The nuclear option

Nuclear power - in different pronunciations - has been surfacing with monotonous regularity. It is an elegant technology with no visible pollution and that appears to be attractive to many. However, it does have a draw-back - the spent fuel (nuclear waste) is radioactive and will remain so after production for 10s of thousands of years. The nuclear waste is created both during the preparation of the fuel as well as the use of it. The waste produced by nuclear plants is high level waste and has a long half-life. With the current crop of plants worldwide, this waste is increasing at over 10,000 tonnes per year. Consensus is that storage of the waste deep in earth is the best way to contain it. However, storing something hazardous for many 10s of thousands of years is not that easy - especially because humans have not yet shown great abilities to contain harmful materials for long periods of time. Also, geological storage is always susceptible to unpredictable shocks and other calamities.

To make the nuclear option viable for power generation, a system that is able to remove the waste from the earth is needed. This can only be done by sending such waste to outside the solar system. Current technology to send objects to space, largely based on fossil-fuel burning rockets, will not be adequate to accomplish the task of transporting spent fuel because of high cost and unreliability. A new technology needs to be developed for this as it is possible that humans are going to find many objects to get rid of in the future (not just spent fuel). So the development of the nuclear option has to be tightly coupled with the space program with a focus on low cost and reliable interstellar transportation of non-human objects. The nuclear power generation, as currently practiced, is a bit like national debt - we are just shifting the problem to the next generation.