> Yes, it stays active for 10k+ years, but it's actually not that expensive to store them at specialized storages forever. Because it's a very small amount on a grand scale.

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.

The strange part psychologically is that saying it lasts 10,000 years somehow seems worse and more unmanageable than say cadmium or arsenic which last forever.

10k years isn't that long. Some concentrated chemical stuff with heavy metals or mercury or whatever in it will be toxic forever.

We can't even agree to keep under 2°C warming in 100 years, so I am also confused about why people are worried about waste that lasts 10K years. My guess is that they actually worry it will be leaked during their lifetime, whereas they know X° warming is beyond their lifetime.

Wind and solar are still competitive without the credits, and while it'd be great to keep the credits to get off of fossil fuels faster, they are no longer needed.

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...)

Why do that when safely storing the waste takes up an incredibly tiny amount of space and costs much less?

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).

I think that the Wikipedia article is about as good as it gets, because the process details are classified:

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.

Radioactive materials that produce enough heat to warm a greenhouse in a conveniently sized package are extremely hazardous if uncontained. It's relatively easy to encapsulate radioactive materials against accidental exposure, but much harder to guard against misinformed or malicious deliberate exposure. Then you get expensive and lethal incidents like these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...

The Soviets did this with RTGs for remote on site power production. They're now abandoned and dangerous sources of nuclear material for those with evil intent.

Theoretically yes, but you seriously complicate the storage of nuclear materials when you start packing it all together and trying to create heat or keep it at any elevated temperature for harvesting heat. That is basically the entire concept of a nuclear reactor, except now its either a random mash of nuclear stuff unless you spend a ton of money categorizing and actively monitoring the state of all the material put in, but with a less robust cooling system than an actual nuke plant and far lower output.

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.

I had considered submitting a YC application for a startup that would do this, take waste radioactive material and turn it into uniform physical pellets or cubes for district heating via vitrification, but it seemed like between the capital costs and regulatory hurdles, it's just really, really hard to make commercial economics work. At least with electrical generation with nuclear, you can get some buy in from people willing to tie up billions of dollars for decades even with a high risk of failure, or get someone with deep pockets like big tech to sign a power purchase agreement for existing nuclear capacity.

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/)

A substantial amount of "nuclear waste" nowadays is low-level waste - things like old radium-dial clocks, or contaminated protective clothing from nuclear power plants, or medical waste from radiotherapy patients. The overall concentration of nuclear material in this waste is very low, and many of the isotopes involved (particularly from materials made radioactive through neutron activation) wouldn't be terribly useful even if they could be effectively extracted.

(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.)

I think the science is pretty well understood. We know how to separate isotopes and react them to create new products, but there will always be some amount of junk that's too reactive to toss in a landfill but not reactive enough to use. Also some of it can be used to make bombs, and that makes us rightfully pretty skittish.

I don’t think anyone is considering its ingestion. At least I hope not, but these are very strange times.

> Nuclear power requires vast investment

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.

As far as reactors that could be deployed in the next 10 years, very optimistically we have:

- 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.

> Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient

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).

Yah-- nuclear isn't going to win on its own, but no one technology is going to get us out of this greenhouse gas mess.

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.

Yeah I agree with you. Im not expecting any real improvements in my personal life by going to nuclear power, but it is all but a solved method to produce nearly any amount of power we would want over extremely long timespans with no significant emissions. You want to desalinate massive amounts of water? Nuke plant. You want to run a huge carbon scrubber farm? Nuke plant. You want endless amounts of steel and aluminum processing and fertilizer production that all require large amounts of energy? Nuclear power. And it doesn't need to rely on promises of future technology improvements or mega-structure scale projects like "Cover X entire state with solar panels and install multiple times the worlds current total battery capacity into the grid." Or waiting for the economics of solar panels to make it viable for all consumers and dealing with all the political shenanigans of connecting them to the grid.

”Baseload” solar is here.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

> I want it to happen even if it slightly increases my power bill or my taxes. And as far as I understand the increase would be slight, if any at all.

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...

The problem with nuclear is the price. As someone else already brought up[0], nuclear is about four times as expensive as solar - and that's pretty much the best case scenario. Try to use nuclear as a peaker plants and it's going to be closer to forty times as expensive, simply because the cost of nuclear is dominated by the construction loan.

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.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515401