there is a compay in Texas pioneering small reactors. Underground power, can power a small city for up to 20 years. For peanuts. Replace and Remove every 20 years. Great technology and would remove the grid from being a national issue.
Thorium-fueled Molten Salt reactors can be made MUCH smaller than Uranium-fueled Light Water reactors. And there is one HUGE advantage to the thorium MS reactors - they are not fissile, so there is no such thing as “runaway” core meltdown. But the thorium fuel is fertile, meaning that once reaction is started (by mixing in a small amount of “spent” uranium fuel rod material) to initiate the chain reaction, the thorium continues to produce power until depleted, at which time there are far fewer long-lived radioactive isotopes, than there are with “spent” uranium fuel rods.
The thorium fuel cycle has several potential advantages over a uranium fuel cycle, including thorium’s greater abundance, superior physical and nuclear properties, reduced plutonium and actinide production, and better resistance to nuclear weapons proliferation (very little plutonium is produced, most of which is “burned” in the breeder cycle).
Check out ‘HOLTEC’ in Camden NJ
Now you have a hot tub full of seething radioactivity - lethally radioactive for the next 50 to 100 human generations.
So what does one do with the radioactive trash? Have the taxpayers foot the bill for disposal?
If the **ratepayers** had to foot the bill for the entire fuel cycle, the only nuke plants that would exists would be military - for power or for weapons.
Until the multiple issues of how to safely dispose of the nuke trash is resolved, I have to be a non-supporter.
This, if for no other reason, than to *not* leave a mess behind for my grandkids......
What do you do with the spent material? Can it be recycled? (i.e., replenished through a 'breeder' or something like that) If not, you've still got a serious problem of waste material disposal. We really don't have any 'safe' way to store material that maintains radioactive toxicity for tens of thousands of years.
Personally, I think the only real solution is to launch the stuff into space and park it in a stable orbit around the sun. (not in orbit around the earth) At some point, if mankind survives as a species and the muslims don't drag us back to the seventh century, I'm sure we'd be able to do something with this stuff. If not, fire it into the sun, and let it be our solar garbage disposal.