Ah, the omnipresent "Nookyoolur = BOMZ!!!!" canard.
The favourite straw man of the pro-nuclear crowd. He sure takes a beating.
What strawman? HE brought it up.
Maybe that's true of what the US buys, but in the EU companies are required to care about where their raw materials come from. As well as meeting standards like RoHS, when calculating taxes on environmental damage what happens in China to mine the materials they use is taken into consideration.
It's not perfect but it has forced China to start cleaning up, at least when it wants to export to the EU.
And if they don't care to? Where does the EU get its rare earths products from THEN?
Or, on the flip side, once it decides to shift the cost of the "cleaner" procedures to the customer, and the prices of rare earths products skyrockets. What then?
No, the biggest problems are the cost and the fact that we want them to be run by people more interested in profit than safety. The latter problem is so bad that insurance companies won't touch nuclear power, and we have to have special regulatory agencies to force responsible behaviour, and even they don't work properly.
New reactor designs won't fix these problems.
The cost is a byproduct of the absolutely psychotic level of fearmongering the anti-nuke crowd has done and the ultra-paranoid regulations morass that's been put in place. And you're right, new, safer reactor designs won't fix people who are hell-bent on terrifying themselves and everyone else about "evil nuclear power".
Hmm... A concrete block with something that can potentially go into meltdown or produce explosive gas inside it. You would be totally reliant on whatever safety features were built in working perfectly, because clearly you can't get to it and just vent off some hydrogen or pump in some cooling water now. Yeah, that sounds like a great plan.
Did you even read...no...no you didn't. Because heaven forbid something contradict your little world view.
We have the ability NOW to produce reactors that simply CANNOT melt down. Where a FAILURE state results in the reactor shutting off, using natural forces like GRAVITY to remove the fuel from the reaction chamber and stop reacting. You pull the plug on the reactor, it shuts down and the fuel moves to a dump tank. The reactor starts to overheat, it shuts down and the fuel moves to a dump tank. Unless you're going to start proposing that we now need to plan for gravity utterly reversing itself....
No gas buildups. No explosions. No boiling water in the reactor.
So, we're back to "Well what if gravity magically reverses itself in a failure?" scenario.
Please. Try not to show your ignorance.
Yes, the products of this form of reactor tend to be more radioactive. That's actually a fairly good thing believe it or not.
People gripe about things like Yucca mountain. Where they're storing stuff that's mildly radioactive and will be for tens of thousands of years.
Hell, at some nuclear plants, this stuff is sitting outside, in the open ON A FUCKING PARKING LOT.
Do we REALLY think we're up to engineering storage facilities with that sort of lifespan?
Maybe? I'd say they're being unrealistic.
The stuff that comes out of an MSR? VERY hot, but VERY short-lived (relatively).
Are we up to storing stuff that lives a few decades or a couple hundred years? Yeah! Easily.
Additionally I'm not saying "fission forever".
I'm saying "Fission for now, where it makes sense" (don't build them on active faultlines or near volcanoes, etc). And augment it with renewables.
Once we have a steady, clean power structure in place, BEAT FEET FOR FUSION (again, augmented by renewables).
The faster we get to the fusion stage, the less overall waste we produce.
The less overall waste we produce, the less we'll need to store.
The less we need to store, the sooner the stuff will break down safely and become inert, rendering the facility it's stored in safe.
As for proliferation risks.
Even if we decomissioned every reactor TODAY, you, and your children, and their children, etc, etc, etc would not be "safe". Because, as I noted, the stuff that runs those reactors (and can be made into bombs) is going to be around a long, long, LONG time. So, if you've been harboring such a vain hope, disabuse yourself NOW. Remember what I said? Radioactive material sitting in the open ON A PARKING LOT. All because NOBODY wants to deal with REALITY and just do what needs doing. They'd rather bask in their beautiful fantasy where everything is clean and safe and runs on the aforementioned fairy farts.
