I have good news and bad news on energy. Even though the US has lots of coal, the idea of 'clean coal' is right up there with a little bit pregnant. Aside from being a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions, coal is nasty stuff loaded with toxic heavy metals and dangerous pollutants (Oil and gas are only marginally better and otherwise more problematic). Renewables can and will be part of the solution, but they will not be the sole answer for everyone. The good news is there are other options worth exploring: there's more than one way to split an atom.
Most existing nuclear power plants are of a type known as a thermal reactor, they use 'slower' neutrons. But there's another type of nuclear reaction useful for generating power that uses faster neutrons. The concerns with existing thermal reactors can be grouped into several categories. Thanks to some experts and books like Prescription for the Planet, here's my current understanding of how fast reactors compare.
1. Thermal reactors use expensive fuel in finite supply like uranium and produce nuclear waste which remains dangerous for thousands of years.
Fast reactors could power this country for decades using that same waste as fuel. FRs also happen to be about 100 times more efficient in converting radioactive mass into electrical energy than thermal reactors, meaning they use relatively less fuel over time. Moreover, the waste from some types of FR's decays safely away in a matter of decades, making storage a far less worrisome and way less expensive proposition. And if we include the depleted uranium (DU) left over from the enrichment process, it would be something like 700 years before any more mining would be needed, once the current thermal types have been phased out. At the current price of energy, the existing DU alone is worth trillions in kilowatts and dollars. This waste is better than free: it's stuff we are anxious to get rid of safely.
2. Thermal reactors can melt down and poison the environment. Case in point, Chernobyl.
This is a damn good point and I've gone into more detail here. The gist of it is nowadays designs with passive failsafe features exist that have been tested and found to prevent all kinds of failures even under the most unlikely scenarios. The type of reactor that caught fire at Chernobyl will never be built again, it did not have those new features, plus it was a poorly designed, graphite-moderated reactor. Even so it took egregious human error and jaw-dropping negligence to initiate the failure. New generation fast reactor designs do have those features.
3. Nuclear power plants can aid in the development of nuclear weapons.
They can, although it isn't quite that simple. In general fast reactors don't lend themselves any better to weapons grade research or production than thermal reactors. Besides, the nations that would do the most good from a global pollutant standpoint by using fast reactors instead of fossil fuels are the US, China, and India. The genie is long out of the bottle in all three.
4. Replacing a significant portion of our grid using fast reactors would be expensive and take a long time.
Maintaining and defending oil supply lines stretched halfway across the world isn’t exactly cheap. And we’re not necessarily talking about 'replacing' anytime soon; we’re talking about building fast reactors in the future instead of building a bunch more plants that burn coal, oil, and gas. Most importantly, the US is extremely well equipped to improve and innovate when it comes to nuclear power. We invented it, we lead in it. It happens that we have a superior fast reactor design in mind called an Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). The IFR concept has several advantages over other kinds of fast reactors, which are in turn superior to thermal reactors in part for the reasons stated above.
In fact, it makes so much sense to build a prototype fast reactor it was already proposed and funded. But whereas India is aggressively moving ahead with plans to develop the technology, and the Chinese have purchased two Russian BN-800 fast reactors, the WH helped halt the prototype IFR in 1994 years before completion. The concept has yet to be seriously revisited, let alone refunded.
As a science writer I spend a great deal of time debunking pseudoscience and misinformation. I urge people to put aside biases and examine the facts with an open mind. Here in the reality-based community, we understand that goes both ways. Over the years I've gone from lukewarm to skeptical and back more than once on nuclear power. For now, I believe it makes sense to consider building, or rather completing, a research IFR prototype. We'd learn a great deal, perhaps enough to build them cheaper, safer, and better. Perhaps not. But at least we would know more.