> We still don't know how to handle spent fuel.

Actually we do, technically, and the amount is trivial (and can be reused, though that isn't currently being done). Spent fuel is a political problem. In fact, last time I checked even just the radiation from coal power plants is greater than from nuclear plants.

> The exact same line was fed to us when Chernobyl was state of the art

Chernobyl was never state of the art and western reactors, which are much safer, are also of a design derived from military designs, not optimized for safety. Also, the negative health effects of coal and other energy sources are so much worse than even Chernobyl that it isn't funny.

"Chernobyl was never state of the art"

Right. Chernobyl-style designs were rejected at a very early stage in the West.

>Chernobyl was never state of the art...

That is being pretty charitable. A plant like Chernobyl would have been illegal to build in any other country.

Political problem? Yes. How much will the problem cost to fix? Uncertainty has a cost.

> Chernobyl argument

Consider airliners. Airliners have been around for 80 years, and get substantially safer every decade. This is a statistical fact. Every crash is used as a learning experience and designs, procedures, and training is adjusted as a result.

There's no reason to believe that such does not apply to nuclear power stations.

One of the biggest problems with nuclear is that we aren't building new plants.

Outside of submarines and aircraft carriers, that is. We seem to have those pretty figured out.

You'd think that nuclear propulsion would be a natural choice for the biggest of the enormous cargo container ships that are currently burning millions of gallons of dirty, dirty bunker fuel instead.

Of course we do. You need to update your ken on nuclear and stop being willfully ignorant. Spent fuel is fuel for breeder reactors, at the end you sit with material that is less radioactive than Guarapari beach.

You blame the nuclear industry, I blame my own party, the Greens, and their relentless demonising of the one thing that could have reversed doubling of atmospheric CO2, and I forgot how many times sea C02 levels. And you and your anti-nuclear agitpop is pulling us further into this mess. Please educate yourself and stop being part of the problem.

> We still don't know how to handle spent fuel.

Yes we do, we can reprocess most of it and then just store what's left - which is such a small amount it could just be buried and essentially forgotten about.

Throw the "spent" fuel in a breeder reactor, reduce it by >90%, store the rest (it's really not much, volume wise, and decays a lot faster after it's been through a breeder).

Large proportions of coal plants spew uranium particles into the atmosphere. That's the radioactivity I worry about.

> Also, I'm always fascinated of the "Chernobyl was unsafe, today reactors are safe" argument. The exact same line was fed to us when Chernobyl was state of the art.

And yet the death toll of Chernobyl turned out to be a tiny fraction of what was feared, and a blib compared to the death tolls from coal and other types.

Two of the reactors kept being operated for years. That's how small of a problem it turned out to be.

> There are good reasons to think that it may indeed be so this time. But the nuclear industry has lost all trust and all right to demand anyone ever trusted them again.

On the contrary they have demonstrated that the plants are safe enough that even in face of utter incompetency and criminal levels of negligence, nuclear disasters are manageable.

Unlike, say, collapsing damns, or coal plants that kill during normal operation.

> collapsing damns [...] kill during normal operation

Thank god I don't live anywhere near a dam designed to collapse as part of normal operation.

The "during normal operation" referred to the coal plants, which should be pretty obvious.

Obvious from the correctly set commas.

In his posthumously published memoirs, Valeri Legasov, the First Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, revealed that the Institute's scientists had long known that the RBMK reactor had significant design flaws.[16][17] Legasov's death from suicide, apparently as a result of becoming bitterly disillusioned with the failure of the authorities to confront the flaws, caused shockwaves throughout the Soviet nuclear industry and the problems with the RBMK design were rapidly accepted.[18][19]

- Wikipedia

The design of the RBMK and the lack of criticism were due to political reasons. Similar to how today we can't update or replace reactors.