Nuclear Power is Not as bad as it seems.

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Sure, if you don't mind leaving the waste for other people to clean up.

If the world continues to depend on fossil fuels, there soon won't be any people around to clean.

Nuclear waste is not actually a problem, regardless of what you were led to believe. It can be reprocessed for more nuclear fuel or it can be transmuted into an inert element so that it's no longer a danger. Often, the high level waste is stored on site.

The biggest problem for growing nuclear as an alternative to oil and coal - there just isn't enough Uranium:

https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-p ... 05%20years.

Check Vaclav Smil if you want to hear the doom and gloom for global warming targets but effectively he's saying it'll take us centuries to sort out how to run our modern economies on something other than majority oil and coal because it's an exponentially more expensive problem than landing astronauts on the moon or solving the CFC issue.

Well of course the author of that article said nothing about breeder reactors. These have historically been thought too dangerous but given the current climate crisis, the world may choose to rethink its risk threshold.

Only because it caught my attention as I was going through the article. Not the most obvious placement or lengthy discussion of the topic but:

And a major fission surplus wouldn't wipe people out before that?

There's more than enough uranium if you use breeder reactors. Plus, if nerd be, they can switch to thorium reactors in future.

isn't uranium used for other purposes? what happens when we use it all up and there is none left for those other purposes?

Guess the article's wrong then. Nevermind!

At the moment, the uranium used for other purposes is usually what they call depleted uranium after the isotope used in conventional reactors (uranium-235) is used up. 99% percent of uranium is the isotope uranium-238, which is not usable in conventional reactors and that's the depleted uranium used for those other purposes as you say. However, in breeder reactors, that other 99% percent of uranium can be changed into plutonium to be used as further nuclear fuel. That's why I said that there's more than enough uranium to power the world if we were to build breeder reactors.

To a large extent, it is wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium

A pro-nuclear page just slightly more optimistic than phys.org:
https://world-nuclear.org/information-l ... 90%20years.

If you could actually do breeders with a 5-6 year limit for a 15TW economy (which some people are arguing is already closer to 19TW), and you can actually - cleanly - multiply fuel value by 60x and not have that eaten up by other cost considerations, it could work for several centuries.

I think to really be credible they'd need a way to do this with SMR's. IMHO SMR's seem like they're only way in which you can really mass-produce nuclear the way SpaceX mass-produces rockets and drive the cost down. Most of the issues around breeder reactors relate to huge / highly expensive facilities that they say are 25% more expensive to run than standard facilities (and they have safety concerns with the molten metal in this case having fewer safeguards than water-based cooling). The main thing I saw cited as to why 'most' current SMR's couldn't handle breeder reaction had something to do with the amount of sodium needed for neutron containment.

I'm personally *not* an expert in this area (not sure if we actually do have any resident experts in the proper technical sense) but the experts I've heard talk about it aren't optimistic regarding supply nor the idea that nuclear could feasibly replace oil and coal.

Also not sure if any of this will clear up over the course of the the thread, whether no one at the top of the field can really come up with accurate estimates, or whether venture capital's already doping public info on this.