Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecky
I'm broadly of the opinion that there are places where nuclear isn't a great idea - like highly active fault lines, for example. Oddly, that seems to be where most of the nuclear plants are.
Beyond that, bring on the nukes I say.
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The US Navy has robust designs that rock-and-roll on submarines to aircraft carriers. Design an anvil system that will meet all local as well as national requirements and pop them into old coal power plants. This is the whole idea behind small modular reactors (SMRs). They do need a higher level of enrichment but not to anywhere near weapons grade, so proliferation is still minimal. Also, you can build several types of reactors as some can fission the leftover fuel from older reactors. Those casks of "nuclear waste" are hardly that - they are fuel to other reactor types.
Then there is Thorium. That stuff is all over the place. Coal ash ponds have them in high enough concentrations to make them worth mining and cleaning up. Many of our rare earth mines that were closed decades ago have mountains of tailings containing thorium. Thorium is one of the reasons we do not mine our rare earths here in North America - the tailings are nuclear waste. We have enough tailings to power the country for 1000 years if you deem it worth cleaning up the tailings and deriving the rare earth as well as heavy metals contained therein.