First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.
To be fair, nuclear waste tends to be disposed of much more properly than coal waste.
There’s also orders of magnitudes less.
True, but still not anywhere near “clean” as it’s always marketed as.
This is a stupid take.
Coal power puts out more radioactive waste than nuclear does, and coal sends it right into the air where we can’t manage it.
Nuclear waste is kept solid, and contained. We know exactly where it goes and as long as the rules are followed it’s not at risk of polluting anything.
Sure solar and wind don’t have any by product once they are setup, but they also don’t fit the baseline power need that nuclear does.
Problem is it’s not profitable to follow the rules, and conservatives have blocked building a national “permanent” storage site for decades. The IS has no where to put it. It’s just sitting in storage facilities, above ground and in many states in places where an earthquake could cause it to leak into ground water and make the area unlivable for centuries, or cost trillions to clean up.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-is-piling-up-does-the-u-s-have-a-plan/
Quite a large number of Republicans, including Trump himself, spend decades trying to ram Yucca mountain through. It faced heavy resistance from both the Clinton and Obama Administrations, the State of Nevada, and myriad of environmental organizations. Trying to blame it on “Conservatives” is pretty ridiculous.
https://www.ktnv.com/news/history-of-yucca-mountain-1982-2018
Yucca Mountain was killed by decades of persistent interference by opponents of nuclear power.
What makes you say that. Nuclear waste has the consistency of glass or sand depending on how it’s processed. And if we reprocessed that waste like the French we could effectively remove the danger of it.
See earlier in the thread. The waste is highly radioactive, of course, and very hot for some time. First it is dumped in pools. If the pool floods or cracks, you end up with the Fukushima issue. Fortunately that went to the ocean primarily and so was diluted. But in the US, much of the country is landlocked and it would instead enter ground water.
Second, once the material is cooled enough to transport, it is supposed to be moved to a secure location, dropped deep into the ground, and encased in concrete. At this point if there are no earthquakes and water doesn’t enter and damage the concrete, this will stay put for a thousand years or so, but eventually it will get out long before it’s safe considering some of it takes around 250,000 years for it to decay enough to be safe.
As for what France does, as I mentioned, the US has not developed or built that tech because there is ultimately no profit in it and the US is unwilling to spend tax money on it. So it would fall to increased energy cost for the consumer in places where nuclear is used, and no one is going to like that. The cost of building the reprocessing facilities and doing the actual processing outweighs the value of the produced product. And building the first one is going to be the most expensive, and no modern energy company is likely to want to take the hit to short term stock prices in order to take it on. And conservatives won’t approve tax increases at all in the current political climate. And progressive places have already started moving to renewables instead since it’s cheaper.
First Ford, then Carter stopped commercial re-processing in the United States. Reagan brought it back. G. H. W. Bush then put the brakes on it but stopped short of an outright ban. Clinton stepped on the brakes even harder but again stopped shy of a full ban and when Bush Jr came into office he started a slow process of bringing it back. That’s as far as this CRS Report goes although there may be an updated one somewhere out there.
Still, the US has spent money on it and was doing so at least as recently as 2008. It appears the biggest worry we have is proliferation of nuclear material, not profit or cost.
Not a single power source we have is clean
How is solar, wind, or hydro not “clean”? The generating of the power, not the building of the facilities, building anything is never clean.