Yves here. In Friday’s Links, reader Michaelmas made some important observations about the US nuclear fuel model, which does only one cycle and thus produces vastly more waste than necessary. That has been a feature as opposed to a bug. Further, he contends that reprocessing plus current technology like laser isotope separation can eliminate nuclear waste.
Admittedly, nuclear waste is not the only reason environmentalists oppose nuclear energy. They also point to catastrophe risk and hazards to wildlife from water cooling processes, which are more pronounced for nuclear plants than other water-cooled power facilities.
As many of you know, as AI and data center power demands are soaring, tech titans have been talking up nuclear power as a low-emission solution. However, a Goldman Sachs report from January argued its role would be limited, in part due to staffing issues:
While renewables have the potential to meet most of the increased power needs from data centers at some times of day, they don’t produce power consistently enough to be the only energy source for data centers….
Nuclear energy has almost zero carbon dioxide emissions — although it does create nuclear waste that needs to be managed carefully. But the scarcity of specialized labor, the challenges of obtaining permits, and the difficulty of sourcing sufficient uranium all pose a challenge to the development of new nuclear power plants…
How much will nuclear power increase?
Recent contracts for nuclear energy facilities along with signs of countries’ greater appetite for nuclear power suggest a significant increase of investment in the next five years, and a corresponding rise in power supply in the 2030s.
The proliferation of AI data centers has boosted investor confidence in future growth in electricity demand at the same time as big tech companies are looking for low-carbon reliable energy. This is leading to the de-mothballing of recently retired nuclear generators, as well as consideration for new larger-scale reactors.
In the US alone, big tech companies have signed new contracts for more than 10 GW of possible new nuclear capacity in the last year, and Goldman Sachs Research sees potential for three plants to be brought online by 2030.
What could help dispel US nuclear dependence on Russia for enrichment is a properly capable nuclear power industry that recycles nuclear fuel and is moving towards closing the nuclear fuel cycle.
Mind you, yours truly has repeatedly called for radical conservation, as in greatly trying to reduce resource consumption, before climate-change-induced collapse forces it upon us. But that view has an even smaller audience now than Before AI.
So one reason to discuss the fact that nuclear waste is a choice, not a necessity, is to try to persuade activists to demand nuclear waste-free new builds. If they can’t stop them, and the political winds suggest not, the fallback is to demand a much safer implementation.
Now to the discussion by Michaelmas, in Links 9/12/2025. I’ve combined two comments:
Nuclear waste is a myth that the US promoted to justify its crappy once-through fuel cycle model, which it set up entirely for political and economic reasons. So when various folks here complain that they don’t like nuclear power because ‘we don’t know how to get rid of the waste,’ they’re ignorantly repeating propaganda that the likes of the CIA have promoted.
We DO know how to ‘get rid of the waste.’ Talk to anybody in the nuclear industry. If they’re honest, they’ll tell you the reason nobody’s ever solved the problem of how to bury that ‘waste’ deep enough so it won’t be a problem for several centuries or millenia is that nobody who knows anything realistically expects that ‘waste’ to stay in the ground because people will probably use it for fuel in the next one or two centuries.
Because it’s barely-used fuel. In the US once-through nuclear fuel cycle, merely 3% to 5% of the original uranium fuel’s total energy content is extracted and used in the reactor before the fuel is discarded. Specifically, Uranium-235, the fissile isotope, comprises only about 0.7% of natural uranium, and enrichment boosts this to 3–5% for reactor use. After fission, a significant amount of U-238 remains.
This isotope could be converted into plutonium-239 and reused in breeder or reprocessing cycles—but in the US once-through model, it’s discarded. So are other actinides formed during operation that also retain substantial energy potential, but aren’t tapped unless reprocessing is done.
In closed or advanced fuel cycles (e.g. MOX fuel, fast reactors), reprocessing raises total energy extraction to 60–90%, depending on the technology and number of recycles. Furthermore, with 21st century technology like laser isotope separation (LIS) —
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/laser-isotope-separation
the remainder that can’t be reprocessed for fuel can be transmuted. There’s no need for any ‘nuclear waste’ to exist.Why does the US nuclear industry have its crappy nuclear power model? This is due to: –
[1.] The mid-20th century historical contingency that Admiral Rickover’s nuclear submarine program developed the boiling water reactor model first and this military application was then ported over to civilian application, and the US has been incapable of moving on from this 75-year old technology;
[2.] As always, the US government placed profitability for US corporations first, and discarding barely-used fuel as so-called waste without recycling seemingly promised greater profits for US energy corporations;
[3.] The US wanted to maintain its nuclear hegemony as much as possible and be able to threaten other states who didn’t have nuclear weapons, and reprocessing technologies are dual use — they’re nuclear enrichment technologies, too.
If you’ll recall, in the 1970s and 80s the US beef with the French nuclear power industry industry was essentially that it did reprocessing and the US beef with the Iranian nuclear industry is that it’ll permit enrichment now…
All flag-waving — yours and mine — aside, the point here is that had nuclear power been handled intelligently, and particularly had the US not implemented the nuclear policies it did both at home and abroad, then how much global climate forcing by CO₂ release could have been avoided?
Let’s suppose, specifically, that the world as a whole had moved to nuclear power along the model France implemented in the 1970s. France today generates around 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear, so it’s one of the lowest per-capita CO₂ emitters among industrialized nations. One recent analysis I’ve seen claims that France’s nuclear program has prevented emissions equivalent to 28 times its total CO₂ output in 2023 over the past 47 years.
Okay. Scaling that globally, if the world had followed France’s lead starting in the 1970s or 1980s, we can estimate:
Global electricity-related CO₂ emissions could have been slashed dramatically. Electricity generation accounts for roughly 40% of global CO₂ emissions. Including plant construction, nuclear emits some 4 grams of CO₂ per kWh, as compared to 400–1000 grams for coal and 200–500 grams for gas. That’s a 99 percent reduction in many cases.
As the world has emitted over 1,700 gigatonnes of CO₂ since 1850, and about 1,000 gigatonnes since 1970, a nuclear-powered world could plausibly have avoided 300–500 gigatonnes of that.
In turn, given that the models suggest that every 1,000 gigatonne of CO₂ adds approx. 0.45 degrees C of warming, that means we might have avoided 0.13–0.23°C of warming, which is a substantial dent in the currently visible 1.2 degrees C rise.
(Visible, because there’s another 3 to 8 degrees of warming in the pipeline currently being masked by aerosol particulate release.)
So yet again, bad incentives and short-termism have become so deeply embedded that most who discuss nuclear power have little idea how and wasteful the US approach to nuclear power is. Raising awareness is a first step to making that change.
All very accurate points about nuclear waste being in fact very valuable fuel to be burned in more sanely designed reactors, the history of why that is not done, etc.
However, this:
Is not actually true.
The history of energy is one of new sources being added to, not substituting previous ones.
You see it with renewables now — there has been a massive build up of renewables over the last few decades, but what happened to emissions? They kept rising all the same.
You can go further back when fossil fuels first started being used on a large scale in Britain instead of wood. Did that lower the use of wood for fuel? Well, I guess you can say it did, but that was primarily because the forests were already cut and there was no wood to be burned anyway. But in the long-term did the use of fossil fuels bring the forests back? Not at all, perhaps a little bit in the US northeast (though one can argue whether that was more because those were always agriculturally marginal areas), but on a global scale we deforested more of the planet than ever before. When they started burning coal in Britain in the 17th and 18th century Sumatra and Borneo were 100% rainforest, so were Mato Grosso, Rondonia, Tocantis and Maranhao in Brazil. Today Sumatra has 5% of its forest left, and only thanks to having some tall mountains, the southern half of Borneo is fully destroyed, most of the Brazilian states I listed suffered the same fate too, and this is just the most notable for their size examples, tropical forests have been decimated everywhere.
Then coal was replaced by oil as the primary transportation fuel in the early 20th century. Did that reduce global coal consumption? Not at all, it is higher now than it has ever been.
This is a fundamental principle. Jevon’s paradox strictly defined is about efficiency improvements, but it applies all the same to substitution with new energy sources.
Because the core problem is a system that depends on perpetual growth, and you can never satisfy the demands of exponential growth.
Plus, you literally boil the planet within a few centuries at current rates of economic growth just from the waste heat, regardless if the energy source, i.e. even if someone was to find a way to produce antimatter by cheating (i.e. not investing the energy equivalent or more into producing it, but somehow flipping the sign by magic) and then control it, we are still utterly screwed.
I had believed 1) BWRs (boiling water reactors) were used in some early power generation stations but not much after that. It has been pressurized water reactors (PWR) since then. 2) The mere existence of Pu-239 (created in reactors since it’s almost entirely absent in nature) is a nuclear weapon proliferation risk, so making more of it increases the resist. 3) Quite a lot of anti-nuclear activism was due to fossil fuel industry astroturfing.
The current buzz is around thorium-molten salt reactors which gets rid of some of these risks, but imposes technological obstacles. It’s just getting off the ground in China now.
A few years ago, I read an interesting book on this subject:
Michaelmas and others like to blame the US government and nasty profit seeking American corporations for the nuclear waste problem. I like attacking the US government and corporations as much as the next guy, but I have to point out that claim is simply wrong.
The real reason is safety. If you read any industry propaganda from the 1960’s 70’s or 80’s the industry was going to feature a mix of light water reactors and fast breeder reactors with reprocessing to burn up all the waste. It turns out it is both difficult and expensive to make safe light water reactors (Chernobyl or Fukushima anyone), but it is far harder to make safe fast breeder reactors. One reason is you have to use liquid sodium as a coolant which us really nasty stuff. Another reason is if you operate it incorrectly a fast breeder reactor can actually blow up like a nuclear bomb. This is physically impossible with a standard light water reactor.
The US, France, The Soviet Union and Japan all tried building fast breeder reactors and all gave up.