, an inert gas. Activation produced in the material surfaces by the fast neutrons will produce waste that is classified as very low, low, or medium activity waste. All waste materials (such as components removed by remote handling during operation) will be treated, packaged, and stored on site."
"Because the half-life of most radioisotopes contained in this waste is lower than ten years, within 100 years the radioactivity of the materials will have diminished in such a significant way that the materials can be recycled for use in other fusion plants. This timetable of 100 years could possibly be reduced for future devices through the continued development of 'low activation' materials, which is an important part of fusion research and development today."
Or to put it briefly: "No long-lived radioactive waste: Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. The activation of components in a fusion reactor is low enough for the materials to be recycled or reused within 100 years.".
Proliferation: "Limited risk of proliferation: Fusion doesn't employ fissile materials like uranium and plutonium. (Radioactive tritium is neither a fissile nor a fissionable material.) There are no enriched materials in a fusion reactor like ITER that could be exploited to make nuclear weapons."
To repeat: waste is not much of an issue CURRENTLY, and in the future we will have ITER and the like, i.e. fusion reactors instead of fission reactors that solve the nuclear waste and the proliferation problem. It is sad how many people are misinformed about nuclear (other comments). There is no higher electricity consumption without nuclear, like... just forget about it. But then again, the future, that is fusion reactors, are pretty damn great. Just check out the last link in this comment.
The one thing I hate about the waste issue is that it is nearly never priced in. "Nuclear is cheap and clean", is what many will say, but dealing with the waste will create costs for the public multiplied by a 100k years. And this assumes the public exists, knows and wants to manage these things for a timeframe that long. 10k years ago we were still in the ice age and roaming around in huts, hunting with sticks. It would be even a challenge to garantuee such a thing for a single century in the current climate and there would be 999 to go just to deal with the stuff that we made at one point.
This is purely a debt to the future generations, and as such we are very easily blue to take them, because we will not be around when it needs to be payed. If we ever realistically counted that stuff in nuclear would be completely and utterly unaffordable.
Sure thing, we could develope ways of reducing the half life time of the waste, building better and greater storage facilities that manage to stay functional 25 times longer than the pyramides, find newer cleaner ways of using the limited nuclear resources we have, etc.
This factor alone makes me unsure this really is the best way to generate energy. One thing many don't realise is that reducing production emissions alone doesn't cut it. We have to use less as well. Eat less meat, based on the methane the cows fart alone. All in all buy and produce less stuff. Which in turn would break capitalism, which we realistically won't carry through even if it would mean extinction.
Arguing for less consumption is a non-starter. It's a tacit admission that the solution to global warming is killing say 30% of the global population, just framed in an indirect manner so it doesn't sound like genocide.
Genocide? Really? I thought it was part of the HN codex not to read others opinions in a unfavourable way unless there is no other conclusion, but okay.
Deforestation to make way for livestock, along with methane emissions from cows and fertilizer use, creates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the world’s cars, trucks and airplanes combined.
The fertilizer has to be used for the life stocks food. If you eat 1 kJ of meat vs 1 kJ of the soy that is produced to feed it, there is less water usage [1], less CO2 emissions [2], less land usage etc.
If anything a move away from meat would help earth to accommodate more people. And that is only meat. What if you are able to buy one product that lasts a decade vs 10 that last a year?
This kind of "use the resources more efficiently"-stuff is what I mean when I say reduce consumption.
And that should by the way not be the task for individuals to tackle, we need higher standards when it comes to efficient resource usage, quality and lifetime of products, etc. This is not something that will be solved fast enough by consumers and their wallets.
Of course energy and transportation is a factor as well in all of this. If we don't want to move our planet into " lol maybe we go extinct"-territory, we will have to reduce individual transport and expand public transport and use renewable or otherwise more efficient means of converting energy.
The thing is: doing it later means we would have to do even harder changes. If we all started tackling this 4 decades ago we could have gone with a smooth, gradual change. Now even instantaneous change would be only amount to damage limitation.
The Greenlandic ice is over the tipping point. We cannot unmelt it. And heating 0°C ice to 0°C water takes the same amount of energy as it takes to heat 0°C water to 80°C water. This means thermally speaking our breaks are still working, but they will stop working any moment and we cannot stop them from loosing their function anymore.
The last year of reading up on climate science really made me realize that things are far worse than I thought they were.
The tech, research and regulations are '40 years old' stuck in an old era.
The 'existential risks' from Nuclear are partly fallout but that can mostly be managed.
It's really 1) waste and 2) proliferation.
The waste ... might possible to be dealt with. We can re-process and turn waste into something that can reasonably sit somewhere safe for '100K years' - that sounds like a challenge but I think it's possible.
Proliferation is the real problem. Nuclear requires 'very responsible systems' from top to bottom. Advanced nations, with transparency and oversight and scrutiny, can handle it.
But as soon as US, Canada, France starts building reactors, then Chile, Ecuador, Afghanistan will want to as well, and who is going to stop them?
Then it's only a 'small bribe' from 'very bad actors' getting a hold of nuclear material, enough to build a bomb, or much easier, just a dirty bomb, enough to very easily do some very bad damaage.
I can see contamination being released in NYC, which maybe only makes a few people ill, another few thousands with 'somewhat unsafe exposure' - but which requires evacuation of Manhatten and 200 years of 'no go zone'. This is the real risk.
So the UN, West, China, Russia would have to all perfectly align on 'the rules' and be very serious about enforcing them.
Because it's political, I don't see it happening. Russia has tons of Fuel they want to sell to Kazhakstan, a civil war breaks out there, baddies get ahold of a reactor, and 'somewhere someone takes a bribe' and some bad materials slip out the back.
We can definitely save the world with nuclear, we just have to act responsibly on a collective level. Not sure if we can, sadly.