Well there’s hardly anything to bury if you reprocess. And we know how to reprocess “spent” fuel (I put quotes around “spent” as it still has 98% of its energy left).
And that’s expensive - too expensive compared against new uranium - so we bury it instead.
But if you now hold it up against the cost of staying with fossil fuels (in the long term), even reprocessed uranium fuel is damn cheap.
Mind you, this is before you consider the next set of nuclear reactors coming online, which hardly produce any waste in the first place. I totally understand if people then argue “but that’s not now” which it isn’t. It’s just that the step towards new reactor tech is one we know how to take, so we literally know how to “solve climate” change: It’s a fuck-tonne of renewables and a fuck-tonne of nuclear.
Well there’s hardly anything to bury if you reprocess. And we know how to reprocess “spent” fuel (I put quotes around “spent” as it still has 98% of its energy left).
And that’s expensive - too expensive compared against new uranium - so we bury it instead.
But if you now hold it up against the cost of staying with fossil fuels (in the long term), even reprocessed uranium fuel is damn cheap.
Mind you, this is before you consider the next set of nuclear reactors coming online, which hardly produce any waste in the first place. I totally understand if people then argue “but that’s not now” which it isn’t. It’s just that the step towards new reactor tech is one we know how to take, so we literally know how to “solve climate” change: It’s a fuck-tonne of renewables and a fuck-tonne of nuclear.
We know how to solve it. We just don’t want to.