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Torillian on 23 August 2019
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Mnementh said:
tsogud said:

While I do agree we need to decarbonize asap and that renewable energy should make up for a lot of that, if not all, nuclear can help us out a lot with our ever increasing demand of energy moving forward. We should at least consider it, not explicitly state in the plan not to and be anti-nuclear. How far are we along to making fusion energy viable because I really don't know?

Regarding nuclear fission energy people often talk about reactor accidents. In my opinion (and that of many others) the far bigger and yet unsolved problem is nuclear waste. Uranium-235 has a half-life of over 700 million years. We have no way to store stuff for that amount of time. I have seen no sound solution to this yet.

I vaguely remembered this from reading about it a while back but I googled it to check my recollection:

https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html

I'm by no means an expert, but my understanding is that the main radioactive product of nuclear fission (U-238) can be recycled to produce Pu-239 which acts similarly to the original U-235 used as a fuel source. This leaves only the fission products of U-235 to be dealt with which have a much more manageable half-life on the order of hundreds of years. 

This is all coming from a site with a rather obvious agenda, so it would have to be double checked, but this matches with my recollection from other sources so I'm inclined to trust it. 



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