Nuclear power is a political fight for the dignity of man. It's difficult to take on the evil empire, but we must not flinch! The opponents of scientific and technological progress must be defeated, or humanity will perish!

Nuclear fission power is the best we have. It's ready to use now, not pending new discoveries, as with fusion. It's the most weather-independent. The fuel supply is not something we have to continually hunt for, as with coal, oil or gas, not because it's as abundant as water or air (it isn't), but because so little provides so much power. That makes it super-easy to store and transport. And we already have over a thousand years worth in storage!

The so-called "waste" is actually a treasure. It does need to be sorted out and handled with a facility designed to handle radioactive materials, but public fear keeps it locked up in the most invincible containers we can engineer, as if it were the mythical Pandora's box.

The ban on spent fuel reprocessing and the de facto ban on breeder reactors has forced us to use mostly U-235, a rare isotope that is not economical to fully separate from the more abundant U-238, and store the rest as "enrichment tailings" or "spent nuclear fuel", but the latter are both fuel. We use only 1/2 of 1% of the uranium that we mine. That's why we have over a 1000 years' worth in storage!

So, let's keep the reactors we have, run them as long as we can, but instead of decommissioning, a cult ritual that lasts until all the litigators are dead, let us replace the over-aged light water reactor with a fast neutron breeder, and start using the "spent" fuel that is already stored around the old plant! Elysium Industries' molten salt liquid fuel design allows us to use the spent fuel with the addition of some plutonium or U-235 to get it started, and the addition of chlorine to make the uranium and plutonium into salt-soluble chlorides, to make a liquid fuel at the plant's operating temperature. It's not even necessary to remove the fission products from the spent fuel, until it has been in this reactor for over 40 years, and the mass of the fission products is nearly as great as the uranium and plutonium. In breeder reactors like this one, the fissile content is maintained by conversion of U-238 into plutonium. (Some of the fission products, which will not combine with chlorine and dissolve in the salt, are filtered out as the reactor operates.)

Oil, coal and gas are fine; their use will not cause climate catastrophe, and the pollution can be managed, but it's more work to do that than with nuclear fission, because it's much more work to mine, process, store and transport the fuel, especially for gas, and the waste stream, especially for coal, is also huge, and you don't get isotopes. An economy built on nuclear fission and isotopes will perform far better than one limited to oil, coal and gas. Nuclear accidents are rare, and despite the public reaction, they are not apocalyptic. Even the Chernobyl exclusion zone has become a flourishing wildlife refuge. There is no rational basis for the level of fear; the fear demands absurd precautions to prevent low-level exposure, and causes total panic at every breach of containment or even just a slightly abnormal operating condition, and this is what makes the cost prohibitive. Political courage could dramatically reduce the cost, by un-brainwashing the public! The fear largely prevents the use of isotopes except where the need is most desperate, as with cancer treatment. Read what Edward Calabrese has published against the Linear No Threshold model of radiation exposure risk assessment!