To say nothing of waste, even when everything goes right. Nuclear is the grandaddy of instant gratification traps. Moment on the lips, hundreds of millennia on the hips. I think we can do better.
Isn’t it the case that all high-level nuclear waste generated in the entire course of human history could fit in a relatively shallow layer over a piece of land the size of a football field? (e.g. [0])
I understood nuclear to be, from most any lifecycle analysis, the modality with the fewest externalities of any grid-scale tech mature enough to field, and somehow almost cost-competitive even while regulated (as it is today) to safety thresholds many orders of magnitude more conservative than the incumbent technologies.
It sounds like you’re informed differently than me. What’d the better way that you propose in the last sentence?
