@Jolly Rancher @Richard Stallman Eating is as important as breathing and if we continue to stifle our economy before reliable and adequate base-load energy is in place, then eating is something we won't be able to do.

I'm as interested in clear clean air as the next person but I also understand the necessity of putting food on the table and I understand people of lesser means are being forced out of their homes or are unable to heat them owing to energy pricing.

Extractive technologies never decrease in cost, you always start with the most concentrated easy to get at ores and when those deplete move to less concentrated more difficult ores until at some point the cost of retrieving the ore exceeds the value.

Early on some oil fields were under pressure, oil just bubbled up, you did not even have to pump it, then we got to where we had to pump it but still there were big plays, stick a straw in the ground and suck out oil. Now most of those fields are depleted and we are at a point where the few that are still producing we only get oil out by forcing water in and the percentage of oil recovered is getting smaller every year.

So we turn to tar sands and shale oil, fracking fields deplete very rapidly relative to conventional fields, why, because they're mostly rock by volume not oil, and tar sands are basically bitumen, useful for making asphalt but not great for fuel, so we have to crack and reform them, remove huge amounts of sulfur, it's a dirty and expensive process.

When we exhaust these and we will all too soon, what do we run our farm equipment and trucks on? Never mind your car and bus, how do we grow food and get it to stores? This problem is urgent and we can't address this with windmills and solar panels they simply are not dense or scalable enough.

We need to get base load power systems that can scale and right now the most promising of those is fast flux molten salt breeder reactors. Why breeders? Because only about .15% of all the nuclear fuel that is available to us is fissionable U-235, the rest is fertile U238 and thorium 232 and most importantly the actinides in existing nuclear waste. Together these fuels could supply all the energy we need for the next 1000 to 10,000 years depending upon growth rates and they could do so cleanly.

Why fast flux? While thermal neutrons can breed thorium, fast neutrons are required for the efficient breeding of U-238 and other even actinides.

Why do we want to breed actinides? Because at least 95% of the energy that was ever in nuclear fuel still exists in the waste so we shouldn't think of waste as waste but as fuel. And because if we burn all the actinides down to fission products then instead of having a million year waste issue we have a 300 year waste issue, and of that only two elements have a half life close to 30 years, Strontium-90 and Cesium-137, both have many industrial uses so really we don't even have a 300 year problem.

Then why molten salt? Well for several reasons first and foremost, extreme safety. All the fuel is already in a liquid form thus can't melt down. Instead of being 200-300 atmospheres of pressure, it is near ambient pressure, thus any rupture of containment just results in some molten fuel dripping onto the floor and solidifying. Because the fission products in a molten salt reactor are continuously removed, it is not intensely radioactive, so someone scoops it up, puts it back in the reactor, repairs the leak, and life goes on.

These reactors are passively safe by physics alone, they require no human intervention and no machine intervention to be safe. If they get too hot, the salt expands, the reaction decreases, if in spite of this they still overheat, a freeze plug melts and drains the fuel tank into a much larger tank that separates it too far to sustain the fission reaction and it stops. Again the fission products are continuously removed there isn't latent heat requiring active cooling. Lastly these reactors are more efficient than a water cooled reactor.

What's the hold up? Our regulatory agency is outdated. It's designed for older style pressurized and boiling water reactors and it's designed for public perception not public safety.

To fix this we need to go from a per installation license to a type acceptance license similar to the way the FCC licenses much radio gear. That is to say once a design is licensed, all designs of that type are similarly licensed. These reactors do not require water and they emit nothing except heat and electricity and they have a small foot print compared to boiling or pressurized water reactors so environmental concerns are minimal.

Second, we need more realistic radiation requirements, instead of as close to zero as possible we need to set safe limits and quantify them. We know people living in elevated cities do not have higher cancer rates, we know in fact they live longer than those at sea level. Therefore I suggest we adopt the radiation levels at higher elevations as being the level of what is safe and acceptable. If we do these things we can have safe scalable and cheap energy, and by extension an economic boom without environmental collapse.

@Jolly Rancher @Richard Stallman My point is as low as possible means spending infinite money to achieve nothing, and so setting a value that is below where there is a statistical link to cancer but non-zero is more logical.

As to sexualizing radionucleotides, that's funny but not problem solving.

@Jolly Rancher @Richard Stallman Hanford was a military plutonium production facility. Environmental concerns were unfortunately not on the table during WWII, and there doesn't seem to be the national will to do anything about it now. Even so cancer rates downstream are only barely discernible. If a completely irresponsible operation like that results in only barely discernible rates, then a modern closed loop processing system with much better controls and characterized chemistry should be many orders of magnitude safer.

But you are correct, we could run entire countries off the existing actinide waste there, as well as that present in dry cask storage at many locations. The big issue with cleaning up Hanford isn't just radiation, it's chemicals, many of those tanks they do not even have records of what is in them.

The Hanford N-reactor in my view is of the worst design possible, similar to Chernobyl it was a graphite moderated design.