This is worth a read:
The next generation of reactors provide in-built safety systems and a way to reuse old fuel.
theconversation.com
The highlights:
Gen IV reactors will also allow more efficient use of nuclear fuel. The fuel in current reactor designs is used only once and then disposed of, which produces radioactive waste that will take hundreds of millennia to decay to a safe level. But this waste contains valuable resources of fissile material that can be reprocessed into new fuel. Burning this fuel in specialised "fast" reactors provides would be much more efficient and generate waste that decays safely within just a hundred years or so. It would also move us towards a closed fuel-cycle that would greatly extend the lifetime of the Earth's uranium reserves.
So one way to reduce the costs of nuclear power plant is simply to build more of them. There are economies of scale in terms of having identical designs with the same requirements for construction, fuelling, operation and maintenance. In the UK in particular, attention is shifting towards so-called small modular reactors, or SMRs, that produce less power but that have lower upfront capital construction costs.
Some of these new reactors will use spent fuel from older reactors:
Last week, the Department of Energy gave a commercial company the green light to test fuel made from spent uranium.
www.wired.com
They finally faced-up to the fact that wind and solar isn't going to feed the bull dog.......
That's a half-truth. The big problem with solar and wind is that it's not 24/7/365. That means you need to build extra capacity and have lots of energy storage. If that storage is based mostly on batteries using lithium we run into material shortages. Thankfully, sodium-ion finally reached mass production this year.
The second problem is as we move towards electrifying virtually everything simply replacing fossil fuel plants with solar/wind on a one to one basis isn't good enough. We need to expand our generating capacity. That's where nuclear comes in. It also means we'll need less storage for solar/wind. We could probably get rid of fossil fuels without nuclear, but it would require a much more massive rollout of solar/wind, coupled with several times more battery storage. In short, we should throw everything we have at the problem.
If fusion comes online soon enough, that will of course be an even better solution than fission, but for now let's plan using what already exists.