The reactors are much more advanced designs, and the US and much of the world has been focused the opposite direction: on very simple, very safe, lower cost designs. Making a fast neutron reactor is just a different class of beast, and it's unclear where the appetite is for it. (Which is a shame.) Japan, China, India, and Russia are the only countries to have started new breeder reactors projects since Franc'es last reactor Superhenix in 1985.
Most breeder reactors use a reprocessing mechanism that is somewhat akin to the enrichment used for weapons. It's goal is to extract the good & enriched stuff & leave the rest of the fission product out (which still have hundreds of years to be dealt with). There's still justifiable hesitancy about developing such technology further. Even if we feel like we can use it safely in X Y and Z countries, once the technology becomes more proven (particularly if it can be shown to be cost effective) it's hard to imagine it won't become more available, and that has a real & scary risk.
Ask yourself how many of the above countries that started breeder reactors do we want making new nuclear weapons? And note how many have kicked out nuclear weapons inspectors (Russia, China).
One of my favorite candidate designs was the Integral Fast Reactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor), began in 1984 as a faster fast reactor which was considerably safer by default, and which was capable of a lower-refinement (lower proliferation concern) burning of already spent fuel (including a wide range of medium-lived/longer-lived transuranic wastes). But almost all indicators are that we try for simpler & dumber designs, not to improve & refine what we could do.
I also think it's a huge disservice only identify short half-life products as dangerous. Yes they have the most immediate threat, but we generate plenty of other wastes that are severely scary, particularly among the transuranics, and plenty of even the "low" nuclear wastes will quickly ruin an area & spread if mistakes happen. The variety of different nuclearly active chemical wastes we have to deal with is vast (those pesky transuranics). I'd love to be talked down here some, I think this is one place I'm best able to be convinced with good science, but my reading of information like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio... is that there is just so much to be dealt with, such a pesky variety. And yes fast reactors help a lot here, if we can deploy them at scale effectively, but again I just question whether on a cost basis that will happen.
I agree with you in principle that nuclear has amazing potential to be handled well. But in fact, most of the world takes the shortest route they can & thinks nothing of how much or what kind of waste is generated. It's a network externality, foisted off onto the government to deal with. Even in France, the one beacon of breeder reactors, there's been scant investment in improving iterating or refining what mechanisms they have; continuing to use one centralized PUREX refining center to do most of the work. Meanwhile we have few positive indicators elsewhere about good nuclear. IFR derived designs like PRISM, S-PRISM and Versatile Test Reactor have repeatedly stalled.
To provide some counter to my own general thread, Japan has shown again and again a willingness to try & try hard that I respect. They recently started working with TerraPower on a PRISM/IFR based design that could potentially go somewhere. But this is a faint ray of hope in a gloomy low-tech unglorious nuclear landscape. https://neutronbytes.com/2022/02/03/terrapower-teams-up-with... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35430993
This to me is the single biggest reason to pursue the tech. The genie is out of the bottle.
Right now there's not success. To say the genie is out of the bottle ignores how new these experimental Russian, Chinese, & Indian reactor projects are. Most are not online. How well they operate now or will operate as they really go online unknown. How refined their refinement is is unknown. How much would these authoritarian entities share with the rest of the world? If heavy-industrialists like GE Hitachi & others start cranking out ultra-successful PUREX breeder reactors, find how to make them cost efffective, and then really many many nations start having these capabilities, doesn't that worry you, just a bit?
The Russian projects I know of are 60+ years old now. They've been plenty successful.
> How much would these authoritarian entities share with the rest of the world? If heavy-industrialists like GE Hitachi & others start cranking out ultra-successful PUREX breeder reactors, find how to make them cost efffective, and then really many many nations start having these capabilities, doesn't that worry you, just a bit?
Not any more than it concerns me that the nations that already have these capabilities do. The non-authoritarian entities of today are the authoritarians of tomorrow and vice-versa. Eventually, this technology will make it out there in a cost-efficient and easily-reproduced manner, it's mostly just a matter of time.
And even if some less-than-friendly nations get access to this, and use it to make nuclear weapons, and then deploy them, unless we're talking about the deployment of a world-ending number of nuclear weapons (an arsenal that would need to really rival the current major nuclear powers) should not lead to a global nuclear exchange. Or more correctly, if it does lead to a global nuclear exchange, we deserve it for being so stupid as to escalate like that.
Is proper processing free or profitable? Nuclear is already unprofitable, in fact, in the history of nuclear energy, it has never been profitable. This is why it requires nations to build nuclear power plants, and investors are only interested in taking the money from selling electricity and not in building the plants, storing the waste, security for storing the waste, being responsible for decommissioning old power plants, and thus it is highly unlikely they'd be interested in paying for properly processing nuclear waste into tough ceramics.
Pro-nukes love to waste their time arguing about this and that. But they only need to do one thing to have all the nuclear power they can use: make it profitable. Nothing else matters, not NIMBYS, not the safety, not the waste, only economic viability.
It's included in the price of operation. Is the processing of CO₂ emissions included in coal or gas generation? Of course not, because it's dumped in the atmosphere.
> Nuclear is already unprofitable
French electricity is cheaper than Germany's. Also the government has been taking EDF's money for decades to cover budget shortfalls, so it's not even subsidised, quite the opposite in fact.
...but thinks that Chernobyl was only responsible for 433 deaths, and they fell asleep at their computers before considering the carbon footprint of uranium mining and enrichment (and unlike materials used in permanent magnets and batteries, which everyone loves to get excited about - uranium is not recycled, nor can it be at least in the US without enormous infrastructure and policy changes.)
That's how hard they had to reach for "deaths caused by wind and solar" - helicopters crashing into wind turbines.
You can point to "research" like this all you like. Power companies in the US are shutting down nuclear power plants because they're not economical and installed wind/solar capacity is outpacing the shutdowns capacity-wise 6:1, and growing.
Why? Because solar and wind cost a fraction of what nuclear does, and are getting cheaper every year. Meanwhile, nuclear is getting more expensive, and that's with the enormous subsidization of the entire nuclear energy program because of its importance to "defense" for weapons and propulsion.
> There's far worse than slighly warm clean water going into Lake Michigan.
And if a "once in a thousand years" storm (which is happening every few years) happens, and the plant does a Fukashima, and pollutes the largest fresh-water lake with radioactive waste, rendering a water supply for tens of millions of people undrinkable, then what?
I can't say I've ever seen 433? About 50-ish people died from the acute effects of the disaster and over time, the number came in around 4000 according to UNSCEAR.
Note for comparison that coal kills 24,000 in the US each year, and no other nuclear power accident in history has killed anyone. Maybe 1 person in Fukushima, depending on how you do the attribution. Zero at Three Mile Island.
The Bangqiao dam killed 240,000 people in one fell swoop but nobody holds that against hydro. We assume we've learned from that and engineered a better dam. We seem to have different standards for the spicy rocks for some reason.
> ... and they fell asleep at their computers before considering the carbon footprint of uranium mining and enrichment (and unlike materials used in permanent magnets and batteries, which everyone loves to get excited about - uranium is not recycled, nor can it be at least in the US without enormous infrastructure and policy changes.)
Err, no, that's factored into the numbers. It still has a lower carbon footprint than wind and solar, let alone storage. Because uranium is so incredibly energy dense.
> Why? Because solar and wind cost a fraction of what nuclear does, and are getting cheaper every year.
Not for the same profile of generation, no. A pure wind and solar grid plus storage would cost dramatically more than nuclear does today. In fact even a 90% renewable grid plus storage is dramatically more expensive that nuclear today. So yeah, an incomplete solution is cheaper than a complete solution, I guess.
> And if a "once in a thousand years" storm (which is happening every few years) happens, and the plant does a Fukashima, and pollutes the largest fresh-water lake with radioactive waste, rendering a water supply for tens of millions of people undrinkable, then what?
This is a silly hypothetical with no basis.
Anyways, the data is clear.
By your own citation, solar is safer. I realize graphs can be tricky to read, but come on. The fact that nuclear requires so much concrete also means solar and wind use less carbon. And you're missing a data point: nuclear is also the most expensive form of energy ever conceived.
I would consider them equally safe, and both the safest form of energy. If you really want to get technical this graph excludes rooftop solar which has about 20X the fatality rate of industrial solar in terms of deaths per TWh. [2] But I don't really care, they're equally the safest form of energy.
> The fact that nuclear requires so much concrete also means solar and wind use less carbon.
This is factored into the calculations I linked and no, they don't.
> And you're missing a data point: nuclear is also the most expensive form of energy ever conceived.
Again, not accurate. Solar and wind are bursty and sometimes just drop to zero. Solar at night or when it's cloudy, and wind when it's not windy.
If you actually want a 100% renewable grid you need storage. And adding this storage makes wind + solar + storage combo significantly more expensive than nuclear. In fact even a 90-something% renewable grid with storage is more expensive than nuclear. [1]
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/what-energy-storage-would-have-to-...
[2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...
But it is.
The generation of electricity through nuclear power plants in the United States cost 29.13 U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour in 2021.[1]
Oh, but there certainly is. The historically high cost of nuclear power electricity is largely due to capital costs (that you would be paying for whether the plants produced electricity or not), and because plants in the US have often not been designed to ramp up and down easily, they tend to be operated continuously. It takes $10B before the first watt of electricity is generated. Uranium costs a fortune. Waste storage is astoundingly expensive due to amount of time it must be stored, not to mention the cost of security for that storage.
Meanwhile,
a typical solar system in the U.S. can produce electricity at the cost of $0.06 to $0.08 per kilowatt-hour.[2]
[2] https://www.electricrate.com/solar-energy/price-per-kwh/
Until then it's just lies and whining to demand handouts.
Bets are already hedged intrinsically. The data is clear, nuclear is the safest, cleanest, lowest-carbon and most reliable form of energy we have. [1]
There's far worse than slighly warm clean water going into Lake Michigan.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy