[varjag]

> Which was nowhere close to as bad as Chernobyl.

Both were Level 7 accidents on INES scale. Fukushima release was about 1/6th of Chernobyl, but ended up blowing 4/5ths of its contents over the ocean. At some point, evacuation of Tokyo metro area was considered. Yeah no, both were pretty bad and the same magnitude events.

> The bigger problem with this kind of fear is that you're giving a pass to the coal industry (among other industries) which have far, far worse disasters regularly.

Fair point, but there's not much coal use in Belarus (mostly natural gas), nor in Norway where I am now (clean energy from the dam to my car's plug). For Belarus, the impact, in health, land and culture was incomparable to that of other energy accidents.

> Modern breeder designs don't have the waste problem.

Right, they have the weapon proliferation problem that you can't design away.

[DennisP]

Breeders aren't necessarily proliferative. The IFR for example ends up with a mix of plutonium isotopes which is more difficult to weaponize than natural uranium ore. The main problem is the need for a high fissile load at startup, but the same mix works for that.

Thorium breeders are another possibility, as long as you're not isolating protactinium.

Another route is Transatomic's design. It's not actually a breeder, and runs on uranium enriched as low as 1.6%, but burns up almost all the transuranics because it leaves them in the fuel mix for a long time, removes fission products, and has really good neutron economy.

Even if you use breeders with potential proliferation issues, one way to go would be to keep those reactors in weapons states, and use them to dispose of the waste from non-weapons states.