[shaunrussell]

Our nuclear reactors are essentially the beta product. There are alternative reactor designs that create much less waste like LFTR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...) and others like TWR that cab consume our existing spent fuel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor).

There are a lot of reasons we predominantly use solid fuel light water reactors, most of them being the decades of sunk costs + commitment inertia that was created by the government investment in the technology... because it was good for the military (submarines, maybe bombs).

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-s...

There are some companies trying to address this like Flibe Energy, who is working on LFTR designs (https://flibe-energy.com/) and Terrapower with TWR (http://terrapower.com), of which Bill Gates is Chairman of the board.

Nuclear could be great. We need massive investment in these alternative technologies.

[someguydave]

Molten salt designs have somewhat unsolved waste and proliferation issues, but you are correct in general.

[pjc50]

Isn't there also a corrosion issue, that hot salt tends to corrode normal stainless steel? The usual Achilles heel of these things is welding issues.

It seems research is ongoing: http://www.electrochemsci.org/papers/vol13/130504891.pdf

[jabl]

You think hot salt is bad? Now let's add 1/3 of the periodic table to the salt.. But yeah, people are working on it. The Americans had something in the 60ies (hastalloy), the Chinese are working on it today. In the short term, many o the MSR startups are planning to replace the reactor vessel every few years to get around corrosion issues, as well as the graphite moderator going bad.