I am certainly no expert on nuclear physics but back in 2007 when gas prices went through the roof I studied a lot about different forms of energy. That is what we can do.
It was apparent that wave and wind energy just were not going to work because places with a lot of wind, like the Aleutian Islands, don’t have a lot of people there.
Solar would help as an addition to the electrical grid in places like the southeast and southwest, especially if panels were put on top of commercial buildings. But solar is too dispersed to act as a primary energy supply.
Then hydroelectric, but we have dammed up most of the places where a reasonable amount of head can be found, so that’s peaked out.
That left natural gas, oil and nuclear. If you’re looking to lower carbon dioxide emissions then natural gas and nuclear are the way to go.
Funny you should mentioned reprocessing nuclear fuel. I always wondered about nuclear waste and how dangerous it was. If it is dangerous then there is still a good amount of radioactivity. If there is a good amount of radioactivity then there is energy. So why not use that energy instead of burying in the ground out in New Mexico?
They wanted to bury it in NevaDUH.
The most dangerous parts of spent fuel is the actinides which are the elements heavier than uranium all of them are radioactive some for millions of years and every one of them is fuel in a epithermal or fast neutron spectrum being burnt to fission products. Only two fission products have half lives long enough to worry about on geological time scales Tc and Sr both have 100k half lives you have a choice with reprocessing separate them and turn them into borasilica glass which is chemically inert and not leachable by meteoric or ground waters. In that form you still a borehole into.granite or shake and put them in stable rocks. Or you make target pins with them and put them into a hard fast neutron spectrum and transmute them into short half life isotopes. Fast spectrum reactors can make fuel and burn long lived fission products at the same time in the same core.
As a professional geologist I can name four places in Texas also that have geologically stable rocks in place for 500 million to 1.3 billion years and will be stable for at least that length in the future Texas is not near any active tectonic margins. You only need a million years of isolation for the long lived fission products and less than 1000 for all the others that is a blink in geologic time. Drill a bore hole 1000 meters into granite fill the bottom 500 with reprocessing separate fission products in borosilica glass and the other 500 with cement same for scales still down then go horizontal just like a shale gas well for 2000+ meters then place the wastes at the time of the well fill the vertical with cement. There is a reason the.natural gas under tens of thousands of psi of pressure is still in the shale after tens to.hundreds of.millions of years it’s gas and water tight and stable over those times scales. No need to use gas shales for waste management there are plenty of dry shales in the Geological settings to.use for waste management.