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Current Climate: A New Nuclear Reactor Goes Online In Georgia
(www.forbes.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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It depends on the renewables. Wind and photovoltaics have stability issues. Hydro and geothermal are more stable. Nuclear is compact and high power but has huge waste disposal issues.
The waste disposal is a solvable issue, that is still less nefarious than fossil fuel emissions. If you set the goal to replace ALL fossil fuel power generation, then nuclear is a necessary component of a renewable energy based grid. Geothermal and hydro are great and necessary, but can't provide a reliable base load for the entire grid. Nuclear plants are complemental to renewables, not competition.
Strangely enough it hasn't been solved in the almost 70 years of nuclear energy. And I doubt it will be solved in the next 70 years either.
I think that depends on the definition of "solved".
In Finland, the Onkalo repository is being steadily built out (honestly, there might already be waste stored there, I haven't checked in on that story in a while. I know there was some delay due to COVID).
In the United States, there's been a lot of the usual politicking about where to build something that doesn't exactly sound appealing to have in one's backyard. Nobody wants to be the senator who allowed the government to build a nuclear waste site in their state, no matter how safe the site actually is.
This has led to the unfortunate situation where by law, the EPA is only allowed to consider a site in Nevada (because the other sites were in states represented by the Speaker of the House and President pro Tempore of the Senate), but because Nevada became an important state for Obama to become president, the site couldn't/wouldn't actually be built there and has been on hold pretty much ever since. My armchair understanding is that the Nevada site is probably one of the better places in the United States that you could store nuclear waste, but politics has ensured it will not be put there for a long, long time.