From Wikipedia, it looks like Strontium-90 can be used in "treatment of bone cancer, and to treat coronary restenosis via vascular brachytherapy". Pretty cool.
I once heard that “there’s no such thing as nuclear waste, just nuclear materials we haven’t figured out how to use yet,” but I’m unfortunately too dumb to know how true that statement is. Your article seems to indicate, “technically true, but for now still quite a lot to figure out.”
(But keep in mind that the overall concentration being low doesn't make this stuff safe! There can still potentially be highly radioactive material in the waste, like flecks of radioactive dust in a bin of used laboratory gloves or whatnot.)
It is always best to plant the trees now and then not need to harvest them later rather than not plant them now and then not have them when you do need them.
A lot of solar's problems magically disappear when you apply a nuclear-level budget to it. Less output during cloudy days? Build twice as many panels and you've solved it while still remaining cheaper than nuclear. What about night? Build wind turbines, hydro storage, and batteries Windless, dark winter nights? You've got a massive budget for a handful of 99.9%-idle fossil peaker plants with carbon capture.
Nuclear is a technological solution to an economical problem. It's sexy, but it doesn't solve anything.
solar is intermittents, nuclear is base load
If somebody is excited about deploying solar plus storage, that makes a ton of sense because prices are tumbling, enabling all sorts of new applications.
Nuclear is the opposite. It's always overpromised and under delivered. It's a mature tech, there's not big breakthroughs, we understand the design space somewhat well. Or at least well enough that nobody thinks that there's a design which will cause a 5x cost improvement, like is regularly obtained with solar and storage.
The US seems committed to taking the high-cost, low-economic growth path for the next few years, at least according to federal policies, and this would fit in with that. But I don't understand the enthusiasm at all.
Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient
Geothermal: regionally locked
Wind: unpredictable
Hydro: all the good spots are already being used
Coal/oil/gas: too dirty
Nuclear faces none of these problems. It’s a big project at the moment, because SMRs aren’t developed (yet?), but the actual operation and output is unbelievably steady. Newer designs are mostly about mega-safety, and more people getting over Chernobyl can help drive funding to potentially reach fusion - the obvious holy grail. I literally cannot even imagine what you think is more viable?
We're going to need to electrify a lot of things to lower emissions. And electrifying things requires a big source of base load. Overbuilding renewables, adding storage, enlarging transmission/grids, and load shedding all help; but likely still fall short of the mark at a reasonable cost.
Nuclear is expensive, but it fills key gaps in other solutions and helps reduce overall system risk.
The storage tech exists and is in practice right now, no advancements needed.
Also, it's not inefficient at all, what do you mean by that?
> Geothermal
This is far more promising than nuclear. Enhanced geothermal is opening up massive regions, and the tech is undergoing massive advancement by adopting the huge technology leap form fracking. It is completely dispatchable, and can even have some short term daily storage just by regulating inputs and outputs.
> Wind
Storage solves this today
In the 2000s, I felt like you did. But since about 2015, it's hard for me to understand your views. Especially after seeing what happened at Summer in South Carolina and Vogtle in Georgia, it's clear that nuclear faces larger technological hurdles than solar, geothermal, or wind. Storage changes everything, it's economical, and it's being deployed in massive amounts on grids where economics rule the day (which isn't many of them, since most of our grids are controlled by regulated monopolies).
> Degradation has proved to be worse than anticipated.
I follow the space closely and there have been zero complaints about this. And regardless the warranties would cover the early installs.
It's going to be extremely hard for any other battery chemistry to catch up to lithium ion. Sodium has a chance, but the supply chain for lithium is massive, growing, and has lots of substitutions if bottlenecks arise.
The logistics challenges of nuclear are an order of magnitude higher than for nuclear. With far more financial risk, timelines around a decade instead of a year.
The technology for storage is robust, scaling massively, and pretty much unstoppable in the US unless there are explicit bans. Nuclear literally needs a technooogy advancement to catch up, and the closest is SMR production, which is coming close to a decade of being in vogue, with plans stalling out everywhere. Even the planned BWRXs in Canada at Darlington may now be at risk since the US is starting to be viewed as unreliable and too risky to depend upon.
The existence of the tech isn't the issue, it is the logistics, cost and practicality of building it at grid scale. If you try to calculate how many batteries you'd need to store the equivalent energy of a hydro reservoir, or one hour of a nuclear plant, then try to estimate the land required, you'd quickly discover how intractable the issue is.
The ones I've seen in the news have enough batteries to time-shift the output by like four hours. Which is rather less then would be needed to keep up output through morning if there weren't other kinds of sources doing that part.
If all else fails: power up the backup natural gas power plants for a couple of hours. We're trying to minimize CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, getting to 0% immediately isn't the goal. Run a carbon capture plant during times of energy excess to compensate if you feel like it.
What kinda batteries are you talking about? There may be tech I’m unaware of, but failing that, there simply isn’t a currently-viable storage solution.
Maybe we’ve made marginal improvements, but our grid certainly cannot handle sending huge amounts of energy to darker regions anyways. The superconductors needed for that don’t exist yet, and the grid overhaul needed to sidestep the superconductors would be tear-jerkingly expensive.
Nuke plants are ready to go. They’re the missing ingredient that steps around all those issues. It provides a large amount of energy, very safely, using a very small land footprint. You can skip huge amounts of the regulation process by using tried-and-tested reactor designs. You can store spent fuel rods in water, then more permanently in concrete and clay.
And again, the holy grail here is fusion. More fusion research will be a completely natural byproduct of a larger nuclear market.
As the other dude said, no one single tech will fix this, and being anti-nuke in an era where we need large amounts of clean energy generation, like, yesterday… we should probably lean on everything we’ve got, and this is tantalizingly low-hanging fruit.
Geothermal does seem to be having its “fusion moment” - I’m very excited to see where that goes! Some Nordic nation (Sweden?) has been living off geothermal for quite some time, so I imagine the tech surrounding its use post-extraction is quite advanced. I’ve got high hopes.
Along a similar line, there was a recent find in hydrogen tech - basically, a way to capture it from the earth, meaning we have an actually-efficient manner of gathering the stuff. Fingers crossed that pans out too!
Vogtle is showing that to be wrong. It costs something like $180-$200/MWh, when market value is around $50/MWh on average. Solar with enough storage to operate as baseload is far cheaper than nuclear today, and will only get cheaper over the next decade. See for example:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/uaes-masdar-launches...
* A contrarianism visa vis environmental crusades against nuclear power that presented it's dangers in a distorted fashion.
* How nuclear on paper presents the possibility of limitless energy with little pollution.
* Nuclear is the kind of big-tech solution that appeals to a lot of nerds.
The problem is that nuclear failed independently from environmental crusades even if some of these were successful. Nuclear power requires vast investment and radiation has the problem that it can weaken anything. Meltdowns aren't the apocalypse environmentalists imply but they destroy permanently a huge store of investment and their commonness has tanked nuclear power independently from popular crusades but those with a stake in nuclear like point to "them hippies" to cover their own failures.
In my opinion this is the strongest argument to take. Any argument about radiation or waste is going to be waved away as "scaremongering" and will be solved by innovations riiight aroung the corner - you won't change anyone's mind with that.
On the other hand, the practical arguments are pretty cut-and-dry: the West is unable to build them fast enough to matter, and they are too expensive to compete with renewables on an open energy market. We already have the receipts for traditional reactors due to Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, and Flamanville 3.
Have we solved every single potential problem which needs solving for a 100% renewable grid? No, but we've got plenty of time to work out the edge cases during the transition. Perhaps some magical mass-produced micro nuclear peaker plants will help in that, perhaps they won't. Let's keep investing in tried-and-tested technology like solar, wind, hydro, and battery storage until the nuclear folks get their act together - no need to bet our entire future on a nuclear miracle which probably isn't going to happen anyways.
The reactors we see still operating today are mostly designed in like the 70s and 80s, some going back to the 60s, but that is only like 40 years after the invention of nuclear reactors and nuclear power, we are now over 40 years past that again, and our understanding of nuclear sciences is leaps and bounds above what we used to build most nuke plants in existance.
- Westinghouse AP1000
- EDF EPR
- GE-Hitachi BWRX
The AP1000 and EPR have been shown to be very underwhelming, in the US and Europe, respectively. Those failures are prompting Canada to look at the much smaller 300MW BWRX in Ontario. However before any cost-overruns the BWRX is getting priced at $14/W recently, and the eye-popping cost of the Vogtle AP1000 at $16/W has scared all potential builders away.
If we could return to the older designs, we might be able to complete them at cheaper prices, but as our knowledge has advanced, nuclear has gotten more expensive.
Despite this both France (which has just finished building an EPR) and the UK (which is building one right now) are doubling down and launching new projects to capitalise on the knowledge gained.
In France all historical reactors worked so well that we did not feel the need to build more. This lead to talented engineers going to retirement without having a chance to pass on their knowledge and experience, causing cost overruns on the new constructions. This is not inherent to the technology itself but a symptom of our decision to put it aside for a while. As an example when I was in engineering school I remember being told “don’t do a nuclear physics major there is no job for that in the future”. Not easy retaining excellence in a field when that’s what you tell your children. All the dude that went there anyway are in very very high demand today, as you might expect.
The new generation of reactors is more complex, mainly because of additional security and reliability requirements, which is a good thing. Those are certified for a lifespan of 60 years and costs are computed on that base. Some old gen reactors in the us are looking to extend their lifespan to 80 years. It’s extremely likely the new - safer - reactors will be able go beyond that, reducing the MW costs compared to current estimates.
We are slowly re-learning to build reactors, and mastering a new technology at the same time. The more reactors we build based on that experience the more that initial cost will be distributed.
There is nothing underwhelming in what was delivered; the process to get there was, but we will get better at that.
Plutonium waste (predominantly Pu-239, but also Pu-240, Pu-241, Pu-242) is used as the initial fissile driver to start and maintain the chain reaction. Often used as PuF4 dissolved in the fluoride salt. Th-232 (as ThF4) is located in a separate "blanket" region surrounding the core or dissolved in salt channels flowing around the moderator structure. The bred U-233 is chemically separated (online reprocessing is key!) from thorium and fission products in the salt processing system and fed back into the core. While U-233 takes over primary power generation, the Pu isotopes are continuously being consumed
It's fascinating that the entire history of nuclear power is tied up with the history of nuclear weapons.
Throrium was not employed as a reactor fuel because it couldn't be used to make nuclear weapons.
philipkglass•6h ago
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-MOX-facility-cont...
Work started on the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in 2007, with a 2016 start-up envisaged. Although based on France's Melox MOX facility, the US project has presented many first-of-a-kind challenges and in 2012 the US Government Accountability Office suggested it would likely not start up before 2019 and cost at least USD7.7 billion, far above original estimate of USD4.9 billion.
The most interesting "recycling" effort right now is the laser enrichment process of Silex/Global Laser Enrichment:
https://www.wkms.org/energy/2025-07-02/company-developing-pa...
The company plans to re-enrich old depleted uranium tails from the obsolete gas diffusion enrichment process back up to natural uranium levels of 0.7% U-235. That uranium in turn would be processed by existing commercial centrifuge enrichment to upgrade it to power reactor fuel.
deepsun•5h ago
In comparison, managing steel production waste is way more expensive.
potato3732842•5h ago
cycomanic•4h ago
mlyle•3h ago
Significant inhaled Pu-239 has a fair risk of causing cancer even after a long time. However mercury is volatile and it's a lot easier to end up inhaling fumes.
And mercury is absorbed well through ingestion and Pu isn't, and most of the risk after ingestion would be chemical, not radiological. From that standpoint, it's looking a lot better than other heavy metals.
lazide•2h ago
The reason we don’t have more solid non-radiological toxicity data on Plutonium (compared to other toxic heavy metals) is because any amount significant enough to count kills people radiologically super quick.
That doesn’t mean it’s non-toxic if we ignore the radiological effects.
mlyle•2h ago
* Plutonium is not well absorbed by ingestion compared to other heavy metals and know ballpark ingestion toxicities
* We also know that pretty much all the plutonium except the long-lived isotopes are gone on a timescale of tens of thousands of years-- leaving behind mostly uranium isotopes.
* There's no real reason to believe this mixture of uranium and a small fraction of long-lived plutonium isotopes is significantly worse than ingesting uranium. It might be worse to inhale fine dust, though.
* Mercury is way worse than uranium because it is so readily absorbed.
lazide•1h ago
We have nearly zero experience with weathered or bio modified plutonium. And the experience we do have with plutonium compounds, is limited by the fact people die awfully fast when they’re anywhere near them.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Especially not when the evidence is absent because we can’t get there because everyone dies first from the more obvious bad things happening.
philipkglass•1h ago
The US nuclear weapons program had several hundred people who were accidentally exposed to measurable doses of plutonium. Those workers did not die at the time. The government set up The United States Transuranium and Uranium Registries (USTUR) to track long term health outcomes for such exposed workers.
https://wpcdn.web.wsu.edu/wp-spokane/uploads/sites/1058/2024...
When I worked with the USTUR, they had also acquired some data from former workers in the Soviet nuclear weapons complex. The most exposed workers there received higher doses than any American workers. Even then health impacts were not immediately fatal.
Here's the NIH summary on plutonium toxicology:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK599402/
It's a lot to read, but there has yet to be a human plutonium exposure accident so severe that the exposed individual died quickly. Or at least no published accident of that sort. There is however a dose-dependent risk of lung cancer from inhaling aerosolized plutonium.
lazide•1h ago
mlyle•53m ago
Basically any mercury that I'm going to ingest accidentally is likely to be a salt. Because elemental mercury is going to evaporate.
> Especially not when the evidence is absent because we can’t get there because everyone dies first from the more obvious bad things happening.
Rats given Pu-239 show LD-50's of hundreds of milligrams per kilogram. Versus something like 20 mg/kg for inorganic mercury.
jjk166•4h ago
kibwen•4h ago
lesuorac•3h ago
kibwen•2h ago
In addition, nuclear isn't competing against coal, it's competing against solar.
Synaesthesia•10m ago
throw0101d•4h ago
For some definition of "active".
The first 6-10 years are quite dangerous, which is why stuff is in cooling pools. After about 200-300 years the most dangerous type of radiation (gamma) has mostly burned stopped, and you're left with alpha and beta, which can be stopped with tinfoil and even paper.
I've heard the remark that after ~300 years the main way for nuclear waste to cause bad health effects is if you eat it or grind it up and snort it.
deepsun•4h ago
People often focus on "radiation" part forgetting the "contamination" part. You can literally walk into the Chernobyl reactor active zone today for up to 2 minutes. But you cannot produce any food in soils around it for thousand years. And there's dozens of dangerous isotopes, each one accumulating and affecting human tissues differently.
Public generally only knows about Geiger counter. Yes, it will scream if everything is FUBAR, but it's useless for estimating safety of a food product.
throw0101d•4h ago
* https://www.nwmo.ca/canadas-used-nuclear-fuel/how-is-it-stor...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask
Are you telling me it's unsafe? Someone better tell Madison Hill:
* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...
* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856
* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
Or Paris Ortiz-Wines:
* https://twitter.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...
(The context here is not walking down some road and getting bombarded with particles: but about the storage of industrial material and the risks it involves. Yes, stuff gets shot out at >300 years: but it's not just lying around randomly.)
blibble•4h ago
which it will do eventually, if it's left out in the open
it needs to be buried
reducing the volume via reprocessing helps
assuming you can do something with the 97% of "useful" stuff extracted (which the UK has mostly failed at, and now stores it in a warehouse)
74B5•3h ago
https://www.bge.de/en/asse/short-information/history-of-the-...
It might be true that nuclear power produces less waste but we have to consider the scales of global energy demand, multiply it by the time scales of nuclear waste to reach what threshold exactly? When and how would nuclear waste become a problem. Would it take ~200 years like the industrial revolution with CO2? Would it be okay if it where 300 years? or 500? What do we do, when background radiation is rising from ground water and soil? Switch back to natural instead of green energy, hoping the next millenias will be fine?
I dont think nuclear power is a solution. It can be step in an energy transition strategy, but no solution.
somanyphotons•2h ago
greenavocado•2h ago
throw0101a•1h ago
Not if it's below non-porous rock…
* https://www.nwmo.ca/who-we-are/how-were-governed/peer-review...
* https://www.nwmo.ca/Site-selection/Steps-in-the-site-selecti...
…below the water table…
* https://www.nwmo.ca/canadas-plan/canadas-deep-geological-rep...
…packed in non-porous soil/clay:
* https://www.nwmo.ca/-/media/Reports-MASTER/Technical-reports...
* https://www.nwmo.ca/Canadas-plan/Multiple-barrier-system
> When and how would nuclear waste become a problem.
Never. If there is ever "too much" of it we reprocess it as per OP article to remove the "non-usable" stuff and burn up the rest. It seems that there's an order of magnitude reduce by recycling (96% is usable fuel, so 4% is left over):
* https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-radio...
deepsun•4h ago
Sorry, I don't have a Twitter account to read the posts, but they look like my point exactly.
throw0101a•2h ago
Neither to I:
* https://status.d420.de
roenxi•3h ago
Is that actually based on some sort of science though, or is it the same woolly thinking as the linear-no-threshold modelling that was popular around the time of Chernobyl? What are the actual risks here and how does it compare to low exercise or the typical amount of air pollution in a large city?
cameldrv•4h ago
benlivengood•3h ago
whycome•5h ago
toomuchtodo•5h ago
If the waste has to sit somewhere generating heat, might as well get some value from it.
(global district heating TAM is only ~$200B, idea sprung from xkcd spent fuel pool what if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)
philipkglass•5h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
whycome•5h ago
kevin_thibedeau•5h ago
meepmorp•3h ago
crote•2h ago
If you look at the current state of US politics, it should be pretty obvious that we can't even count on the richest and most advanced countries to remain stable for even a couple of decades: your "no abandoning nuclear sources" policy can be completely gone in the blink of an eye.
When it comes to something as dangerous as nuclear material you should hope for the best but plan for the worst. Using latent heat might be a neat idea in a best-case scenario, but quickly turns into an absolute nightmare in a worst-case scenario.
AngryData•2h ago
With the expenses involved with all of that, it would probably be better to just build multiple geothermal plants instead and you don't have to worry about nuclear materials at all for similar power output.
To me the only 2 economically feasible strategies I see with high level nuclear waste is recycling with some sort of breeder reactor program, or dumping it in a deep stable hole that is trapped away from any water tables on the order of 100,000 years or more, by which point it will just be a uniquely rich and and diverse nuclear mineral deposit.
With a breeder reactor though and all the supporting nuclear reprocessing facilities, even though it would be a lot of work and money, it would be recovering the vast majority of potential energy from previously mined and refined nuclear materials that you are talking about recovering heat from, and in a far more controlled manner that allows us to just chuck the material into pretty much any other reactor without any significant modifications.
credit_guy•5h ago
CGMthrowaway•4h ago
All it takes to change that is a federal subsidy supporting the industry. The same was said about wind & solar until it wasn't (due to tax credits). Now that the credits are going away with BBB, the cost of every new utility-scale development just went up ~30% and many, many projects will be killed.
toomuchtodo•4h ago
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...
> Lazard’s analysis of levelized cost of electricity across fuel types finds that new-build utility-scale solar, even without subsidy, is less costly than new build natural gas, and competes with already-operating gas plants.
> Despite the blow that tax credit repeal would deal to renewable energy project values, analysis from Lazard finds that solar and wind energy projects have a lower levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) than nearly all fossil fuel projects – even without subsidy.
(Lazard is the investment banking gold standard wrt clean energy cost modeling: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...)
CGMthrowaway•3h ago
quickthrowman•2h ago
Matticus_Rex•4h ago
And subsidizing this still won't make new nuclear particularly competitive without ditching the silly LNT harm model and killing ALARA at the regulatory level. If you do that, suddenly nuclear can be profitable (as it should be in a world where the AEC and NRC approached radiation harm risk with actual science).
pstuart•4h ago