In 100 years we won't need it. In 100 years we'll be asking ourselves why we bothered with nuclear energy at all. Look at the fundamentals. There's more than e

In 100 years we won't need it. In 100 years we'll be asking ourselves why we bothered with nuclear energy at all. Look at the fundamentals. There's more than enough free energy all around us. In 100 years the world population will be declining, and we will already have mined and refined all the metal we'll ever need. The energy use per person is already falling and will continue to fall. Solar will be vastly more cheap, efficient, and be part of a 100% circular economy. It'll cover most of the energy needs just by covering buildings or creating useful shades for parking, reservoars, irrigation channels and agrovoltaics. Energy storage will essentially be solved. We have to. You can't run a car or a ferry directly on nuclear energy. We have to store and transform energy at a similar scale to what's needed to balance the grid to replace fossil fuels anyway. Think about how many days you could run your house on a modern BEV. 5-7 days in my case. And already, today, my car is helping balancing the grid by avoiding charging when prices are high. I'd be willing to do V2G too if it was supported. In northern climates advanced geothermal will provide heat for district heating, and some extra electricity for the winter. Once you've built a well it provides all the benefits of nuclear with none of the downsides. It's just a matter of time before deep geothermal wells are cheap enough to drill. Could be decades, but not more than 100 years. With all the oil and gas engineers with nothing better to do in 20 years time.. I'm inclined to think we'll have some excellent solutions for advanced geothermal by 2050. We've already seen innovations from the oil/gas sector transferring over to geothermal in recent years. There are some nuclear proponents that dream about everyone having megawatts of personal energy. Think of everything we could do if we had 10x the energy we have today! That's a terrible idea. If the entire world went all-in on nuclear and expanded its energy usage, the waste heat would be a problem and a barrier to getting the climate back to a cooler stable equilibrium. Nuclear R&D is fantastic. We should continue to develop it. But mostly for future space use. Helions fusion reactor might be a good idea if it works. It should have less problems with waste heat since it converts much of the energy directly to electricity rather than using heat exchange mechanisms. If Helion succeeds fission is permanently dead, and we'll definitely want to bury the waste in 100k year storage so we don't burden our children with more debt and can stop thinking about the waste at all.