Nuclear Waste Reprocessing Gains Momentum in the U.S.
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-MOX-facility-cont...
Work started on the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in 2007, with a 2016 start-up envisaged. Although based on France's Melox MOX facility, the US project has presented many first-of-a-kind challenges and in 2012 the US Government Accountability Office suggested it would likely not start up before 2019 and cost at least USD7.7 billion, far above original estimate of USD4.9 billion.
The most interesting "recycling" effort right now is the laser enrichment process of Silex/Global Laser Enrichment:
https://www.wkms.org/energy/2025-07-02/company-developing-pa...
The company plans to re-enrich old depleted uranium tails from the obsolete gas diffusion enrichment process back up to natural uranium levels of 0.7% U-235. That uranium in turn would be processed by existing commercial centrifuge enrichment to upgrade it to power reactor fuel.
In comparison, managing steel production waste is way more expensive.
For some definition of "active".
The first 6-10 years are quite dangerous, which is why stuff is in cooling pools. After about 200-300 years the most dangerous type of radiation (gamma) has mostly burned stopped, and you're left with alpha and beta, which can be stopped with tinfoil and even paper.
I've heard the remark that after ~300 years the main way for nuclear waste to cause bad health effects is if you eat it or grind it up and snort it.
People often focus on "radiation" part forgetting the "contamination" part. You can literally walk into the Chernobyl reactor active zone today for up to 2 minutes. But you cannot produce any food in soils around it for thousand years. And there's dozens of dangerous isotopes, each one accumulating and affecting human tissues differently.
Public generally only knows about Geiger counter. Yes, it will scream if everything is FUBAR, but it's useless for estimating safety of a food product.
Geraldine Thomas, the co-founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, says there are more worrisome things than radiation:
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...
Is that actually based on some sort of science though, or is it the same woolly thinking as the linear-no-threshold modelling that was popular around the time of Chernobyl? What are the actual risks here and how does it compare to low exercise or the typical amount of air pollution in a large city?
https://www.epa.gov/radiation/blue-book-epa-radiogenic-cance...
* https://www.nwmo.ca/canadas-used-nuclear-fuel/how-is-it-stor...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask
Are you telling me it's unsafe? Someone better tell Madison Hill:
* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...
* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856
* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
Or Paris Ortiz-Wines:
* https://twitter.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...
(The context here is not walking down some road and getting bombarded with particles: but about the storage of industrial material and the risks it involves. Yes, stuff gets shot out at >300 years: but it's not just lying around randomly.)
Sorry, I don't have a Twitter account to read the posts, but they look like my point exactly.
Neither to I:
which it will do eventually, if it's left out in the open
it needs to be buried
reducing the volume via reprocessing helps
assuming you can do something with the 97% of "useful" stuff extracted (which the UK has mostly failed at, and now stores it in a warehouse)
https://www.bge.de/en/asse/short-information/history-of-the-...
It might be true that nuclear power produces less waste but we have to consider the scales of global energy demand, multiply it by the time scales of nuclear waste to reach what threshold exactly? When and how would nuclear waste become a problem. Would it take ~200 years like the industrial revolution with CO2? Would it be okay if it where 300 years? or 500? What do we do, when background radiation is rising from ground water and soil? Switch back to natural instead of green energy, hoping the next millenias will be fine?
I dont think nuclear power is a solution. It can be step in an energy transition strategy, but no solution.
Not if it's below non-porous rock…
* https://www.nwmo.ca/who-we-are/how-were-governed/peer-review...
* https://www.nwmo.ca/Site-selection/Steps-in-the-site-selecti...
…below the water table…
* https://www.nwmo.ca/canadas-plan/canadas-deep-geological-rep...
…packed in non-porous soil/clay:
* https://www.nwmo.ca/-/media/Reports-MASTER/Technical-reports...
* https://www.nwmo.ca/Canadas-plan/Multiple-barrier-system
> When and how would nuclear waste become a problem.
Never. If there is ever "too much" of it we reprocess it as per OP article to remove the "non-usable" stuff and burn up the rest. It seems that there's an order of magnitude reduce by recycling (96% is usable fuel, so 4% is left over):
* https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...
Plate tectonic and sismotectonic are also sources of concern: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10706-005-1148-4 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...
This endless list of nit picky objections that go on and on and on and on and on, that are brought up no matter how low the probability, is why we can't have nice things (like cheap, reliable, zero-emission electricity available 24/7).
More people will die from plane crashes—which is amongst the safest ways to travel—than from nuclear waste radiation in the next few hundred years.
Geraldine Thomas, the co-founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, says there are more worrisome things than radiation:
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas
I personally live about 50km nuclear reactor and don't think about it at all.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickering_Nuclear_Generating_S...
There is nothing we can do about it, therefore comparing this risk the the risk induced by nuclear reactors seems moot to me as we can decide to prefer renewables upon nuclear.
> cheap
Nuclear-generated electricity is way more expensive than renewables', and the gap is widening. Source: LCOE (the gold standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
> reliable
A continental fleet of a renewables's mix is at least as reliable.
> zero-emission
No, the total lifecycle emissions of nuclear (industrial PWR) is low (10-15 g eqCO2/KWH) but not zero.
> electricity available 24/7
A continental fleet of a renewables's mix with storage (vehicle batteries thru V2Gn, green hydrogen, hydro...).
In order to generate electricity even France burns non-negligible amounts of fossil fuel since the inception of its nuclear fleet: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+...
> More people will die from plane crashes
One can decide whether he will (or not) hop on a plane. A nuclear reactor and its waste threatens everyone, even very remotely and in a distant future.
Note: my own brother was killed during a jetliner crash (Swissair SR111, 1998).
> There is nothing we can do about it, therefore comparing this risk the the risk induced by nuclear reactors seems moot to me as we can decide to prefer renewables upon nuclear.
Sure there is (with enough warning); it's just physics:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Te...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_Redirect_Mission
> Nuclear-generated electricity is way more expensive than renewables', and the gap is widening. Source: LCOE (the gold standard)
I live in Ontario, Canada, and renewables are much more expensive than nuclear (Table 2):
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2024...
In previous years nuclear was cheaper than (natural/methane) gas:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2022...
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2021...
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2020...
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2019...
To date, nuclear energy has cost the province $58B and has generated 3300 TWh, while our renewable experiment with the Green Energy Act will cost several billion per year over the life of the twenty year contacts and generate 200 TWh.
> In order to generate electricity even France burns non-negligible amounts of fossil fuel since the inception of its nuclear fleet:
Perhaps they should get more nuclear so they burn less fossil fuels. Ontario's mix:
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply
There are currently plans to expand the nuclear fleet.
> One can decide whether he will (or not) hop on a plane. A nuclear reactor and its waste threatens everyone, even very remotely and in a distant future.
It threatens the people who live >500m underneath the ground once it is buried.
We cannot cancel this risk, and we can cancel the risk of nuclear accident by not exploiting nuclear reactor (this is now possible thanks to renewables).
> To date, nuclear energy has > while our renewable experiment
The LCOE is the gold standard.
Comparing an existing fleet of reactors with many hidden costs (indirectly paid for by the taxpayer or the consumer) with the full cost of renewables, and neglecting the cost of any nuclear mishap (accident, waste, decommission...) is a classic trick. In France some even compare the official production cost of the amortized fleet (w/o the investment) to the complete cost of renewables. Yay!
> once it is buried
Who will bury an industrial nuclear reactor during a major accident, and how will they do it? Where is this even only a plan?
Or is it about building it underground, and what about skyrocketing inspection and maintenance costs? Where is this even only a plan? Do your really believe that a broken nuclear reactor vessel vomiting corium will be safe underground, and in such a case why are waste long-term repositories (way less 'active') so difficult and expensive to design and build (as already stated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44517316 )?
> I dont think nuclear power is a solution. It can be step in an energy transition strategy, but no solution.
Do you mean nuclear fission specifically? Because I can't imagine anything being a long term solution except nuclear power (fusion).
An accused defends himself badly by declaring to the judge "I am not the only culprit of homicide!".
Significant inhaled Pu-239 has a fair risk of causing cancer even after a long time. However mercury is volatile and it's a lot easier to end up inhaling fumes.
And mercury is absorbed well through ingestion and Pu isn't, and most of the risk after ingestion would be chemical, not radiological. From that standpoint, it's looking a lot better than other heavy metals.
The reason we don’t have more solid non-radiological toxicity data on Plutonium (compared to other toxic heavy metals) is because any amount significant enough to count kills people radiologically super quick.
That doesn’t mean it’s non-toxic if we ignore the radiological effects.
* Plutonium is not well absorbed by ingestion compared to other heavy metals and know ballpark ingestion toxicities
* We also know that pretty much all the plutonium except the long-lived isotopes are gone on a timescale of tens of thousands of years-- leaving behind mostly uranium isotopes.
* There's no real reason to believe this mixture of uranium and a small fraction of long-lived plutonium isotopes is significantly worse than ingesting uranium. It might be worse to inhale fine dust, though.
* Mercury is way worse than uranium because it is so readily absorbed.
We have nearly zero experience with weathered or bio modified plutonium. And the experience we do have with plutonium compounds, is limited by the fact people die awfully fast when they’re anywhere near them.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Especially not when the evidence is absent because we can’t get there because everyone dies first from the more obvious bad things happening.
The US nuclear weapons program had several hundred people who were accidentally exposed to measurable doses of plutonium. Those workers did not die at the time. The government set up The United States Transuranium and Uranium Registries (USTUR) to track long term health outcomes for such exposed workers.
https://wpcdn.web.wsu.edu/wp-spokane/uploads/sites/1058/2024...
When I worked with the USTUR, they had also acquired some data from former workers in the Soviet nuclear weapons complex. The most exposed workers there received higher doses than any American workers. Even then health impacts were not immediately fatal.
Here's the NIH summary on plutonium toxicology:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK599402/
It's a lot to read, but there has yet to be a human plutonium exposure accident so severe that the exposed individual died quickly. Or at least no published accident of that sort. There is however a dose-dependent risk of lung cancer from inhaling aerosolized plutonium.
Basically any mercury that I'm going to ingest accidentally is likely to be a salt. Because elemental mercury is going to evaporate.
> Especially not when the evidence is absent because we can’t get there because everyone dies first from the more obvious bad things happening.
Rats given Pu-239 show LD-50's of hundreds of milligrams per kilogram. Versus something like 20 mg/kg for inorganic mercury.
We have human studies where people were injected with several micrograms of plutonium and went to live on normal lives; and we have human studies where adults absorb less than 1/1000th of the plutonium ingested.
Who do you think will be fine, and who not?
Why do you dodge the question?
When we talk about mercury in the environment, we talk about the forms that it exists in-- just like we'd be talking about plutonium oxide.
> Why do you dodge the question?
I'm sorry-- I assumed we were talking about something useful or that made sense-- not to say, it's more dangerous than mercury (when choosing the form of mercury that's not implicated in toxicity events too often).
Why are you moving the goalposts? We have animal and, unfortunately, a lot of human data on plutonium exposure.
Just like arguing that the only common form of mercury people would run across in daily life (elemental!) isn’t applicable, since it isn’t implicated in toxicity events (duh! Because it’s not particular toxic and requires massive exposures over time!) - when we’re talking about relative toxicity of elemental plutonium and mercury compounds, eh?
Or do you want to try to guess if we can make a plutonium equivalent of methyl mercury - which we haven’t really tried to make, because it’s insane.
Then it reasons that we should absolutely use this fuel.
And yes there's the risk of greater nuclear proliferation but we already have colossal stockpiles of nuclear weapons that pose a massive threat to mankind. That's been the reality for 70 years.
In addition, nuclear isn't competing against coal, it's competing against solar.
Pop all the waste in stainless steel casts huge pile in a geologically stable desert.
You can read more about vitrification of nuclear waste here:
All it takes to change that is a federal subsidy supporting the industry. The same was said about wind & solar until it wasn't (due to tax credits). Now that the credits are going away with BBB, the cost of every new utility-scale development just went up ~30% and many, many projects will be killed.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...
> Lazard’s analysis of levelized cost of electricity across fuel types finds that new-build utility-scale solar, even without subsidy, is less costly than new build natural gas, and competes with already-operating gas plants.
> Despite the blow that tax credit repeal would deal to renewable energy project values, analysis from Lazard finds that solar and wind energy projects have a lower levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) than nearly all fossil fuel projects – even without subsidy.
(Lazard is the investment banking gold standard wrt clean energy cost modeling: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...)
And subsidizing this still won't make new nuclear particularly competitive without ditching the silly LNT harm model and killing ALARA at the regulatory level. If you do that, suddenly nuclear can be profitable (as it should be in a world where the AEC and NRC approached radiation harm risk with actual science).
Even SMRs can't compete on price along - current estimate (per the Goog):
SMRs: SMR LCOE range from $80-$90/MWh. Renewables: Solar and wind LCOE can range from $20-$50/MWh, with some estimates even lower.
Yes, having "guaranteed" output has value, but I'm of an age where I can remember the promise of "power too cheap to meter"
Isn't this, though certainly not intentionally, just reiterating that lawful high tech labor fundamentally has no place in modern globalized economy? [Manufacturing iPhone] from [externally sourced parts] into [complete phones] has been economically unattractive everywhere, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
If you look at the current state of US politics, it should be pretty obvious that we can't even count on the richest and most advanced countries to remain stable for even a couple of decades: your "no abandoning nuclear sources" policy can be completely gone in the blink of an eye.
When it comes to something as dangerous as nuclear material you should hope for the best but plan for the worst. Using latent heat might be a neat idea in a best-case scenario, but quickly turns into an absolute nightmare in a worst-case scenario.
With the expenses involved with all of that, it would probably be better to just build multiple geothermal plants instead and you don't have to worry about nuclear materials at all for similar power output.
To me the only 2 economically feasible strategies I see with high level nuclear waste is recycling with some sort of breeder reactor program, or dumping it in a deep stable hole that is trapped away from any water tables on the order of 100,000 years or more, by which point it will just be a uniquely rich and and diverse nuclear mineral deposit.
With a breeder reactor though and all the supporting nuclear reprocessing facilities, even though it would be a lot of work and money, it would be recovering the vast majority of potential energy from previously mined and refined nuclear materials that you are talking about recovering heat from, and in a far more controlled manner that allows us to just chuck the material into pretty much any other reactor without any significant modifications.
If the waste has to sit somewhere generating heat, might as well get some value from it.
(global district heating TAM is only ~$200B, idea sprung from xkcd spent fuel pool what if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)
When will there be an IPO?
https://www.hanfordvitplant.com/low-activity-waste-law-vitri...
And yeah, that was my thought re: 'might as well get some value from it' I mean what if that heat transfer was mostly passive? So that a nuclear waste storage depot in the arctic creates some other value.
https://www.hanfordvitplant.com/vitrification-101
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
For nations devoid of uranium reserves and not absolutely sure to always be able to secure uranium supply (i.e. not a superpower) recycling is an interesting way.
Case in point: France.
In June 2001, the U.S. Department of Energy classified "certain privately generated information concerning an innovative isotope separation process for enriching uranium". Under the Atomic Energy Act, all information not specifically declassified is classified as Restricted Data, whether it is privately or publicly held. This is in marked distinction to the national security classification executive order, which states that classification can only be assigned to information "owned by, produced by or for, or is under the control of the United States Government". This is the only known case of the Atomic Energy Act being used in such a manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_lase...
The United States developed the somewhat related AVLIS process to industrial readiness for the Special Isotope Separation project to produce high-grade weapons plutonium from old reactor fuel. However, it was ready just in time for the end of the Cold War, so it got shut down in 1990.
https://inis.iaea.org/records/r6yew-5nk17
Construction and operation of a Special Isotope Separation (SIS) project using the Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation (AVLIS) process technology at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) near Idaho Falls, Idaho are proposed. The SIS project would process fuel-grade plutonium administered by the Department of Energy (DOE) into weapon-grade plutonium using AVLIS and supporting chemical processes.
I once heard that “there’s no such thing as nuclear waste, just nuclear materials we haven’t figured out how to use yet,” but I’m unfortunately too dumb to know how true that statement is. Your article seems to indicate, “technically true, but for now still quite a lot to figure out.”
(But keep in mind that the overall concentration being low doesn't make this stuff safe! There can still potentially be highly radioactive material in the waste, like flecks of radioactive dust in a bin of used laboratory gloves or whatnot.)
From Wikipedia, it looks like Strontium-90 can be used in "treatment of bone cancer, and to treat coronary restenosis via vascular brachytherapy". Pretty cool.
If somebody is excited about deploying solar plus storage, that makes a ton of sense because prices are tumbling, enabling all sorts of new applications.
Nuclear is the opposite. It's always overpromised and under delivered. It's a mature tech, there's not big breakthroughs, we understand the design space somewhat well. Or at least well enough that nobody thinks that there's a design which will cause a 5x cost improvement, like is regularly obtained with solar and storage.
The US seems committed to taking the high-cost, low-economic growth path for the next few years, at least according to federal policies, and this would fit in with that. But I don't understand the enthusiasm at all.
* A contrarianism visa vis environmental crusades against nuclear power that presented it's dangers in a distorted fashion.
* How nuclear on paper presents the possibility of limitless energy with little pollution.
* Nuclear is the kind of big-tech solution that appeals to a lot of nerds.
The problem is that nuclear failed independently from environmental crusades even if some of these were successful. Nuclear power requires vast investment and radiation has the problem that it can weaken anything. Meltdowns aren't the apocalypse environmentalists imply but they destroy permanently a huge store of investment and their commonness has tanked nuclear power independently from popular crusades but those with a stake in nuclear like point to "them hippies" to cover their own failures.
In my opinion this is the strongest argument to take. Any argument about radiation or waste is going to be waved away as "scaremongering" and will be solved by innovations riiight aroung the corner - you won't change anyone's mind with that.
On the other hand, the practical arguments are pretty cut-and-dry: the West is unable to build them fast enough to matter, and they are too expensive to compete with renewables on an open energy market. We already have the receipts for traditional reactors due to Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, and Flamanville 3.
Have we solved every single potential problem which needs solving for a 100% renewable grid? No, but we've got plenty of time to work out the edge cases during the transition. Perhaps some magical mass-produced micro nuclear peaker plants will help in that, perhaps they won't. Let's keep investing in tried-and-tested technology like solar, wind, hydro, and battery storage until the nuclear folks get their act together - no need to bet our entire future on a nuclear miracle which probably isn't going to happen anyways.
Yes, this is what the solar/wind people keep claiming about energy storage.
>the West is unable to build them fast enough
No, the West is unwilling to build them fast enough. Then it chickens out, and the institutional knowledge to build the next plants are lost (so you lose the volume discount).
Regaining and retaining the institutional knowledge to build things may be more expensive in the short term, but it should be done- the fact that a country is capable of building power infrastructure on a whim is vital for its national defense.
This is the hidden cost of buying Chinese solar panels (because once you can't buy from China, or once China is unwilling to sell to you, you'll be paying for your own nuclear infrastructure regardless). And no, other countries' solar panels are not cheaper than nuclear; 'not knowing how to do it ourselves' cuts both ways.
Energy storage isn't popular with grid operators because it requires a different kind of grid. US grid operators don't want to upgrade their operations for solar or for other problem 'cause their profit strategy is running their capital into the ground.
Solar energy production in many countries is increasing exponentially but who knows idiocy US policy is going to mandate going forward.
The reactors we see still operating today are mostly designed in like the 70s and 80s, some going back to the 60s, but that is only like 40 years after the invention of nuclear reactors and nuclear power, we are now over 40 years past that again, and our understanding of nuclear sciences is leaps and bounds above what we used to build most nuke plants in existance.
- Westinghouse AP1000
- EDF EPR
- GE-Hitachi BWRX
The AP1000 and EPR have been shown to be very underwhelming, in the US and Europe, respectively. Those failures are prompting Canada to look at the much smaller 300MW BWRX in Ontario. However before any cost-overruns the BWRX is getting priced at $14/W recently, and the eye-popping cost of the Vogtle AP1000 at $16/W has scared all potential builders away.
If we could return to the older designs, we might be able to complete them at cheaper prices, but as our knowledge has advanced, nuclear has gotten more expensive.
Despite this both France (which has just finished building an EPR) and the UK (which is building one right now) are doubling down and launching new projects to capitalise on the knowledge gained.
In France all historical reactors worked so well that we did not feel the need to build more. This lead to talented engineers going to retirement without having a chance to pass on their knowledge and experience, causing cost overruns on the new constructions. This is not inherent to the technology itself but a symptom of our decision to put it aside for a while. As an example when I was in engineering school I remember being told “don’t do a nuclear physics major there is no job for that in the future”. Not easy retaining excellence in a field when that’s what you tell your children. All the dude that went there anyway are in very very high demand today, as you might expect.
The new generation of reactors is more complex, mainly because of additional security and reliability requirements, which is a good thing. Those are certified for a lifespan of 60 years and costs are computed on that base. Some old gen reactors in the us are looking to extend their lifespan to 80 years. It’s extremely likely the new - safer - reactors will be able go beyond that, reducing the MW costs compared to current estimates.
We are slowly re-learning to build reactors, and mastering a new technology at the same time. The more reactors we build based on that experience the more that initial cost will be distributed.
There is nothing underwhelming in what was delivered; the process to get there was, but we will get better at that.
If your ideal power plant can only be built by a hypothetical builder, then it cannot be built
Literally a farmer can build a solar power plant.
Can the farmer legally connect it to the grid in your location?
https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2025-06/cec-approves-worlds-l...
"Intersect has closed ~$6B in project financings and raised ~$2.1B in corporate equity to support the buildout of clean energy assets including data center opportunities across the U.S." [1]
Not exactly farmers. Solar farmers, perhaps.
[0] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/06/13/largest-battery-stora...
[0] https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/new-approac...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
For both the French and British the current investments are fueled by wanting to subsidize their military nuclear ambitions.
As per expected Sizewell C costs it will be even more expensive than Hinkley Point C, nothing learned.
The ”lifespan” you proclaim is also an extremely rosy picture. About the entire plant except outer shell and a few core components like the pressure vessel gets replaced over it.
You also have no idea if expensive nuclear power will have an economical lifespan lasting as long.
We already see existing nuclear plants all over Europe being forced out of the market by cheap renewables. This will only worsen leading to nuclear power having fewer and fewer hours to amortize its insanely high costs over.
No. The load factor of the pair of EPRs built in China (5 years late and 60% above the budget) at Taishan is quite bad (.55 and .76).
In France the EPR isn't even producing electricity, while it was to be delivered in 2012 (budget 3.3 billions €, real cost > 23.7 billions €)
> delay and cost overruns caused by local political opposition and lack of vision
Source? An official report (dubbed the "Folz report") explains why the EPR project in France (Flamanville) was a failure, I cannot find "local political opposition" among the causes.
French ahead: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/media/organes-parleme...
> In France all historical reactors worked so well that we did not feel the need to build more.
The context was quite different: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl... ... and the real total cost of this "nuclearization" is already huge.
> This lead to talented engineers going to retirement without having a chance to pass on their knowledge and experience
The Civaux-2 reactor was delivered in 1999.
In 2000 the French nuclear sector (at the time "Areva") was trying to sell EPRs (even in France).
In 2003 Finland ordered an EPR and work began in 2005.
How exactly are we supposed to believe that all knowledge vanished, without anyone in the industry to act accordingly, especially while the existing French fleet of reactors (56 at the time) had to be maintained?
> our decision to put it aside for a while
Cause: oil counter-shock (~1985), which (sadly) reducing electricity competitivity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?ta...
Even EDF, as early as 1986, considered the nuclear fleet too large: "We will have two to four too many nuclear reactors by 1990," ( https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1986/01/17/nous-auro... ) and this was confirmed by the 1989 Rouvillois-Guillaume-Pellat report. The reason is well known: after the oil price shock, hydrocarbon prices had fallen significantly and sustainably, and they were competing with electricity.
However, reactors were built until the end of the 1990s. Three of them were started after 1985, and four were built in the 1990s. Some were ready to go in 1999 but did only diverge the generate electricity in 2002...
> certified for a lifespan of 60 years
Subject to a successful technical in-depth inspection every 10 years.
CFR Part 52 license (the first one to get it) https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part052/f...,
UK GDA license (of a variant) https://www.onr.org.uk/generic-design-assessment/assessment-...
Let's check!
Hitachi Nuclear, hard hit by the reactor shutdown in Japan following Fukushima, canceled projects, even in Europe (inherited through the acquisition of Horizon Nuclear Power) and even their R&D for Generation 3 (ABWR).
Their overall move is moving them away from the energy sector (abandoning their wind turbine division in 2020).
The deal with GE ("GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy") dates back to 2007 and has produced nothing to date: these large industrial companies (inertia...) with very different and poorly complementary cultures have not worked together, and none will be permanently based on the soil of their first customer (Canada).
The combination of their resources and weak hopes will accentuate the difficulty of orchestrating a large two-headed project: Areva NP (French+German), worse.
The BWRX design is truly innovative and very recent; no examples exist.
Specification adjustments demanded on the fly by the safety authority will likely rain down, delaying and increasing the cost of the project.
The client will be sensitive to this, having already suffered this (at Darlington, the host plant itself) and is experienced (Darlington has been in operation for 30 years).
The customer is strict (their nuclear power is renowned for its good performance), well-positioned to benefit from the advice of US and French safety agencies (whose relevant institutes are interested in SMRs), and perhaps a little bitter about not being able to deploy their national CANDU.
This SMR model has been optimized to be low-cost (series effect), which could (the magnitude of the side effects of certain modifications) make it difficult to adapt despite its modularity.
I see a recipe for disaster likely to make the 4 EPR projects and Vogtle look like resounding successes.
https://youtu.be/CXVHRkd3byg?si=-wqRibYVIOb-E75f
And the fuel flexibility of the CANDU brings all this back to the waste reprocessing original topic too!
This view is much easier to defend than the one in favor of new reactor designs. However, the fundamental debate is about renewables vs. nuclear, and factually, nuclear, even in a nation with good uranium deposits + good track record + design safer than most other ones... is increasingly difficult to defend.
> don't modernize it too much
The price to pay for this is high because it means giving up on trying to resolve some of the problems of nuclear power (risk of accidents, dependence on uranium, waste, proliferation of weapons, etc.).
> it might still be cheap
Projects over the past two decades show that even projects with improved old reactor designs (rather than radically new concepts) fail.
> Decouple Pod
It seems to me that he misses some key points, for example won't such an underground setup be way more difficult to inspect and even more to maintain/repair? Long-term waste repositories projects are way less demanding and their costs are exploding.
Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient
Geothermal: regionally locked
Wind: unpredictable
Hydro: all the good spots are already being used
Coal/oil/gas: too dirty
Nuclear faces none of these problems. It’s a big project at the moment, because SMRs aren’t developed (yet?), but the actual operation and output is unbelievably steady. Newer designs are mostly about mega-safety, and more people getting over Chernobyl can help drive funding to potentially reach fusion - the obvious holy grail. I literally cannot even imagine what you think is more viable?
The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.
Also, it's not inefficient at all, what do you mean by that?
> Geothermal
This is far more promising than nuclear. Enhanced geothermal is opening up massive regions, and the tech is undergoing massive advancement by adopting the huge technology leap form fracking. It is completely dispatchable, and can even have some short term daily storage just by regulating inputs and outputs.
> Wind
Storage solves this today
In the 2000s, I felt like you did. But since about 2015, it's hard for me to understand your views. Especially after seeing what happened at Summer in South Carolina and Vogtle in Georgia, it's clear that nuclear faces larger technological hurdles than solar, geothermal, or wind. Storage changes everything, it's economical, and it's being deployed in massive amounts on grids where economics rule the day (which isn't many of them, since most of our grids are controlled by regulated monopolies).
What kinda batteries are you talking about? There may be tech I’m unaware of, but failing that, there simply isn’t a currently-viable storage solution.
Maybe we’ve made marginal improvements, but our grid certainly cannot handle sending huge amounts of energy to darker regions anyways. The superconductors needed for that don’t exist yet, and the grid overhaul needed to sidestep the superconductors would be tear-jerkingly expensive.
Nuke plants are ready to go. They’re the missing ingredient that steps around all those issues. It provides a large amount of energy, very safely, using a very small land footprint. You can skip huge amounts of the regulation process by using tried-and-tested reactor designs. You can store spent fuel rods in water, then more permanently in concrete and clay.
And again, the holy grail here is fusion. More fusion research will be a completely natural byproduct of a larger nuclear market.
As the other dude said, no one single tech will fix this, and being anti-nuke in an era where we need large amounts of clean energy generation, like, yesterday… we should probably lean on everything we’ve got, and this is tantalizingly low-hanging fruit.
Geothermal does seem to be having its “fusion moment” - I’m very excited to see where that goes! Some Nordic nation (Sweden?) has been living off geothermal for quite some time, so I imagine the tech surrounding its use post-extraction is quite advanced. I’ve got high hopes.
Along a similar line, there was a recent find in hydrogen tech - basically, a way to capture it from the earth, meaning we have an actually-efficient manner of gathering the stuff. Fingers crossed that pans out too!
Solar panels provide shade, retain soil moisture better, and grow better feed crops for sheep and other animals to graze on while acting as living lawn mowers.
(2022) Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep grazed under panels - https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
and more recently
(2025) Landline: Episodes 17 & 18, June 8th & 15th
https://www.thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/11160565 https://www.thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/11160566
https://iview.abc.net.au/video/RF2404Q017S00 https://iview.abc.net.au/video/RF2404Q018S00
ie. In actual practice they're very much the opposite of "ineffcient".
They are also starting use massive batteries including lithium phosphate and sodium tech for things like grid storage and powered locomotives.
> Degradation has proved to be worse than anticipated.
I follow the space closely and there have been zero complaints about this. And regardless the warranties would cover the early installs.
It's going to be extremely hard for any other battery chemistry to catch up to lithium ion. Sodium has a chance, but the supply chain for lithium is massive, growing, and has lots of substitutions if bottlenecks arise.
The logistics challenges of nuclear are an order of magnitude higher than for nuclear. With far more financial risk, timelines around a decade instead of a year.
The technology for storage is robust, scaling massively, and pretty much unstoppable in the US unless there are explicit bans. Nuclear literally needs a technooogy advancement to catch up, and the closest is SMR production, which is coming close to a decade of being in vogue, with plans stalling out everywhere. Even the planned BWRXs in Canada at Darlington may now be at risk since the US is starting to be viewed as unreliable and too risky to depend upon.
The ones I've seen in the news have enough batteries to time-shift the output by like four hours. Which is rather less then would be needed to keep up output through morning if there weren't other kinds of sources doing that part.
If all else fails: power up the backup natural gas power plants for a couple of hours. We're trying to minimize CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, getting to 0% immediately isn't the goal. Run a carbon capture plant during times of energy excess to compensate if you feel like it.
These are not complicated. They scale small, scale big. This is not very complicated engineering, and not very difficult to understand with even basic electronics knowledge.
The existence of the tech isn't the issue, it is the logistics, cost and practicality of building it at grid scale. If you try to calculate how many batteries you'd need to store the equivalent energy of a hydro reservoir, or one hour of a nuclear plant, then try to estimate the land required, you'd quickly discover how intractable the issue is.
We're going to need to electrify a lot of things to lower emissions. And electrifying things requires a big source of base load. Overbuilding renewables, adding storage, enlarging transmission/grids, and load shedding all help; but likely still fall short of the mark at a reasonable cost.
Nuclear is expensive, but it fills key gaps in other solutions and helps reduce overall system risk.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
Vogtle is showing that to be wrong. It costs something like $180-$200/MWh, when market value is around $50/MWh on average. Solar with enough storage to operate as baseload is far cheaper than nuclear today, and will only get cheaper over the next decade. See for example:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uaes-masdar-launches...
I regularly run the numbers for the US, and using old NREL numbers it's $120/MWh.
The US has great solar resources. Germany has some of the worst.
But in any case most of the cost is in the battery, not the panels, which are cheap. So bump that up and it doesn't change the cost much.
I'm any case, unless you are Finland or similar, nuclear is not on the table.
As for the "five percent of nuclear waste, which is composed of long-lived radioactive material" it rather conflates transuranics (with fairly long half lives) and fission products (which are generally fairly short-lived https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-lived_fission_product#Lon...). A key benefit of reprocessing is splitting short and long half life materials, which will enable better disposal options tailored to the nature of the material. For instance, short-lived can be vitrified and stored near the surface for a few hundred years, the long-lived baked into synroc. All this has been done.
Plutonium waste (predominantly Pu-239, but also Pu-240, Pu-241, Pu-242) is used as the initial fissile driver to start and maintain the chain reaction. Often used as PuF4 dissolved in the fluoride salt. Th-232 (as ThF4) is located in a separate "blanket" region surrounding the core or dissolved in salt channels flowing around the moderator structure. The bred U-233 is chemically separated (online reprocessing is key!) from thorium and fission products in the salt processing system and fed back into the core. While U-233 takes over primary power generation, the Pu isotopes are continuously being consumed
It's fascinating that the entire history of nuclear power is tied up with the history of nuclear weapons.
Throrium was not employed as a reactor fuel because it couldn't be used to make nuclear weapons.
It is always best to plant the trees now and then not need to harvest them later rather than not plant them now and then not have them when you do need them.
A lot of solar's problems magically disappear when you apply a nuclear-level budget to it. Less output during cloudy days? Build twice as many panels and you've solved it while still remaining cheaper than nuclear. What about night? Build wind turbines, hydro storage, and batteries Windless, dark winter nights? You've got a massive budget for a handful of 99.9%-idle fossil peaker plants with carbon capture.
Nuclear is a technological solution to an economical problem. It's sexy, but it doesn't solve anything.
solar is intermittents, nuclear is base load