This is the solution. The bite is that politicians know it is incredibly unpopular, and in America penalizes rural voters who have to drive farther. Ideally, it would be assessed annually when you renew registration and amortized out as monthly payment (or possibly an option to pay a lump sum). Based on your cars mileage for the last year, so it would be a post paid tax. However here in Texas, we just got rid of inspections that verify your mileage, so it would be left to self reporting, which is notoriously unreliable.

1. No, not breeders, but reprocessing. There is still a lot of usable fuel left in an “expended” fuel cell, just not in enough concentration.

Long term storage and/or reprocessing of fuel. On site storage is not a viable long term solution. We need some way to safely store expended fuel or change the rules to allow reprocessing. Commercially, we need to figure out an economical way to build power plants that doesn’t die under the weight of its own regulations. Vogtle 3 & 4 went waaayy over budget, and almost bankrupted the partners (Westinghouse I believe). Solar and wind are seeing reduction in cost due to expanding market and the economy of scale that goes with it, along with generous subsidies. For nuclear to get those benefits it would have to be constructed at a rate not seen since Three Mile Island. We lost all of those benefits accrued during the 60s 70s and 80s. We would be starting at least 10 years behind wind and solar.

Right, but they don’t exist commercially and are 10 years away by best estimate (I think I haven’t looked lately). Also, Navy style reactors are not anything like SMR designs currently under development. They are much closer to current PWR reactors in use. I love the idea of more nuclear, hell that’s what I do for a living. I just feel like SMRs are more vapor ware that’s always “10 years away”. I hope not, I know some really smart people who are currently working at Terrapower trying to make it a reality.

I use an Asus 86RU running Asus-Merlin. It ticks all of your boxes.