> climate actions taken in European countries like stopping nuclear energy
It's not a climate action. It's an environmental action, which there's an overlap with, but which is not the same thing.
It's not a climate action. It's an environmental action, which there's an overlap with, but which is not the same thing.
FYI when they say nitrogen they don't mean it literally – it's a code-word for nitrogen oxides (NOx) and ammonia (HN3).
The right time to develop a different nuclear platform was 40 years ago, but the second rightest time is today. Where is the bold, government-level messaging and big research grants saying "here's a completely new architecture, it's simply not capable of the same failure modes as Fukushima or Three Mile Island."
I guess that's why people were boosting Thorium a while back, but I haven't heard much news there. Seemed like microreactors was the latest sexy thing.
Most of them catch fire every month or dissolve themselves from the inside after a year. Turns out the idea probably needs materials that don't exist yet (but might soon?).
The Russian BN 800 is the closest if you believe their government, and the chinese LFTR project has some promise.
Even with the basic possibility issues solved there are a bunch of economic, resource and political issues to work through after that.
Secondly, (it's such an absurd myth that keeps being repeated), there are plenty of effective, perfectly functional, usable, right-now-being-used plans for storing nuclear waste. It's not even much overall: The total amount so far produced by humanity to-date is just over 400,000 metric tons (this is very little physical volume on any industrial scale of things) and of that only about 4% is highly radioactive. The rest is low-radiation and one third of that total is suitable for reprocessing..
Bottom line, there is NO major problem with storing it if even minimal intelligent effort is applied to the task.
There's the problem. Even if we only have the 300 year stuff, sooner or later someone is going to put a Jeffrey Immelt in charge of the process and the effort will be neither intelligent sufficient to be called minimal.