At this point it makes more sense to invest in solar, wind power and energy storage capacity to reduce CO2 emissions.
Our current solutions to short-term storage are perfectly adequate long-term solutions. And we don't even need to store it that long, because soon we'll need it to produce fuel for next generation reactors.
The real problem with nuclear waste management are impossible and unnecessary safety requirements.
The cost of waste management is already included in the cost of nuclear energy. The cost of energy storage is not included in the cost of renewables, thus they may appear as cheaper, and indeed they are – for now – because we currently don't need energy storage. But as the renewables penetration rises, the cost of energy storage will skyrocket: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-re...
In fact, the money needed for waste storage has long been accumulate by a fee in the US and is literally on the bank account of the government .
There is already enough money to build a facility.
The problem is all political.
> At this point it makes more sense to invest in solar, wind power and energy storage capacity to reduce CO2 emissions.
No its actually not. Countries that try to reduce CO2 with these methods are pretty slow and struggle heavily. Even worse, the larger part of your overall grid depends on these the more difficult it sill be to balance the grid.
Furthermore, any sustained drop-down in one of these can shut down part of the country.
Why do we keep claiming that climate change is a existential problem but then we are like 'we can't do the easy solution because nuclear waste is slightly problematic'. Guess what, I much rather deal with nuclear waste in 100 years then with the result of climate change.
France showed the world 50 years ago that it is a pretty easy thing to have low CO2 electricity and had other countries adopted this, we would be in a better situation.
Germany is the perfect example, had they done their 'Energiewende' towards nuclear they would be closing their goals by now.
Cheaper than having an inflexible nuclear plant.
Also, there's the rough rule of thumb saying that when variable sources (like wind or solar) approach a fraction of total generation in the grid equal to the capacity factor of said source, system integration costs start to rise rapidly (because that's, at the latest, the point where you'll start needing large amounts of storage, curtailment, or long-range transmission). Thus, in most grids wind+solar will unlikely see much larger than 50% of total generation without massive extra investment and/or breakthroughs in storage costs.
If we're going for lowest-cost deep decarbonization, it looks like the share of nuclear will start to rise when we go deep enough, see e.g. slide 41 in https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Getting...
And your counter argument is 'nuclear plant' are inflexible? What? Nuclear are not actually inflexible specially new ones compared to those we build 50 years ago. Furthermore nuclear industry has finally again started to innovate and the next generation of reactors will be able to be fully load following.
What is actually inflexible is solar and wind, that about the most inflexible technologies that exist.
That ship has sailed already.
Nuclear in west fails because of regulatory issue, and this is totally clear if you look at the history of nuclear construction.
> That ship has sailed already.
That's just a dumb attitude. Gas had many ups and downs. Wind did as well. Even coal.
Saying nuclear is dead because currently in the west or the US its not growing as fast is wrong.
China will be building 100s of nuclear reactors and they are very interested in starting to sell these globally.