Are you talking about a dirty bomb? Spent nuclear fuel from PWR/BWR do not contain the right isotopes of Plutonium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor-grade_plutonium
> People currently value not getting nuked more than clean and unlimited fission energy
This looks like a false-choice. A choice between the presence of nuclear weapons vs unlimited fission energy might be slightly fairer, but many countries have a civil nuclear program without nuclear weapons.
> With renewable energy power plants, you can use normal security
Non-"normal security" is not a great cost for a nuclear power station (1+ GW). 50 extra staff might be 5M USD a year extra, so 0.60 USD/MWh more. Scaling to more reactors per site would give economies of scale.
> You need to provide accountability to IAEA to prove that you don't smuggle those plutonium away to make nukes.
Accountability is good; tracking where each fuel bundle is and goes is fairly standard practice (at least nowadays), no? Audits don't have to be a pain if their requirements mesh with the business processes.
> This is really sad as they're throwing all the good fuel away from the waste.
The Plutonium is good stuff for breeder reactors. The depleted Uranium bulk is less useful, as we have thousands of tonnes already sitting around. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of reprocessing is the extraction and vitrification of fission products. Less bulk, splitting the higher activity products out of the bulk, reducing the storage requirements.
> there's no way we can remove those expensive safeguards
Rules can be changed. De-escalation is possible!
Consider Helion's design. This reactor will produce copious excess neutrons and tritium from DD fusion. A single 50 MW (average) Helion reactor would produce enough neutrons in a year to make half a ton of plutonium in a fission-suppressed blanket. It would also produce more than enough tritium to enable all the bombs made from the plutonium to be boosted. And this is a single, rather small fusion reactor!
Cheap neutrons would be a proliferation nightmare.
Since it's so dangerous and rife for abuse, we shouldn't allow anyone to use it despite the obvious benefits, right?
This is fear mongering and nothing more.
One of the reasons is that we can make nuclear bombs out of it. People currently value not getting nuked more than clean and unlimited fission energy, so everything that might be used to make nukes are insanely regulated. This have downstream effects that make nuclear fission hard and expensive:
- With renewable energy power plants, you can use normal security. With nuclear fusion power plants, stealing a big tokamak wall to make dirty bomb is hard, so you can still use normal security. With fission power plants you need special armed security
- You need to provide accountability to IAEA to prove that you don't smuggle those plutonium away to make nukes. This affects the nuclear power plant design, as you don't want to have any blind spot where the operator can smuggle the nuclear material away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HHMAht3gSg
- Some countries ban nuclear waste reprocessing because they don't want someone using the plutonium from reprocessing process to make nukes. This is really sad as they're throwing all the good fuel away from the waste. Similar story with breeder reactors
With meltdown risk at least its solvable by safer reactor design, but there's no way we can remove those expensive safeguards.