Building out a climate-friendly, SAFE, CLEAN, HEALTHY fleet of modern breeder reactors will not only save thousands of lives in Australia from choking to death on coal each year, but will create a market for burning up old nuclear waste and especially warheads. Old nuclear warheads are expensive to maintain. We should open a program offering to buy them, and then burn them for energy. America burned 16,000 bombs worth of weapons grade material in their reactors, powering 10% of America the last few decades. That's like powering the whole of Australia for 20 years on old Soviet bombs!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program

I am more convinced than ever that breeder reactors like the IFR and LFTR are the future, and that we can convert a 250,000 year storage problem into 500 years of clean energy for the planet! Nuclear waste and warheads, they're not the problem, they're the solution! (If we burn them in breeder reactors). GE have the PRISM ready to build in the first nation that will let it. I say let's offer to store some of the world's waste, as just America's nuclear waste is now a resource WORTH $30 TRILLION!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(reactor)

Bravo Max Green, bravo! You do realise the absolute storm from the greens that would cause though? Poor old Helen Caldicott would get a new lease of life though. Whirling round like a demented dervish lol.
I am surprised Rhosty has not suggested Thorium?
I would love to see the world embrace some real technology but politics always gets in the way of the BEST idea. Good luck anyway to Max and Rhosty and I will remind people if these technologies get up you were the ones I heard touting them.

Hi JBowyer,
thanks for that. I was anti-nuclear for years, having inherited (without knowing how, exactly) Caldicott's screeching banshee hysteria against nuclear power. To be honest, the word still scares me. But why? *Why*? It's 1980's Cold War hysteria from movies like "The Day After" etc. It's ignorance, conflating NUKULAR BOMBS with the safest large scale reliable source of power known to the human race!

Honestly, the horse has bolted. The majority of large CO2 emitters already *have* nuclear bombs. Maybe if they belonged to an international fuel club run by the IAEA, there might be more pressure to use non-weaponisable safe fission, which itself might one day create a market incentive to fission the warhead away? They can make money burning it rather than booming it!

Given that the Guardian has a story about combined coal, oil & gas air pollution in China kills about 4000 people (or a Chernobyl per DAY!) in China alone, I wonder if anyone has counted how many lives this 'deadly' nuclear power stuff has already saved in countries that use it?

"A new paper from NASA’s Goddard Institute authored by Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen in the journal Environmental Science and Technology purports to do just that. Hansen is well known as one of the founders of modern global warming science. The authors come up with the striking figure of 1.8 million as the number of lives saved by replacing fossil fuel sources with nuclear. They also estimate the saving of up to 7 million lives in the next four decades, along with substantial reductions in carbon emissions, were nuclear power to replace fossil fuel usage on a large scale.....

The conclusions of the study are quite unambiguous. Even assuming uncertainties, nuclear power has saved at least hundreds of thousands of lives in the past forty years, and possibly millions. This is in stark contrast to the small number of lives lost in only one catastrophic nuclear accident. There are many more millions that would be lost if countries were to embark on a nuclear-free future replaced by fossil fuels.

....

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/nuclear-power-may-have-saved-1-8-million-lives-otherwise-lost-to-fossil-fuels-may-save-up-to-7-million-more/