Even so, we need to eliminate stockpiles, waste. Traveling wave reactors (TWR) seems like the best technical bet. Maybe we'd get some electricity out of it.
(I'm not clear why we don't drop radioactive waste onto the Marianas Trench and let the earth eventually devour it.)
Solar and wind have rapidly come down in price, which is awesome. However, due to their variable nature, they do suffer from the problem of declining value as their grid penetration increases.
So there is a place for dispatchable capacity. If your country has enough dispatchable renewables like hydro or geothermal, awesome. If not, there's not that many good options. Nuclear, and maybe fossil and/or biofuels (in general, I'm very skeptical wrt large-scale biofule use, so this ought to be very limited) with CCS. Batteries and demand shifting are good for short-term bursts, and will likely replace gas in that role, but for large scale shifting they are way too expensive.
I'm very much a fan of the work Jesse Jenkins is doing in power systems modeling, see e.g.
https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/events/getting-zero-pathway...
> Even so, we need to eliminate stockpiles, waste. Traveling wave reactors (TWR) seems like the best technical bet. Maybe we'd get some electricity out of it.
Last I read, the company behind the TWR (TerraPower) is mostly focusing on a fast spectrum molten salt reactor nowadays. Which is cool, I'm a big fan of the fast MSR as a concept. That being said, while breeding would allow us to increase the utilization of nuclear fuel by about two orders of magnitude, at the moment uranium is so cheap that it's not seen as economically worthwhile.
But, if nuclear is going to play a major role in the world's energy supply, breeders will eventually be necessary. So I do think we should develop them.
> (I'm not clear why we don't drop radioactive waste onto the Marianas Trench and let the earth eventually devour it.)
The waste problem is more political than technical. Burying the waste deep in bedrock is perfectly good.
Solving the political issues at Yucca would be a great permanent solution to waste.
I'm terrified of what's happening in at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. My friends (who work on this issue) tell me that when the toxic plum seeps thru the water table all the way to the Columbia River, everything down stream becomes uninhabitable. That's Portland, Vancouver (WA), etc.
I really want someone to figure out how to turn all that crap into glass trinkets and then drop into deepest ocean.