Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening
That premise requires more convincing evidence for me. Nuclear reactors have an incredible safety record, given that most current reactors have their design roots in the 60s, and have been operated for longer than initially anticipated, on MBA-style shoestring budgets. Given that scenario, yes, accidents are bound to happen. But where are the improved designs you mention? What processes have been adapted to improve reactor safety since the 60s? Which reactors have been safely decommissioned at the end of their planned lifetime instead of running beyond their age?
What we have now is the result of thirty years of political (and economic) languishing: no firm decision had been made either way. I applaud Angela Merkel for finally making a firm decision on that subject, but I also think the decision was the wrong one. I applaud India's decision to actually develop and build 90s-era reactor designs.
whatever means you put up to prevent catastrophic events, they will never be enough
As evidenced by the impending climate catastrophe, you are correct. But even ten Tsjernobyl meltdowns will be less impactful than what we are facing now.
we have yet to find a working way to handle our nuclear waste for the next 10k-100k years
No, we already have that solution: Gen-4 breeder reactors, another 90s-era reactor design. We just never had the political will to build them, thereby perpetuating our 10k-100k year problem.
Take a look at history if you need more evidence. At some point, someone always said „now we know better and we can build XXXX to be perfect“, and now we are laughing about them (to give a bad but simple example: Titanic). You are naïve if you think today is any different than yesterday, even with all that superior technology and knowledge that we have – but that was also true for any other point in time.
And your „waste solution“ will not help one bit with the waste we already have. Hence my argument remains.
And your „waste solution“ will not help one bit with the waste we already have.
Why not? Breeder reactors can use spent fuel as (part of) their power source, and that spent fuel is the cause of our 10-100k year problem. From wikipedia [1]:
Since breeder reactors on a closed fuel cycle would use nearly all of the actinides fed into them as fuel, their fuel requirements would be reduced by a factor of about 100. The volume of waste they generate would be reduced by a factor of about 100 as well
[..]
In principle, breeder fuel cycles can recycle and consume all actinides, leaving only fission products [having] a peculiar 'gap' in their aggregate half-lives, such that no fission products have a half-life between 91 years and two hundred thousand years. As a result of this physical oddity, after several hundred years in storage, the activity of the radioactive waste from a Fast Breeder Reactor would quickly drop to the low level of the long-lived fission products
So, not only would fast breeder reactors reduce our waste volume by 99%, they would also reduce our waste storage lifetime from 10k-100k years to a few hundred years (a more than 99% reduction).
That premise requires more convincing evidence for me. Nuclear reactors have an incredible safety record, given that most current reactors have their design roots in the 60s, and have been operated for longer than initially anticipated, on MBA-style shoestring budgets. Given that scenario, yes, accidents are bound to happen. But where are the improved designs you mention? What processes have been adapted to improve reactor safety since the 60s? Which reactors have been safely decommissioned at the end of their planned lifetime instead of running beyond their age?
What we have now is the result of thirty years of political (and economic) languishing: no firm decision had been made either way. I applaud Angela Merkel for finally making a firm decision on that subject, but I also think the decision was the wrong one. I applaud India's decision to actually develop and build 90s-era reactor designs.
whatever means you put up to prevent catastrophic events, they will never be enough
As evidenced by the impending climate catastrophe, you are correct. But even ten Tsjernobyl meltdowns will be less impactful than what we are facing now.
we have yet to find a working way to handle our nuclear waste for the next 10k-100k years
No, we already have that solution: Gen-4 breeder reactors, another 90s-era reactor design. We just never had the political will to build them, thereby perpetuating our 10k-100k year problem.