Nuclear Waste Production Plants are not needed - 12 March 2023

Some population of the "green" community has been demanding an increase in nuclear energy production in the United States.  While this may make some sort of sense in the short term, it shows a grotesque failure to understand how actions and consequences relate.  Let us get some terminology straight at the start of the conversation.

There is a common misunderstanding that people know how to build and maintain "nuclear power plants".  If we look at these facilities in the short term, the name "nuclear power plant" makes sense, but if we consider the long term, a better name becomes obvious.  The plants will operate and produce electrical power for 20-40 years, the short term.  Once exhausted, they leave behind nuclear waste that will last tens, hundreds, and thousands of years.  In this longer term, it is clear that their primary end-product is nuclear waste, therefore the facilities are more accurately called "nuclear waste production plants" and they have a brief surplus power in their early years.  

By and large, we have no idea how to deal with the legacy of nuclear waste production plants.  Coal-fired and gas-fired plants can be cleaned up, solar plants and wind farms can be recycled, and even dams can be safely breached.  There is a problem with coal mines and gas drilling sites, but we have general technology to deal with most of that residual.  But we have no technology or process that can handle nuclear waste. 

Nuclear waste comes in multiple types, and some will argue that we can process 90-95% of the nuclear waste from the nuclear waste production plants.  This is insufficient in the extreme.  We build large processing plants to remove threats from water so that it can be used near humans, but we have no technology for nuclear waste products.  The 5-10% remaining nuclear waste that cannot be processed can only be waited out while it remains toxic - waiting for thousands of years.  And even the faint technologies that we do have that can partially process this nuclear waste have proven to be very expensive.  So expensive that we have to ship the waste to the processing plant instead of processing the waste on-site.  No one wants to allow the unprocessed waste to travel nearby, so moving the waste to the processing plant is not possible.

As a result, nuclear waste production plants leave pools full of "spent" waste material sitting nearby, waste that will take thousands of years to become safe to handle.  

If it is not obvious by now, nuclear waste production plants do not generate enough surplus energy to justify their construction or operation.  They are so costly and risky that they cannot get private insurance to cover their construction and operation.  

We may develop nuclear fusion in the future.  Until then, we must continue to develop avoidance and convervation technologies, and we can only build using renewable energy production technologies.

Edit:  https://medium.com/predict/nuclear-power-is-the-future-heres-why-1901f8fa68e0