[Big Dave]

The US Navy has decommissioned scores of nuclear propulsion plants without incident. You let them sit for about six years and any residual beta or gamma emitters decay. Then you cut ‘em up like anything else. The US has decommissioned a handful of utility nukes and likewise had no problem.

As for the spent fuel rods, dealing with them begins with reprocessing them. About half of mass of all the “nuclear waste” in the US is usable U-235 in spent fuel rods. You reprocess it and recycle the fissile material back into the system. We know reprocessing technology works. The US was reprocessing fuel rods in the late 1940s.

The non-fissile portion has to go back to where every milligram of it came from – the earth’s crust. You let the beta and gamma emitters (always fairly short half-lifes) decay down to either an inert or alpha-emitting isotope and then you mix it with sand (about 250 parts sand to 1 part waste) and vitrify it. Drill a bore hole into a subduction zone and let plate tectonics bury it in the mantle. Howard Ballard – the guy who found the Titanic - suggested simply crushing the glass (it has about the same concentration of radioactive isotopes as uranium ore and is not soluble in water and is chemically as inert as things get) grind the cullet to fine granules and simply spread them widely into deep parts of the ocean. The abyss is covered by thick layers of mud and the heavy cullet will sink through it and be covered. The Marianas or Tonga Trenches would do nicely. Trenches are doubly good because they are formed by subduction, so the stuff is into the mantle within a couple hundred years. The French use vitrification and land burial and have had no trouble at all.

If you use fast-breeder technology, your “waste” contains about 108% of the fissile material that your “fuel” had in the first place. Drawback of fast breeders is that you have to “refuel” quite often to maximize the yield of fissile material. A regular reactor gets refueled about once a year. A fast breeder needs to be “refueled” every six weeks. This process converts non-fissile U-238 into fissile Pu-239. Fast breeders can also make the thorium cycle go. The fast breeder converts non-fissile Th-232 into fissile U-233. Thorium is far more ubiquitous in the earth’s crust than uranium.

Maybe because in my business I meet a lot of people who have worked around nuclear power, I have a lot of confidence in it. Nuclear power is proven and reliable and available as fast as you can license and build the plants.

If you simply cannot stand nuclear power, coal works just as well for generation of electric power.

Jamesqf’s estimate of 18 GW(e) sounds about right for electrification of railroads.

The cost of electrifying the railroads is high not because the catenary is so expensive but because you’d have to build an entirely new electrical T&D system to feed it. This, of course, ignores the cost of an additional 18 GW(e) of generation capacity.

Most railroad electrification puts one leg of the current in the track and the other leg(s) in overhead catenaries. This is much safer than “third rail” electrification.

Slug locomotives are used in both hump yards and as boosters for helper locomotives.

You know electrification is also possible for trucks on the Interstates.