The root of the waste problem in the U.S. goes back to Jimmy Carter, who signed an executive order preventing the reprocessing of nuclear fuel. That’s ultimately why the U.S. has radioactive waste stored in ‘temporary’ holding facilities all around the country while France can get 70% of its electricity from nuclear without a significant waste problem. France reprocesses its spent fuel, and most of the leftover waste only remains dangerous for a few hundred years and is much lower in quantity.
It’s projected that the amount of high-level waste France’s reactors will produce over the next 20 years will be about 2600 square meters. That’s a block of waste about 13 meters high and wide, to power most of the energy needs of a major country for 20 years. You could fit 100 years of France’s high level nuclear waste in an Ikea store. Hmm… Not a bad idea. The Swedes will do something with it. We can call it Sklort or something, and if it was an Ikea product it would be nearly impossible to assemble into a bomb.
Anyway, the U.S. could be in that position today, if not for the efforts of the left-wing ‘green’ movement and the idiocy of Jimmy Carter. No Yucca mountain needed.
And let’s also acknowledge that one of the main reasons nuclear power has become so expensive and non-competitive is because people on the left in the States have delayed pretty much every nuclear power project with repeated lawsuits, demands for endless environmental studies, and other harassing techniques. On a project that requires billions of dollars in up-front capital, delays are incredibly expensive. This was especially true around the time when nuclear was killed off because interest rates were very high, and a five year delay could easily double the cost of a nuclear power plant.
Then those same people argue that nuclear is non-viable because it costs too much to build the plants. A clever strategy, and one that has done great harm to the U.S.'s energy independence and to global warming.
France’s regulatory system allowed for sensible ‘type certification’ of a nuclear power plant, and subsequent plants based on the same design get accelerated approval and protection from frivolous or duplicated lawsuits and injunctions. The U.S. regulatory system was ‘strengthened’ under Carter to prevent that type of certification. However, under new regulations type certification is allowed again.
Nuclear power languished in the U.S. from 1992 until 2005 when Bush enacted the energy policy act of 2005. Until then, not a single license for a nuclear power plant had been issued in the States for decades. To his credit, Obama has continued Bush’s policies and even extended them, and has to be considered to be pro-nuclear.
Many on the left are coming around now, because Global Warming fears are trumping their fear of nuclear power. But at the time when nuclear power looked like the future, the left moved in lockstep to oppose it, and they fought hard against it. I was there - I was involved in the debates. I was in college during the big anti-nuclear hysteria, and I know how the sides lined up.
And even if many of them are now on board with nuclear power, the major opposition to it still comes from the left. Even if you want to blame NIMBY-ism, that too is a product of the propaganda and hysteria pushed by anti-nuclear activists in the 80’s and 90’s. The scaremongering was way over the top, and to bring this around to the subject of this thread, highly unscientific.
