Nuclear Plant Could Bring 1,600 Jobs to Kemmerer, Wyoming

Isn't being recycled ... which is the real issue.

Mining waste from copper, rare earth concentrates, minesite rehabilitation, safe tailing dams, etc are all things that in theory can be dealt with.

It's not Mission Accomplished!! until they are actually dealt with though .. until then it's just toxic lead free to leach into water.

Nuclear waste is dangerous.

Coal ash, tailings, hydrocarbon extraction byproducts; those are also dangerous. Look at cancer rates near refinery areas in Louisiana or Houston -- you might imagine a nuclear bomb went off in those areas based on the cancer rates.

Nuclear waste has the unique property that it is very easily detected. This is actually a good thing! It means we can isolate it, test for isolation, and stay away. The other upside is that there is less of it. Contrast that with something like the Kingston fly ash spill. There is not enough U-235 on earth to spill that much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly.... That is a single event (with a death toll similar to Chernobyl!) The picture for semiconductor manufacturing or battery manufacturing is not perfect either.

Short sighted? Removing a zero carbon clean energy source from the table when decarbonization is urgently needed -- that is short sighted.

> suggestion would cause similar accidents every 4-6 years

That seems like somewhat absurd speculation. Both of those events made future incidents significantly less likely. Also Chernobyl was totally avoidable and only happened because of extreme incompetence prevalent in the USSR.

Much to get through. So,

You've linked one of worlds worst nuclear disasters there. Nothing to do with nuclear power though, and it certainly didn't cause anywhere near a trillion dollars in damage.

> The problem is that the fuel and waste from any nuclear plant is very dangerous

It isn't that dangerous. We've been at this for 50 years. If anything interesting had happened regarding waste we'd have the regressives up in arms about it and never hear the end of it. I'm not saying no risk, but I am saying negligible. Plenty of nasty stuff out there, and one more heap doesn't need serious attention.

> If we ignored Chernobyl ...

(1) Ok, so put the fire out. That isn't a half-trillion dollars in costs though. Where is this trillion dollars coming from, and what is it protecting against?

(2) Everything causes cancer. Including, famously, a suit to have Starbucks coffee in California labelled as carcinogenic [0]. And coal dust causes cancer, which we've put up with for literal centuries. What are the actual risks are here? Carcinogens aren't a rare thing, a lot of people already die of cancer, because we're surrounded by them. A few more in exchange for the sort of upside nuclear promises is, observing the actual state of things, a good trade. So what are the real numbers you're talking?

At any time from 1970 to today, reducing standards to allow more nuclear development would cause a net reduction in carcinogens because coal dust is deadly. Probably nat gas too.

(3) Nobody is building plants like Chernobyl in this century. That design was from last century.

(4) Bonus points, where are you getting this from? Because a lot of the scary post-Chernobyl modelling was done on a Linear-No-Threshold model that is a good case study in people applying excessive safety to nuclear, assuming that it is much more hazardous than we have any evidence for.

> It will deliver as stable energy as nuclear but cheaper and with comparably no risk.

Nuclear would be cheaper if it was held to sane safety standards that are comparable to what we're putting up with literally right now. I've lived next to coal plants. That is worse for my health than if I had been living in Fukushima when the plant melted down. Nobody in my town was particularly worried about the risk though because that would be remarkably stupid.

[0] https://www.newsweek.com/heres-why-everything-gives-you-canc...

No way this gets commercialized in 10 years. The NRC page [1] states that the Natrium project is in the preapplication phase. In the case of NuScale, the approval took 6 years from the application time, and that was a pressurized water reactor, that the NRC has plenty of experience with. Compared to that, the NRC has virtually zero experience with sodium cooled reactors; one can claim that the precursor of the NRC, the AEC had such experience, but probably no employee from those times is still alive, let alone currently employed.

So the pre-application, application and approval process will be one of learning as much for the NRC as for Terrapower. If they get it done in the next 10 years, that's a stunning achievement. And only after that Terrapower will start working on the actual commercial reactors.

This is a very long haul enterprise.

But if they get it done, this can change the nuclear industry. Russia already has 2 such reactors working, and this month they started burning fuel derived from nuclear waste in one of them. These reactors achieve a lot of things: no need for pressure vessel, can burn U-238, so basically the uranium reserves become unlimited, produce much less waste, and can even burn waste. The first of these is by far the most important, because it means they can be made for much cheaper.

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-...