Sweden’s parliament has voted to change its 100% renewable target to a 100% fossil-free target, leaving the door open for nuclear.
Wow. That would suck. Especially as noone has any solution for the problem of safely storing radioactive waste. Running nuclear power plants makes us create a problem many generations after us have to deal with.
Nuclear waste remains a problem largely for political reasons. The engineers know how to deal with it: You can burn it to make more power. Fully burned nuclear fuel stays dangerously radioactive for a couple hundred years. It’s no harder to deal with than any other moderately obnoxious industrial waste.
One of the ways the anti-nuclear movement really screwed us was by freezing most nuclear technology development in the 1980’s. The so called Gen IV Reactor designs are mostly design ideas that had been proposed by 1990 and some still haven’t even had a demonstration plant built even though most of them largely avoid both the major safety and waste issues that are the major complaints against nuclear.
