Guest essay by Ronald Stein, Oliver Hemmers, and Steve Curtis
There is lots of talk about nuclear power around the world today. However, except for China and, maybe, Russia, there is no action.
Talk means nothing, but action means everything. Perhaps the reason for inaction is the massive waste of government funding for nuclear power promises. Private capital produces many times more production than government funding does. Maybe if the money was left in the hands of the people, some sense of urgency could be realized. Moreover, to secure monopolies for those who own them, massive government roadblocks are placed in the way of any competition that could disrupt the profits from these monopolies.
Such is the case for government subsidized wind and solar projects over the last two decades. Because of mismanagement and outright corporate theft, the sizzle has come off the idea of just electricity from “renewables”. Once the private industry lost their government subsidies, wind and solar projects started shutting down. Some, of course, are still around, but no utility company will take even a single penny of risk on solar and wind production.
So, when the gravy train of government subsidies stops flowing, the profit centers move on. No gravy, no profits, no production. Then the citizens are left to clean up the mess. What a deal. Citizens pay to make the mess and now citizens pay to clean it up. All while enjoying the benefits of higher electricity costs. Maybe they will get tired of this scam and start to realize that they really need nuclear power.
The answer to safe, continuous, uninterruptible, emissions-free electricity is laying right in front of us. Locked in the nucleus of each uranium atom is a source of energy that is 50,000,000 times that released by burning an atom of coal.
So, all other things being the same, we should use this natural uranium resource instead of just throwing it away. The commercial nuclear industry, so far, has leveraged only 3% of the energy available in nuclear fuel rods. We would not get very far buying an apple and just eating the peel. Yet, that is what we do with our uranium.
It makes a lot of sense to make use of all the uranium since we went to the trouble of mining it and refining it. Your cheap costs for electricity (worldwide) in past years have come at the price of taxes. In the USA, the renewable subsidies over the years stand at $5 trillion (or so). This means that every person has paid $15,000 above their power bill for the luxury of having so-called “renewable” electricity. So, do you really wonder what will happen to your power bill when that subsidies are gone?
Now, we add the further economic pressure of a sharply rising demand (data centers) with a stable or slightly reduced supply of electricity. It appears that we have to cover the cost of wind and solar renewables and the cost of competition for a vanishing resource at the same time.
Since data centers are profitable at $3.00 per kWh, how far do you think they will bid before residential customers give up bidding? Ironically, recycling slightly used nuclear fuel (SUNF) can result in retail prices around a penny per kWh, $0.01 because they do not require special equipment and engineering to work. So, we are either headed for penny per kWh power (recycling in fast reactors) or dollar per kWh power (wind and solar renewables and high data center demand).
Fast reactor recycling, basically, involves dumping chemically altered SUNF (already existing) into a vat of hot molten salt (or sodium). The magic of breeding allows uranium that is unusable in conventional reactors to produce 50,000,000 times more power than coal. This releases at least 90% of the uranium power instead of the current 3%.
Remember, countries are proposing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to “bury” or throw this uranium material away. Even then, they cannot find a way to do so because the public does not want it in their “backyard”. We are proposing that we turn this hundreds of billions of dollars of liability into hundreds of trillions of dollars of electricity revenue. Sound impossible? Well, a reactor called Experimental Breeder Reactor-II demonstrated this capability with technology called pyroprocessing (extracting elements using voltage and chemistry) and fast reactor recycling. Modern technology allows this to be done with “liquid fuel” mixed right in with the molten salt (best process). Of course, there are many different ideas of how this can be done. The best way to find out which works best is to try it. Only privately capitalized industry tries things more than they talk. So, do you want talk or action?
All we have to do is crank up the free enterprise innovation engine. No other method works nearly as good. To do this, the government has to get out of the electricity business. Government subsidies only cloud the effectiveness of free enterprise and force the warp speed of private innovation to die in the face of the molasses of free government money. If no results are required, people get lazy. But business must have results, or they lose their investments. The only money government loses is your tax money. So, we must find a way to encourage the innovation of free enterprise while eliminating the molasses of government free money, camouflaged as subsidies. What we need is a proposal submitted to government to explain the logic of this, even in the face of enraging monopolistic interests. Don’t the people deserve the benefit of their investments?
Let’s find those who are advocates of the people. Once investors see $100 trillion in assets, they can be very persuasive. So, what we need is a state governor willing to advocate for the people. So far, none has emerged. However, as prices go up, supply goes down, billionaires become trillionaires from government-funded monopolies, and citizens’ quality of life degrades, hopefully someone will remember the great promise of recycling slightly used nuclear fuel (SUNF). Oh, yeah, the USA government has a fund of $50 billion collected from ratepayers plus interest to do only this. In the right hands, innovation can be realized. Believe it or not, the voices of citizens like you could make the difference.
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The assertion that civilization can be built upon renewable energy is a denial of reality.
That fact is being proven every day as we waste our wealth on the fantasies of Net Zero 2050.
If we do not abandon wind and solar power/energy resources, humanity will decline into a medieval state with a global population 10% of our present population, mostly slaves.
My hope is that we are NOT that stupid.
Nuclear fission can NOW meet humanity’s energy demand for a period of time LONG enough to develop a fusion capability and spread our civilization over the Solar System and beyond.
Humanity with nuclear power is prohibited from wars. War and nuclear power are incompatible. If humanity, through fear, abandons nuclear power – paragraph one is our fate.
All people, including our thoroughly ignorant, uneducated leaders, must learn simple facts.
It is not a matter of faith or religion; it is matter of physics. Believe what you wish, but unless your belief corresponds to physical reality, ‘survival’ will be a pitiful state.
Our childhood is over. The millennium is ahead – or darkness. Choose.
Not for a religious zealot they’re not.
Religious zealotry had nothing to do with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were essential for the eradication of an insane, genocidal military empire.
My technician, then a young soldier, was on a ship bound for Japan. I am well aware of the plusses and minuses of using nuclear weapons against Japan, now one of our close allies.
As I said, it is time to grow up, or our future will be bleak.
It is likely still debatable, but the two cases of using a nuclear weapon in a declared war have been credibly argued to have saved hundreds-of-thousands to several million lives.
And it appears the military of at least nine nations have performed enough “war games” (or followed those that other nations have performed) to have stockpiled nuclear weapons specifically in preparation for POSSIBLE future warfare. FYI, the US alone has about 3,700 “nukes”, split between fission and fusion warheads.
Meanwhile, dreaming—especially about some things, such as “simple facts”—is OK.
Thanks for the comment. I realize that it is a LONG step for Humanity, but sooner or later we will need to make it.
The focus on going nuclear ignores the fact that uranium supply is also limited, so the next crisis awaits. Ditching completely this “renewable” nonsense and going back to the healthy and economically feasable energy mix we had in the 70’s….before the anti nuclear movement gained momentum and everthing began to go southwards from the 80’s on.
CO2 was never a problem and never will be, idiot politicians and voters are.
Everything is limited if the time frame is long enough.
However we have enough uranium for 10’s of thousands of years. Perhaps more than 100,000 years.
I’m not going to lose sleep over it.
It’s not so much the uranium that can be mined, you face more severe bottlecks in processing handling and of course storing the waste. Just some examples, fyi Russia dominates currently the nuclear fuel market…and that’s not easily overcome with $ or in a short period of time. Know how and experience are the most valuable resources.
If you need more processing, build it.
There is no storage problem. Reprocess it and the waste goes away.
Comment demands elaboration.
e.g. all of the depleted uranium ever used in nuclear electricity generation on planet Earth would fit in a cube the size of ____
The world’s existing inventory of used nuclear fuel is sufficient, if recycled, to produce nuclear electricity for approximately 25,000 years. And that’s only the current inventory of used fuel in storage.
There will never be a crisis over shortage of fissile material. There will only ever be a shortage of invested capital in plant and equipment to turn that fissile material into useful energy such as electricity.
Ummmm . . . got any $$$ to go with that?
Go consult the OECD/NEA Red Book
I gave up on wild goose chases decades ago.
Won’t need it. In 25000 years, the Northern Hemisphere will be back under a mile of ice. Hard to spend money there.
We do not need 25000 years. We need a long enough program such that the next big breakthrough can be realized and put into operation.
Hey, that’s got to be controlled nuclear fusion, which is only 20 years away . . . again.
Still
If the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor can be made to work, the known extractable quantity of thorium in just one known deposit in the USA could power our nation for centuries.
The proposal does not take more uranium out of the ground. It recycles fuel rods that existing reactors cannot use. The amount of potential energy in those “spent” fuel rods is enormous, amounting to 30 times the amount of electricity produce by fission reactors from inception to date.
If I remember correctly, in most nuclear plants, only about 3% of the uranium in nuclear power rods is consumed by the time the rods are pulled and put into storage.
Fossil fuels will persist for a time, but are ultimately finite. Uranium is retrievable from ocean water in excess of 3 billion tons, and it is renewed.
It seems there is no bad idea that can’t be recycled in WUWT. Breeder reactors- lets see, the US, Russia, France, India have had a go. In fairness, there are a few research rectors that have bred, but the cost of any electricity from them is prohibitive. They produce so much heat, that they need liquid sodium to be cooled in most cases- you know, that element that catches fire in the presence of water. Sounds safe. Oh yeah, lots of plutonium, produced, handy if a terrorist group got hoold of it, also the most poisonous element known.
History
🔹 1950s–1960s: Early optimism and first setbacks
🔹 1970s–1980s: Ambitious programs, costly failures
🔹 1990s–Present: Decline and cautious revival
🔹 Summary: Why they failedCommon themes in breeder reactor failures:
If I wanted to know what ChatGPT thought on the matter, I’d have asked it. But your overall point is valid – if breeder reactors were safe and cheap to run, we wouldn’t be debating them, they’d be part of the power mix already.
Unlike Communism (or any variety of political / societal collectivism) it’s possible to perfect breeder reactors and keep plutonium from being used for weapons – if the NIMBYs, fearmongers and generally nuclear power ignorant can be dealt with. For the plutonium the processing needs to be designed to not produce Pu 239. Pu 238 and Pu 240 are the isotopes useful for reactors. To steal Nike’s catchphrase, Just Do It. What’s the state of the art in materials resistant to molten sodium? Start there, develop the materials and cooling system design to withstand molten sodium flowing through it for decades, testing with sodium melted with non-nuclear heat sources.
No, his overall point is NOT valid. Nearly all of the projects in his list were intended only to demonstrate FBR technology. No one in their right mind ever pretends that demonstration projects ARE intended to be the final commercial product.
His pretense that plutonium is “the most poisonous substance known”, is simply ridiculous. there are a host of reasons why FBRs are not in extensive use now. They all have to do with economics, not safety or technical reliability.
or politics…
Didn’t President Carter outlaw fast breeders in the US as part of nuclear non-proliferation?
There are better reactors, and much safer ones. Walk-away safe.
Per MWh, nuclear still has by far the fewest fatalities. I believe wind has the most. Think about that for a little while.
Actually it’s hydraulic thanks to this disaster.
1975 Banqiao Dam failure – Wikipedia
And this one.
1979 Machchhu dam failure – Wikipedia
A quarter of a million people perished because of Banqiao. Another 25,000 because of Machchhu. These are the worst industrial accidents in history.
The issue of fatalities should be context specific. Deaths during the construction of facilities ought not to be compared to a storm-caused flood years after. For example the large Hoover Dam on the Colorado River is reported to have resulted in 112 deaths, 96 during construction. Building highways also results in deaths. Such are few when compared to the fatalities from using those highways. That number is 40,000 (+/- 10000) per year since 1930, or about 3,000,000.
I have this odd vision of a multi-thousand tower wind facility failing and a massive gust of wind flattens Austin Texas. Result: 989,252 (est.; 2025) people strewn across the coastal plain all the way to the Gulf of America.
You did not include the Light Water Breeder Reactor operated in the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in the 1977 to 1982. It operated successfully and at the end of core life about 3% more usable nuclear fuel was produced than it originally contained. But because Carter shut down nuclear fuel reprocessing in the US, no further action was taken.
Gee, England and France have been recycling nuclear fuel for decades. What are they doing right?
They have also been transporting nuclear fuel safely for decades. What are they doing right?
Time to work your magic, Elon.
Is that you, Donald?
Nellie packed her bags and said goodbye to the UK circus.
Sounds like a risky investment to me. But who knows, maybe it would work.
Thorium?
I worked in the nuclear industry for years. In my opinion, unless there is severe reform in the regulatory space it is dead, because of cost. The only cost effective nuclear plants running today are those built when it didn’t take 12 years to do it. Even in that case, they still cost as much or more to operate than other options.
Sure it’s clean, reliable and safe. But Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR), and Boiling Water Reactors (BWR) operate at best near 34% thermal efficiency. There is a lot of waste heat.
There is a big reason why fossil fueled plants dominate the industry: cost. In the US, every nuclear plant competes with everything else. Right now, the only real player in clean, reliable, and dispatchable electricity is combined cycle natural gas. No doubt that will change, as change is the normal state of things, but not any time soon.
The article doesn’t explain why every nuclear power station ever built requires huge amounts of taxpayer funding and guaranteed, inflation-linked above market rates price for their output.
Russia and Chinese nuclear power stations the result of command and control economies.
“Private capital produces many times more production than government funding does.”
Yes it does and it also weighs risk/reward and says, “Nuclear? No thanks”.
If private capital were in a rush to invest in nuclear, why did EDF in France fail to raise enough capital to replace its ageing fleet of 59 nuclear power stations – these originally funded by taxpayers when EDF was State-owned? And why as a consequence has EDF been re-nationalised so the taxpayer can fund the replacement of the nuclear fleet?
The EDF/Chinese consortium in the UK has run out of cash to complete the Hinkley Point C reactor, started in 2016 due for commissioning in 2019, or 2022, or 2026, or 2030, or…. and is getting taxpayer cash thrown at it. UK Gov has also guaranteed an inflation-linked £128 per MWh for reactor lifetime. Gas costs around £70 per MWh.
The problem with those who write about electricity production is they lack any clear understanding of economics and many are strangers to physics.
The best, cheapest, most reliable – after 100 years experience – is coal-fired and gas-fired power stations.
You don’t understand the economics of power generation either. Coal is NOT the cheapest solution if it is not available and has to be transported. This is precisely why and where India and China are building their nuclear power stations. This is precisely why France built its 60 nuclear reactors. The Franco-Belgian coal-field was emptying out.
Anti-nuclear nut jobs delay the building of plants, making companies spend 20 years building something that could be done in 3. Then when the costs go up, they proclaim, see we told you nuclear was too expensive.
Add to this the ridiculous levels of regulation and over engineering they demand and it’s no wonder nuclear is expensive.
Apply the same standards to fossil fuels plants, and none of them would be economic either.
Hard to take an article seriously when it starts with a major error.
“There is lots of talk about nuclear power around the world today. However, except for China and, maybe, Russia, there is no action. ”
Ontario has the first of seven nuclear power reactors under construction. Oh yes, NO government subsidies.
Claimed in the above article:
“. . . but no utility company will take even a single penny of risk on solar and wind production.”
However, there are these facts:
— NextEra Energy: The world’s largest electric utility by market capitalization and a leader in wind, solar, and battery storage, notes Energy Digital Magazine.
— Constellation Energy: A major provider of nuclear, natural gas, and electricity, with significant capital expenditures allocated to clean energy, according to Investopedia
— Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG): Ranked among the top utilities for its high percentage of planned capital expenditures going to nuclear and renewable energy projects, as per Decarbonization Channel.
— Avangrid: Another top utility heavily investing in clean energy, with 100% of its planned generation capital expenditures directed toward renewables and nuclear, according to Decarbonization Channel.
— Xcel Energy: A large utility on track to provide 100% carbon-free electricity by 2050, already sourcing over half of its electricity from renewables and investing in electric vehicle infrastructure.
— Brookfield Renewable: Operates a large portfolio of renewable power assets, including hydro, wind, and solar facilities, notes Investopedia and NES Fircroft.
Credibility is more or less inversely proportional to hype.
All dependent upon enormous government subsidy.
Got any facts to support that statement?
You omitted subsidies for each listed.
Here’s the thing: I likewise did not mention the enormous subsidies that the US Federal government (via channeling money from US taxpayers) provides annually to:
— fossil fuel producers (the IMF estimated that, when accounting for environmental externalities, US fossil fuel subsidies were over $750 billion in 2022)
— agriculture/farms (including corporate farms)
— big pharma (such as over $30 billion in subsidies for COVID-19 vaccines : also see https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/us-tax-dollars-funded-every-new-pharmaceutical-in-the-last-decade )
— the producers of electric vehicles
— the aerospace and defense industry
— the semiconductor industry (just the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 allocated over $50 billion for the semiconductor industry to incentivize domestic production)
I could go on and on, but need I?
You seem to think that taxes not levied is the same as direct financial contributions by a government. This is a typical falsehood utilized by all antinukes.
To most people on the left, any tax rate less than 100% is a subsidy.
Except for them.
No. I listed industrial/economic sectors that receive direct subsidies (financial payouts, even if conveyed via electrons in accounting software) . . . those are definitely NOT the same as exemptions from taxes.
You seem to think that a truth can be claimed to be a falsehood.
No, you listed sectors that you claimed received subsidies. You didn’t list a single subsidy.
Re-read my post above of October 21, 2025 9:29 am, where I specifically stated:
“— the semiconductor industry (just the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 allocated over $50 billion for the semiconductor industry to incentivize domestic production)”
But I’ll even go further to help you comprehend, and to clarify for you and others that this was indeed money paid out by the Federal government (aka a subsidy) and NOT just taxes that weren’t levied. From Google AI’s Overview (with my bold emphasis added):
“The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 is a U.S. law designed to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing and support scientific research and development (R&D). It authorized roughly $280 billion in funding, including about $52 billion for semiconductor incentives and R&D, and authorized another $170 billion for federal R&D over five years across various science and technology fields. Key provisions include incentives for domestic chip production, a 25% investment tax credit for semiconductor manufacturing, restrictions on expanding chip manufacturing in China, and funding to strengthen STEM education and regional tech hubs.
“Key components of the act
Semiconductor incentives: Provides about $52 billion to encourage domestic production and research in the semiconductor industry, with $39 billion dedicated to manufacturing incentives. . . .”
Facts matter, despite you being unable/unwilling to recognize them.
And, as I commented to you earlier:
“P.S. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and other major AI bots/LLMs . . . any could be your friend.”
I see no subsidies, just empty rants that they exist.
Why don’t you try being specific so that the rest of them can shoot them down again?
That’s funny! In my “empty rants” post above (October 21, 2025 9:29 am) I specifically cited:
— the IMF (International Monetary Fund, for your benefit),
— the http://www.ineteconomics.org website (managed by the Institute for New Economic Thinking)
— the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, and
— direct references to subsidies of $750 billion, $30 billion and $50 billion.
Apparently you missed those specifics . . . look again, and then start shooting.
P.S. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and other major AI bots/LLMs . . . any could be your friend.
Still not a single subsidy, just whining louder and louder that they are because that’s what you want to believe. I’ve seen the bogus lists the groups you list usually use. Things like trying to claim standard run off the mill tax deductions that tall companies get, as subsidies.
You call that “shooting down”???
I’m sure you didn’t notice, but you did not provide any specifics in your
rantcomment.And once again:
“P.S. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and other major AI bots/LLMs . . . any could be your friend.”
from what I’ve heard Helion’s testing is going well
they are now 100% confident they can make D-T work but are still shooting for D-He3
should announce they’ve made electricity from both in Polaris by the end of the year
no cryo, no superconductors, no steam turbine, no breeding blanket
materials are aluminum and silica, low activation
. . . and no steady-state power production . . . if any significant fusion reaction is achieved, it’s pulsed power only.
BTW, the sellers of commercial IEC devices—such as NSD-Fusion and IEC Fusion to Astral Systems—that use steady-state fusion to create neutron radiation are also positive they have made fusion devices that work, but freely admit they don’t achieve anything close to break-even power generation. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor .
A good first step and I hope it works.
As do I, for surely controlled nuclear fusion at even a 20% overall efficiency in producing electricity to feed the world’s grids, would basically free mankind of its present energy constraints and related political/economic “headwinds”.
Unfortunately, neither reality or The Scientific Method are based on hope.
Back in the day, breeder reactors were declared illegal in the US due to weapons grade plutonium being one of the byproducts of that process.
The concern was the plutonium would end up in the wrong hands.
I do not know enough about this new technology to comment on the plutonium production it may or may not entail. If, repeat if, plutonium is a byproduct, we can have better means to keep it out of the hands of illicit users.
Hmmm . . . didn’t the Louvre Museum in Paris have “better means” to prevent theft?
Just sayin’. 😉
The security at the Louvre would make the designers of the Maginot Line proud.
The solution is simple. Don’t refine the plutonium.
That’s pretty much what was going on with the EBR-II fuel cycle. The pyroprocessing left a lot of the fission products in the fuel elements, which makes the fuel elements much harder to to steal. In addition, the plutonium in the fuel will have a much larger fraction of 240Pu than what would be considered weapons grade.
One advantage of leaving the refractory fission products in the fuel is that the fuel becomes a high entropy alloy, which gives it more resistance to damage from the fast neutron flux.
Plutonium is pyrophoric. This means it cannot be handed by anyone without a glove box under argon-atmosphere conditions. Some random gang of terrorists can do nothing with plutonium. Fabricating nuclear weapons requires facilities on the scale of Mayak, Hanford Reservation, Pantex or Sellafield. Or Fordow. And recent events in Iran showed how places like Fordow can and will be eliminated.
Let’s be a little more specific and accurate in that claim.
Fine powders, chips, and machine turnings of plutonium are highly susceptible to spontaneous ignition because of their large surface area-to-mass ratio.
Larger pieces of plutonium (i.e., “bulk” plutonium) ignites at much higher temperatures, requiring external heating to reach an ignition point that is significantly above room temperature in an ambient air. According to a Web search:
“For bulk, pure plutonium metal, the spontaneous ignition temperature is around 400–500 °C.”
BTW, the same situation exists with magnesium. FWIW, I have a block of pure magnesium purchased as part of a camping fire starter kit. I don’t have qualms about it spontaneously igniting in my pocket or backpack . . . the instructions are to shave/scrape off fine slivers or chips to facilitate its ignition in air.
The primary reason that bulk plutonium metal is handled in glove boxes with carefully filtered air is to minimize the danger of release and subsequent human inhalation of highly poisonous particles/dust coming off the plutonium.
Ever hear of a “dirty bomb” using spent nuclear fuel???
Some so-called “solutions” are not at all “simple” if one cares to look into specific details.
China has almost unlimited money, no chance of public rebuke, no environmental rules (that they observe), and a huge population that needs energy. By 2050 they will be well into their nuclear conversion and on the AGW bandwagon. They understand the economic decline that comes with renewables. They are happy to feed it. Right now while the West is prostrating itself to the alter of renewables they openly said they will do nothing to curb their fossil fuel growth “until sometime in the future”. That time will be when they have built out their nuclear country wide grid.
The type of reactor you advocate, dissolving used nuclear fuel in water, molten sodium or salt reactor coolant, was once called a homogeneous reactor. Such reactors have been evaluated and a few small experimental ones built and operated briefly some with water/fuel coolant and some with sodium/fuel anbdsalt/fuel coolant. No full scale homogeneous power reactors have ever been built. The reasons are plentiful. In water/fuel reactors, hydrolysis of water to hydrogen and oxygen in occurs in abundance and the oxygen promotes corrosion of the metal parts of the reactor and the gasses generated are explosive. In sodium or salt/fuel reactors, the coolant is highly corrosive to most metals. In any homogeneous reactor, the coolant becomes so intensely radioactive that repairing damaged parts is extremely difficult. Proverbial ten-foot poles do not provide near enough separation of the part and the workers. More like 100-foot poles would help but then the radioactive gasses released from the coolant would get them anyways. The concept of a “fast,” meaning the neutrons emitted by fission are not slowed to low speed, have their own control difficulties and are much more expensive to build than current power reactor designs although a few are in operation. The added concept of continuously recycling a small stream of the coolant to remove fission products and add more fuel has its own very expensive add-on difficulties.
The French have long-ago developed and implemented nuclear fuel recycling of fuel rods from conventional used nuclear fuel produced by their water-cooled power reactors. In this process, used fuel is shipped to a recycling facility where usable fissile materials remaining in the fuel are collected and used to fabricate new fuel. The leftover radioactive wastes are turned into glass and “stored in a room in Le Hague” as I was once told by a French nuclear engineer. This process has been used safely and productively for six decades. The US once had a program to develop the same but President Carter shut it down for his concerns over proliferation of nuclear weapons.
It is easy on paper to claim that homogeneous reactor schemes will yield cheap electricity and are practical, but the experience says otherwise, by far.
Yeah, but little known—and even less publicized—is the fact that recycled nuclear fuel used in MOX-fueled nuclear reactors (in France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Russia, and Japan) is only recycled ONCE.
One has to use “fast” nuclear reactors to enable the repeated recycling of spent nuclear fuel, and you’ve already alluded to some of the problems of those reactor designs,
The Russian BN-800 is the ONLY fast reactor currently in commercial operation . . . there are multiple reasons for that.
It is technically possible recycle French nuclear fuel more than once. The basic reason that France recycles spent nuclear fuel only once is that contaminants build up in the plutonium to a point where the cost of removing those contaminants in a second recycle operation is thought to be prohibitive as compared with the cost of either fresh fuel or once-recycled fuel.
As I’ve said repeatedly, at this point in the 21st Century, we buy nuclear power for its energy reliability and security benefits, for which we pay a premium over what gas-fired generation costs. France remains committed to nuclear power in order to maintain those energy security and reliability benefits.
The current policy in France is that recycled nuclear fuel must remain roughly cost competitive with once-through nuclear fuel.
But if that policy were to be abandoned in favor of one where it is no longer expected that recycled nuclear fuel must be roughly cost competitive with once-through nuclear fuel, then the additional cost of removing the plutonium contaminants in a second and even subsequent series of recycles would be accepted as part of that revised nuclear fuel cycle policy.
The biggest issue for widespread nuclear adoption in the US is over the top activism and the ‘Linear no-threshold’ rule instituted by the NRC. The latter is responsible for a stupid amount of extra costs that are entirely unnecessary.
The concept that there is no safe amount of radiation flies in the face of all reality. Getting rid of this ridiculous regulation should be top priority for the Trump administration to help reduce the costs of deploying safe & effective nuclear energy.
Now, how you deal with the ‘over the top’ activism is open to debate but Trump has already declared an ‘energy emergency’, surely that gives the government power to help stream line nuclear deployment.
As for ‘fast breeder reactors’, ok, go ahead, its proven technology and been around for decades. Heck the CANDU reactor has been proven to run very well after recycling of the spent fuel and adding a bit of Thorium (an element so abundant we could power all of human society for millenia).
The interesting thing in regards to the war on burning fossil fuels, in a way I’m all for it, we shouldn’t be burning them if we can help it as they provide an abundant source of materials for products we can use without burning them. Better to use uranium, thorium etc for power, since as far as I know they have no other legitimate safe use, at least not to the same extent as hydrocarbons.
I’m looking forward to the real breakthrough that will provide a ‘nuclear battery’ small enough to fit in a car, throw in a bit of shielding and we can have electric vehicles that run for decades without replacing or recharging the battery (yeah, its a dream, but it would be COOL).
With respect to the “linear no-threshold” rule – It’s my understanding that a history of severe sunburns greatly increases the risk of developing skin cancer. This implies dose rate for ionizing radiation can be as important as total dose with respect to radiation induced cancers.
What needs to happen is for the damage from radiation to occur at a rate that exceeds the body’s ability to repair such damage.
The real problem with nuclear power generation is that return on capital is very, very slow. Investors are only allowed to recoup a very small portion of total invested capital because of the need to keep electricity rates as low as possible. In this regard, nuclear power is the same as large hydro: very low capital cost recovery because of very high initial capital cost.
Another significant issue is that Three Mile Island showed that a gang of idiots as operators can destroy billions of dollars in sunk capital in less than five minutes through operating errors.
There have been major improvements in control room design since then.
This has also been an area with massive research by both NASA and the FAA. Trying to figure out how to format massive amounts of data so that mere humans can understand it, pick out the important parts, then properly react.
I agree at all levels. Recycle useful waste. Produce lots of safe, affordable energy. Get the government out of the energy production and transmission business, all they do is screw it up and make it more costly.
What does the author think of the Natura Resources and Texas effort?
Why do we buy nuclear?
At this point in the 21st Century, going with nuclear power is strictly a public policy decision. We buy nuclear for its energy reliability and security benefits, for which we are obliged to pay a premium over what gas-fired generation costs.
Here in the US, with abundant supplies of natural gas available for decades into the future, going with nuclear will remain a public policy decision for a long time to come, not a decision driven by energy marketplace economics.
What about the French?
The French made a public policy decision in the late 1970’s to go with nuclear as a means of guaranteeing energy reliability, energy independence, and energy security for their nation. The French government funded the reactors.
The French recycle their nuclear fuel for a similar reason, to ensure they have a reliable long-term source for their nuclear fuel.
Building replacement reactors in France for the ones built in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s will be exceedingly more expensive than the originals for the very simple reason that after the French stopped building reactors, their nuclear construction industrial base withered on the vine so that it is only a shadow of what it once was forty years ago.
What about the AI boom?
Dan Yurman of the Neutron Bytes blog asks the question, what happens if the AI boom is a bust?
OPINION – What Future for SMRs if the AI Boom is a Bubble? (Neutron Bytes, October 19th 2025)
To me, Yurman’s article is another piece of evidence that the big AI data center corporations are locking up access to new-build generation capacity because they believe the electricity itself will become the most valuable product of their investment.
At some point in the future, these AI firms will be selling their access rights to the new-build generation capacity at a considerable profit. Or become power marketers themselves.
Reducing the capital cost of nuclear
How to reduce the capital cost of nuclear is an exceptionally complex topic. Just how complex that topic can be is explained in this JohnS substack article from January 2025 which looks at costs of building First of a Kind (FOAK) versus Nth of a kind (NOAK): How the US can make nuclear energy cheap again
JohnS says in his article:
The claim made by many that simply by eliminating most of the NRC’s regulations, we can substantially reduce the capital cost of nuclear enough to make it competitive with gas-fired generation — that claim is complete nonsense.
Here in the United States, capital cost for new-build nuclear for both SMR’s and for AP1000-size large reactors is currently running at approximately $18,000 USD per kw. Capital cost for new-build gas-fired generation is now running at $2,000 to $2,500 USD per kw.
Recent cost studies claim that the capital cost of nuclear for both SMR’s and for the large AP1000-size reactors can eventually be reduced to less $7,000 per kw, maybe even less than that. But only if somewhere between ten and twenty firm orders for each reactor type are on the books so that production volumes can reduce unit costs for the various subsystems needed for each reactor type.
A socialized approach to constructing and operating nuclear energy, as was implemented in France in the late 1970’s, is a total anathema to free market energy advocates.
IMHO, only the federal and state governments have the financial resources needed to place an initial ten or twenty firm orders for each reactor type with the reactor vendors, either SMR-size or AP1000-size.
Which means that reestablishing the nuclear construction industrial base in the US at its most efficient production rate is strictly a public policy decision which will require a socialized energy market approach to building additional nuclear capacity.
But nuclear is dangerous – Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. Fukashima. The biggest impediment to inexpensive, reliable nuclear power is irrational fear. The next biggest impediment, on the US, is the NRC and lawfare