requested by @raven-harlot and @pokegeek151
As there is a lot of conflicting information in this post, with varying levels of reliability, I will not be giving this an overall rating.
Nuclear power is considered more environmentally friendly than coal and other fossil fuels.
Source: ‘Nuclear power has a lot going for it. Its carbon footprint is equivalent to wind, less than solar, and orders of magnitude less than coal. Nuclear power plants take up far less space on the landscape than solar or wind farms, and they produce power even at night or on calm days.’
Source: ‘The paper demonstrates that without nuclear power, it will be even harder to mitigate human-caused climate change and air pollution. This is fundamentally because historical energy production data reveal that if nuclear power never existed, the energy it supplied almost certainly would have been supplied by fossil fuels instead (overwhelmingly coal), which cause much higher air pollution-related mortality and GHG emissions per unit energy produced (ref. 2).’
Newer nuclear power designs may be safer.
Source: ‘Nuclear proponents are now banking on next-generation designs, like small, modular versions of conventional light-water reactors, or advanced reactors designed to be safer, cheaper, and more flexible.’
Source: ‘Molten salt reactors have numerous operational and safety advantages over solid fuel designs. […] Fluid nature of the fuel means meltdown is an irrelevant term and allows the fuel salt to be automatically drained to passively cooled, critically safe dump tanks.’
(Fallout is indeed set in a world where oil depletion resulted in international turmoil, eventually leading to a nuclear exchange between the US and China. I don’t think this needs further exploration, so I’m just going to link to the Wikipedia page and leave it at that.)
Nuclear waste disposable is a factor to consider, as it does pose some risks, but this risk is generally lower than the public perceives it to be.
Source: ‘In the absence of reprocessing, spent fuel is considered to be waste and must be prepared for permanent disposal in a separate facility. In addition, the waste stream from spent-fuel reprocessing must also be disposed of. Many nuclear countries, from the United States to China to Finland, have researched the technologies and geologic locations for disposal sites, but no permanent disposal site is in use anywhere in the world. Pending approval and construction of disposal sites, all spent fuel and processed waste are being kept either in cooling pools or in aboveground storage casks.’
When a holistic view is taken of the nuclear waste-disposal process, the risks seem extremely small, yet among the general public, these risks are one of the most-feared aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle.’
France gets around 70% of its electricity from nuclear power, not 80%. They have been storing their waste in France, not Finland, and they are currently building their first permanent underground facility. (Finland was the first to begin building an underground repository, which may be where the confusion came from.)
Source: ‘Since France’s first nuclear power plant opened in 1956, the country has housed its high-level toxic waste in four short-term national surface facilities at La Hague in Normandy, Marcoule and Cadarache in the south and Valduc, north of Dijon.’
Source: ‘The world’s first geological tomb for nuclear waste is rapidly taking shape more than 400 metres below the forests of Finland.’
From what I can tell, uranium does have a particularly long half life compared to other components of nuclear fuel. 95% of the energy in fuel rods is still present in nuclear waste.
Source: ‘The majority of the material in spent nuclear fuel is a relatively stable form of uranium called uranium 238 (U-238). It has a half life of over four billion years, so it will be around for a long time. The next largest fraction of material is unspent uranium 235 (U-235) and plutonium fuel with half lives of 700 million years and 24 thousand years respectively.’
Source: ‘as much as 95 percent of the energy in fissile uranium remains in the waste’
It does not seem that uranium was chosen over other materials specifically for dual usage in bombs. Its advantages were that it was one of few fissile materials, and the only one that occurs in usable amounts in nature.
Source: ‘All heavy nuclides have the ability to fission when in an excited state, but only a few fission readily and consistently when struck by slow (low-energy) neutrons. Such species of atoms are called fissile. The most prominently utilized fissile nuclides in the nuclear industry are uranium-233 (233U), uranium-235 (235U), plutonium-239 (239Pu), and plutonium-241 (241Pu). Of these, only uranium-235 occurs in a usable amount in nature—though its presence in natural uranium is only some 0.7204 percent by weight, necessitating a lengthy and expensive enrichment process to generate a usable reactor fuel’
Thorium waste may be more difficult to refine into bombs, although this is disputed somewhat.
Source: ‘When thorium is used, the nuclear reactions are altered so that the reactor produces much less plutonium, and the radioactive waste it does create is more difficult to refine for use in bombs.’
Source: ‘Contrary to that which many proponents of thorium claim, U-233 should be regarded as posing a definite proliferation risk. For a thorium fuel cycle which falls short of a breeding cycle, uranium fuel would always be needed to supplement the fissile material and there will always be significant (though reduced) plutonium production.’
Thorium would produce less waste, and this waste would likely be dangerous for shorter periods of time.
Source: ‘The thorium fuel cycle generates much less waste, of far less long-term toxicity, which has to be stored for just three centuries or so.’
Source: ‘Claims that thorium fuels give a reduction in radiotoxicity are justified. However, caution is required because many such claims cite studies based on a self-sustaining thorium cycle in equilibrium. More realistic studies which take account of the effect of U-235 or Pu-239 seed fuels required to breed the U-233 suggest the benefits are more modest.’
In 2016, researchers did find a way to convert nuclear waste into a diamond battery.
Source: ‘New technology has been developed that uses nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered battery. A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current.’
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