[markvdb]

Compact, mass produced nuclear energy projects with no nuclear proliferation risk and radioactive waste management time limited to less than one human generation's professional career span. That seems like a decent baseline to me.

Not sure if fission will ever be able to reach that. Fusion perhaps? I'd certainly like to see that researched with high priority.

In the short to medium term at the very least, I see more economic potential in simple, modular tech. Cheap generation using solar, wind and water. Matching supply and demand better through storage and interconnects.

I'd also be very interested in actual research on how to actually lower demand, in beating the Jevons paradox.

[DennisP]

Some of the GenIV designs would be compact and easily mass-produced.

You'll never get waste management below about 300 years with fission, because that's basically what you get from the fission products. But the really long-term stuff is plutonium and other transuranics. Those are unburnt fuel. Fast reactors and some molten salt reactors are supposed to eliminate that. Bury the fission products for 300 years and they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore.

As an American this seems like a long time to me, but when I lived in Germany it didn't so much. We had a brewery in town that had been operating continually for 800 years.

Proliferation resistance gets complicated but some designs are a lot better at it than others. Almost everything requires at least some enriched fuel for startup, even if unenriched works after that. CANDU reactors don't require enriched fuel at all but they don't achieve the waste requirement. Some designs let you extract usable weapons material from reactor fuel (including current CANDU reactors), with others there's no way to extract fissile that's easier to enrich than natural uranium ore.

It might be doable to centralize startup fuel production in nuclear powers, and use reactors that take unenriched fuel after startup, have no way to extract weapons-grade material, and consume the transuranics.

Fusion of course would fix a lot of this. D-T fusion does produce a lot of neutrons that you could use to make plutonium, but you need those neutrons to make more tritium. You get activated reactors parts but those fit your time requirement.

[markvdb]

> You'll never get waste management below about 300 years with fission, because that's basically what you get from the fission products.

That's at least one and probably more like five wars over the reactor territory.

I'm mildly optimistic about fusion's potential...

[DennisP]

Bear in mind the decay is exponential, so most of the radioactivity is in the near term. There's no fissile, and by mass it's about 1% as much as we're getting now from conventional reactor spent fuel. Encase it in glass and bury it, and you're probably good.

I'm mildly optimistic about fusion as well. One big advantage is regulatory; fission reactors can be safe if you design them well, but fusion reactors can't do much damage even if they're terrible. The NRC has already decided on a much lighter regulatory regime for them.

[Moldoteck]

Proliferation is not much related to plants. It's cheaper to build a weapon with distributed enrichment capacity for uranium in some caves.