How we get there

First and foremost, as with all energy technologies, the best thing we can do is Use Less Energy. The biggest thing that we need to do to advance nuclear power specifically is to allow for more of it. One of the best ways to lower costs associated with building nuclear power plants is going to be to build more of them and take advantage of economies of scale. A commitment to nuclear energy would hopefully allow new plants for production to open up, alleviating the bottlenecks currently facing production. The other way we are going to be able to increase the cost competitiveness of nuclear power is Putting A Price on Carbon. We need to make it easier to build new nuclear power plants than it is to build new fossil fuel power plants, which contribute to the currently irreversible problem of Climate Change.

In order to make nuclear power plants more efficient, we are going to have to have Large Scale Storage systems for extra electricity. This will allow the plants to run all the time and use the energy they produce off peak when demands increase. Nuclear energy must become viewed as a part of the clean energy economy in order to displace fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas that pose an immediate risk by releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. This is not to say that we need to support nuclear at the expense of wind and solar, but just that we need to move forward under the assumption that nuclear is going to exist in the future. We are going to have to get over concerns about nuclear meltdowns and realize that without nuclear, we are unlikely to be able to sufficiently reduce our CO2 emissions.

Finally, more research needs to go into trying to figure out what to do with nuclear waste. This is not something that we should wait on before working on constructing new nuclear power plants, but is something we will need to put more effort in going forward. It may not be a particularly popular idea, but the risks that concentrated nuclear waste hold are likely lower than that of climate change spread out all over the world. This is especially true because we can hold waste in storage containers above ground for at least 120 years.