Next-Gen Nuclear Is Coming, If We Want It.
Back in 2009, Simon Irish, an investment manager in New York, found the kind of opportunity that he thought could transform the world while — in the process — transforming dollars into riches.
Irish saw that countries around the globe needed to build a boggling amount of clean-power projects to replace its fossil fuel infrastructure — while also providing enough energy for rising demand from China, India, and other rapidly growing countries. He realized that it would be very hard for renewables, which depend on the wind blowing and the sun shining, to do everything. And he knew that nuclear power, the only existing form of clean energy that could fill the gaps, was too expensive to compete with oil and gas.
But then, at a conference in 2011, he met an engineer with an innovative design for a nuclear reactor cooled by molten salt. If it worked, Irish figured, it could not only solve the problems with aging nuclear power, but also provide a realistic path to dropping fossil fuels.
“The question was, ‘Can we do better than the conventional reactors that were commercialized 60 years ago?” Irish recalled. “And the answer was, ‘Absolutely.’”
https://grist.org/article/next-gen-nuclear-is-coming-if-we-want-it/
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... including used fuel from existing light water reactors, depleted uranium, nuclear weapons, and existing mine tailings.
There are huge stockpiles of depleted uranium worldwide. Currently this depleted uranium is most commonly used to shoot "enemies" and poison their children and grandchildren.
The leftover fission products of fast reactors have much shorter half-lives than those of existing light water reactors; radioactivity approaches that of the original "natural" uranium ores in a few hundred years.
In any case, used nuclear fuels properly contained are not nearly so scary as toxic coal or gas fracking wastes having half lives of forever, that are dumped wherever, and with the blessing of the Trump administration, even ignoring greenhouse gas emissions.
A toxic coal ash accident:
A roughly equivalent (at least within an order of magnitude or two) amount of "spent" nuclear fuel minding its own business, going nowhere, doing nothing.
