And looking at how much the clean up of large scale nuclear processing has and will cost it is not cheap either.
Now that wind and solar are getting to the same price point there is no point in using nuclear reactors for energy generation.
That's the unfortunate thing about abandoning fission reactors. Fusion is far safer and doesn't produce radioactive waste byproducts.
With fission you can easily go down to 300 years of storage, this has been known since the 60s but that's often ignored.
Waste is only a significant problem if you want to make it a problem.
Still 300 years of storage isn't great. It is still a duration of time longer than the US has been a nation.
You could literally just put that waste somewhere in the desert, put it there and leave. The chance that that waste ever actually harms somebody is basically zero.
Basically any cave that isn't likely to flood with massive amounts of water is fine.
> Breeder reactors are definitely interesting avenues that I wish we'd gone down from the beginning.
You don't even need a Breeder for this, a Burner can get there as well.
If somehow we have a breakthrough in fusion technology to make it energy positive, then I have no doubt we'll see a huge increase in people trying to use it.
You need 300 to 1000+ windmill to replace a single nuclear power plant. Might be doable in the US but there is no way to do that in France for example. Same for sun, good look replacing a nuclear plant in northern Europe with a solar farm, it's not Nevada.
Nuclear is on demand, wind and sun are not.
> The waste storage problem is not solved.
Renewable energy storage is not solved.