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Just because it's safe doesn't mean it's the best we have right now.
- It's massively expensive to set up
- It's massively expensive to decommission at end of life
- Almost half of the fuel you need to run them comes from a country dangerously close to Russia. (This one is slightly less of a thing now that Russia has bogged itself down in Ukraine)
- It takes a long time to set up.
- It has an image problem.
A combination of solar, wind, wave, tidal, more traditional hydro and geothermal (most of the cost with this is digging the holes. We've got a lot of deep old mines that can be repurposed) can easily be built to over capacity and or alongside adequate storage is the best solution in the here and now.
I would like to add, that though we have the means to store the radioactive waste safely, it's not done properly in many places. So it's also an organizational challenge.
Storage is not easy when you don't have massive amounts of free land. This is an ongoing debate in Europe, and in one particular country a leaky storage was discovered just a month or two ago. Again.
And there is no guarantee that what we build today is not going to be a massive liability in 50 or 200 or hell, 500 years. But the companies and people who are responsible will not even exist at this point.
The problem with these arguments and the focus of debates is that they are based on nuclear energy from uranium, not thorium. Thorium is ubiquitous in nature, power centers are much easier to set up and can be small and the waste, while initially (a bit) more radioactive than uranium waste, loses it's radiation level much faster
Edit:typo
Where are the thorium reactor ? We currently have none. Are we allowed to throw speculative energy source in the debate ?
ILL THROW FUSION!!!!!
Already India and chine have had working ones for many years. It's not speculative and I recommend you to research the tech. It's unfortunately not very present in western nuclear energy debates. Could be a political reason but that's just a dirty guess
I thought all thorium based reactor were still at the research stage. I made a quick search to see if there was any in actual use but couldn't find a source. If you have one please send it I'm really interested.
If they are still at the research stage then I'll wait until one is built at scale to decide whether they are a better alternative.
The abundance of uranium and thorium is of the same magnitude. The thing is economics. Uranium is cheap, and as long it is, we use the sources we have. As the peice of uranium rises other sources get economical including sea water extraction which is effectively renewable.
Uranium is a much scarcer source compared to thorium. Uranium can also be used to create nuclear weapons, that's why other countries have difficulties using the tech because foreign powers are afraid of these consequences
You realise you don't need to decomission entire building at EOL?
What about the storage for the used fuel? This is a massive problem for any country not occupying half a continent.
As first step separate useful isotopes from used fuel. Most of used fuel are them. The rest won't be as big.