[dredmorbius]

Keep in mind that coal, as of the late 1800s in the U.S., was seen as a multi-million year supply. At then-current rates of use.

Thing is that the rates of use ... increased somewhat.

Exponential growth has a way of catching up with you.

Nuclear has a very long-term footpring and some unusual aspects relative to other energy systems. Many of its more notable critics come from inside the industry, or were early pioneers. I'm not so sanguine.

[acidburnNSA]

My estimates assume us-level consumption (10kWh/yr/person) for 10 billion people, and that will last 4 billion years. Don't think I'm too worried about exponential growth catching up to that!

Nuclear waste lasts a long time but we know how to store it for geologic time frames in crystalline bedrock or salt deposits where we have evidence that nothing will move for 200million years. And we only need 1 million until it's safe again.

If you got all your primary energy from nuclear reactors for your entire life, you'd make about 3 soda cans of waste. That's tiny compared to all the alternatives.

[dredmorbius]

Projections of limited per-person energy growth have proved exceedingly unreliable.

[acidburnNSA]

You're right. In the 1970s people estimated continued exponential per-person growth in the USA and ordered power plants in accordance. But then demand leveled off and lots of power plant orders were canceled. It's been nowhere near exponential in developed nations for some decades and is currently not expected to return to exponential growth. Sure, teleportation could be invented and use lots of energy, though, so if that's your point, fair enough. Let me rephrase my estimate a bit then to reemphasize the magnitude of the nuclear resource:

With 10 billion people using 40,000x the current per-person USA energy usage, we could power the world for at least 100,000 years with the nuclear resource.