| Why is it that solar is always sold based on what might be available in a few decades, while nuclear is judged as if 1950s technology was the only option? Complaining about the supposed problem of nuclear "waste" (really, unused fuel) is the equivalent of someone today complaining that computers were too large to be useful outside of a few labs. Who would want a "computer" when only a handful of labs would be able to afford the high maintenance costs (replacing vacuum tubes is expensive). > Are these in production? No, due to the roadblocks put up by anti-nuclear activists and governments that prefer reactors that generate certain isotopes of plutonium. > What sort of waste/byproduct do they produce? The entire point of a breeder reactor is to burn through most of the fuel. We currently only use about 3% of the fuel we put in the reactor. Any breeder should only leave a few % of problematic fission-product waste. This gets even better when you consider that some of that "waste" is actually useful for various purposes. However, even in the case of the old wasteful-1950s-tech reactor, the amount of waste involved is so trivial, it's hard to compare even to "renewable" technology like solar. (making PV cells has it's own waste/pollution problems http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-... Also, another bonus of using the decay chains of thorium's fission products is that the worst isotopes produced only last on the hundred-year scale, not thousands of years. > How is it different from conventional nuclear waste? You're talking a handful of grams per-person-per-year, see above. The question you should really be asking instead is why every other form of power generation isn't held to the same standards. > Is it totally inert? It's far more inert than anything you will find dumped into a coal tailings pond, and I'd rather be near a tiny amount of nuclear power waste than the chemicals used to make PV cells. > Are you aware that if solar... Are you aware that most of these "larger" (lol) solar installations are de facto running on natural gas? I'm all for using a variety of technologies, and solar certainly should be an important part of energy generation. Unfortunately, until we find a way to store power quickly and efficiently at the TWh-scale, these unreliable technologies are not viable for base load power. |