Where we need to be

Nuclear energy needs to become a part of our clean energy portfolio along with Wind and Solar energy and an increased effort to Use Less Energy. Nuclear needs to grow along with other clean energy sources to make up for not only the current nuclear power plants that are being decommissioned, but also to make up for fossil fuel plants being taken offline and increases in energy demand that are sure to occur.

We need to be able to build more nuclear power plants for less money. Nuclear power plants have a low operational cost compared to fossil fuels, but the initial costs need to come down to make them a viable technology in the long term. In addition, there is currently a huge bottleneck in the production of nuclear power that must be overcome. There needs to be more than one place in the world to get a key component for nuclear reactor production. These two issues are probably going to be the largest stumbling blocks to overcome.

We also need to be able to run at 100% to get the most out of our mined and processed Uranium and use less carbon-intensive technologies to acquire properly purified Uranium. Currently, the carbon emissions associated with mining and processing Uranium are the only operational emissions associated with nuclear power. Finding ways to get the Uranium by using emissions free technologies would make nuclear as clean as solar or wind with regards to CO2 emitted while running. Not only do we need to be cleaner in getting the feedstock for nuclear energy, but we need to make better use of it. Uranium degrades naturally, meaning our fuel is slowly being used up even if we aren't getting anything out of it. The most efficient way to use this would be to produce power from nuclear reactors all the time and then storing excess for reducing peak loads.

Finally, we need to eventually address the issue of what to do with the nuclear waste. There are a number of potential solutions that have been discussed, such as recycling (also known as reprocessing) spent fuels, burying fuels underground, of finding some living thing to help the natural degradation process. One of these, or some other technology we haven't thought of yet, needs to eventually take care of dealing with the waste from this process so that we don't create a new major problem by trying to solve the climate change problem.