It’s not a big secret that the Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace and other groups have forestalled nuclear waste storage and recycling research, and nuclear policy in the US for decades while it is racing ahead in other countries. The next energy moguls will probably be in India, where they are working towards reuse reburning and thorium tech.

Meanwhile one of the best ways to get rid of both nuclear waste and weapons fissionable stock is to burn it for energy, thus making it as inert as possible. A serious policy on storage and reuse needs to be formulated but it’s really dead stalled due to the old guard anti-nuclear contingent in the Democrat party.

That needs to change in the face of AGW, growing energy needs, and the population we need to support in 40 short years (9 billion by 2050 or sooner) The more plentiful and cheap power becomes the easier it will be to cope with that population in a clean manner, and there are also correlations between energy, urbanization, and lower birth rates. We can increase population density with plentiful energy, we can’t if it’s expensive.

*Note that this is a Nuclear industry think tank source, and they definitely have a bias for Nuclear energy. Also note that I’ve found this site to be reliably factual over the past several years.

Issues in Science and Technology is a quarterly publication put out by the National Academy of Sciences, and in its newest issue, out this week, Luther Carter, Lake Barrett, and Kenneth Rogers author a critique of the Obama administration for its re-examination of U.S. policy on the back end of the fuel cycle. In fact, the authors of ‘Nuclear Waste Disposal: Showdown at Yucca Mountain’ don’t acknowledge the legitimacy of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. The essay is a political polemic, and it fails to recognize the strategic advantages associated with centralized long-term management of used nuclear fuel…

…Is U.S. policy on the back end of the fuel cycle ideal? Absolutely not. The United States needs a path forward for the long-term management of high-level radioactive waste from civilian and defense programs, but new nuclear plants will or will not be built on electricity demand fundamentals, not the political football that has been, and to some extent remains, Yucca Mountain. States have moratoria on building new nuclear plants by virtue of the government not having a repository for used nuclear fuel disposal, but there is widespread reconsideration of that ban in a number of those states. Alaska earlier this year overturned its moratorium. Industry’s safe and secure management of commercial reactor fuel is playing a role in this reconsideration by state legislatures.

There’s no denying that the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle is in a state of flux from a federal policy perspective.

In other words, if there’s a flaw in Obama’s science policy, this is it.

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