Nuclear power is safe, affordable, and the waste problems

are much more manageable than the public realizes. That was the take-home message

from this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago, where a group of experts from the US

and EU participated in a session called "Keeping the Lights On: The

Revival of Nuclear Energy for Our Future."

As you might have gathered from some of our prior AAAS coverage, climate change was a pretty central theme in many of the sessions and, although nuclear power won't be able to fulfill all our energy demands in a post-carbon world, it's hard to avoid thinking that the world will need to make full use of nuclear energy.

We'll tackle the last part of the take-home message first, since it's rather topical. President Obama dealt the highly-troubled proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain another blow last week. That didn't surprise many, given that, during his campaign, he made statements opposing the site, while top Senate Democat Harry Reid (NV) has all but stated that Yucca Mountain would not open on his watch.

Despite the lack of a secure, long-term, high-level waste storage site, great strides are being made towards methods of solving the waste problem. Reprocessing, vitrification, and even dry cask storage tech are now at the point where we can deal with interim storage for the next 50-100 years, which is what it will probably take to build the political discipline needed for a longer-term solution. Meanwhile, smart people in labs are working on being able to partition and transmute the long-lived actinides, something that should excite any physics nerd.

As for that long-term solution, several test sites are progressing nicely in Europe: Onkalo in Finland, the charmingly-named HADES project in Belgium, and Grimsel in Switzerland.

Environmental critics of nuclear power frequently claim that nuclear power isn't cost-effective once the decommissioning costs and waste storage is accounted for. That isn't true, claims Dr. Roland Schenkel, Director General of the European Commission's Joint Research Center. Using Finland as an example (since they're in the process of building a new reactor, one of the only nations currently doing so), he put the total lifetime cost of a nuclear plant at about ?3 billion over 100 years. Of this figure, dismantling and waste management only amounts to ?10 million, and repository closure and sealing another ?230 million—that's less than five percent of the total electricity production costs.

Nuclear is also safe (Chernobyl notwithstanding), and the newer generation III plants under construction should make it even safer. A lot of effort is going into simplifying the designs to use more passive systems, fewer components, and more standardized features, helping both safety and the economics of new plant construction.

Currently, the US lags behind Europe when it comes to new nuclear plants. There are several plants under construction across the Atlantic but, despite plans for 34 new light water reactors in the US, ground has yet to be broken on any of them. I'm not a betting man, but I'd be surprised if that remained the case a decade from now.