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The US has tons of money saved up to handle nuclear waste, all reactor operators have been paying for 5+ decades, but because of grid lock the money is just pil

The US has tons of money saved up to handle nuclear waste, all reactor operators have been paying for 5+ decades, but because of grid lock the money is just pilling up. Instead of making constructive policy the idiots dead-locked themselves with this idiocy at Yucca Mountain. And there has never been a real program to systematically use the civilian nuclear waste. This was of course planned but the program was stopped in the general anti-nuclear attitude of the 70s. This program would have lead to a huge amount of green energy and a reduction in the nuclear waste. And the uranium mining would be much less of an issue if we had modern reactors. We are operating at 2% efficiency, a thermal breeder could reach high 90%s. The existing civilian nuclear waste could be enough for a long time. No more mining. And thorium is a waste product of current rare earth mining in absurd quantities. So really any more mining that we do is just because of bad policy. And when talking about mining, the reality is solar and wind need far, far more mining and those mins have tailings too. > Fission gets billions of dollars of free public money for research every year and had much more spent in the past. And nuclear was excluded from almost all green energy subsidies for decades a far larger number in total. Even more important the changes in the grid pricing basically simply did not favor long term base-load investments. Not to mention all the programs that force utilities to adopt a % of renewables. And even today, the places that have stable reactors have low electricity prices because of long term price agreements while everybody else is suffering. France had decades of low energy prices and even today most in France have low energy prices. And the cost of that was mostly on the books of the utility and has been paid down for many decades now even with the low energy prices. France has sadly mismanaged its fleet for the last 30 years, with the anti-nuclear state abusing the amazing systems the generation before built for them. And despite all of that abuse and lack of maintenance and investment France still has reliable, low price, green energy.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
The idea that environmentalists had any influence on IFR is a complete fantasy or that pouring another half a trillion into failed attempts at separation and reprocessing programs would magically make them clean or cheap is laughable. If you want to lament the mismanagement of funding for green energy, then lament that large scale wind was abandoned in the early 40s because the very first attempt was a little bit more expensive than coal or that the first ten billion dollars moving down the learning curve for solar to make it viable for mass market took 5 decades.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

The idea that environmentalists had any influence on IFR is a complete fantasy or that pouring another half a trillion into failed attempts at separation and reprocessing programs would magically make them clean or cheap is laughable. If you want to lament the mismanagement of funding for green energy, then lament that large scale wind was abandoned in the early 40s because the very first attempt was a little bit more expensive than coal or that the first ten billion dollars moving down the learning curve for solar to make it viable for mass market took 5 decades.