Hacker News Reader

Many Gen IV nuclear designs can use the 10K year waste fuel and turn it into 300 year waste. If you believe climate change is killing us, this is the answer. If you don't believe that but believe clean, free electricity in abundance is best for a developing world, then this is also the answer.

View on HN

I'm the biggest proponent of Gen IV nuclear. But believe me that the level of partitioning and transmutation required to get to 300 year waste requires reprocessing processes of a sophistication that are contrary to the concept of "free" anything. In fact, there's SO much nuclear fuel on Earth and in the seawater, and seawater uranium extraction is getting cheap enough that it's now reasonable to envision world-scale nuclear fission without heavy reprocessing. Deep burn/modified once-through cycles or limited recycling can get you really far with this kind of resource.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com