Comment by tsimionescu
2 days ago
It is not "THE" issue, it's barely even "an issue". The amount of radioactive material produced by a fission plant, and the form in which it comes, makes it trivial to store relatively safely - certainly much, much easier than the CO2 waste that most of our other energy generation solutions emit.
Also, the biggest issues with nuclear power are (1) the risk of catastrophic meltdowns, (2) the risk of using it as cover for nuclear armament, (3) the massive capital expenditure to create a plant, and (4) the amount of water needed for cooling and running the plant. All of these make the problem of taking some radioactive rocks and burying them trivial in comparison.
Do I remember correctly that modern thorium-based reactor designs mitigate at least #1 and #2?
And #4 can be addressed by not using potable water for cooling. Even assuming a reactor is water-cooled in the first place, that water has to be purified anyway before it can be used as coolant - so might as well just use seawater if you're gonna have to purify it anyway.
Hell, a coastal nuclear plant could be a net-negative water consumer with a desalination plant onsite. California could completely abolish the very notion of "drought" within its borders by going all-in on nuclear and desalination. It probably never will, though, because rich landowners are California's most protected class and anything that'll lower their property values (by "ruining" the pretty coastal views) is verboten.
I actually tried to do some back-of-the-napkin calculations about this a while ago and unfortunately, even if you made nuclear regulations sane, so that the cost came down significantly, I still don't think it would be cheap enough for ag use, which is the actual issue with droughts in CA. Municipal water you could likely supply completely with desal and it wouldn't even get that much more expensive, but 70% of water use in CA is for ag, and they couldn't support the price increase.
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