Fusion power probably won't be soon, but I'm not ready to give up on it in the longer term.

I used to think of the waste issue as one of three big reasons to spurn nuclear power (the other two are risk of escaping radiation during an "event" and the danger of nuclear material s getting into hostile hands). I favored phasing out nuclear power. But you know, all of the risks with nuclear power are local risks. You could have a bad accident like Chernobyl, or piss off a community somewhere when we try to store the waste near them, or a city might blow up due to nuclear terrorism, and that's a rather large downside. But it's by far the cleanest source of power, exceeded by no competing energy source. The more we use nuclear, the less we'll mess up the climate.

Climate change is not a local risk. It's a global thing, and if we don't get it under control, we might no longer be worrying about anything at all.

I'm talking about NASA's methane clathrate scenario. If the global temperature rises plus 10 degrees centigrade, the clathrate deposits buried shallowly on the continental shelves could be warmed enough to bubble up into the atmosphere. Methane is a terrific greenhouse gas. Global warming will go nuts. Feedback loop. Nobody knows how far it might go; we could get boiling oceans.

So. Now I'm mildly in favor of increasing the use of nuclear fission as a power source for the next 50 years at least, or until we have nuclear fusion in hand. If we lose a few cities, it's better than wiping ourselves out entirely, or failing to produce the power we need to sustain our civilization.

Sorry to pop your bubble, but nuclear is far from clean and going forward it will produce more CO2 per kw than gas fired plants do.

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We are rapidly running out of high grade ore to mine. Mining low grade ore a nuke plant creates just as much CO2 as a gas fired does...before you calculate in the huge amounts of energy needed for decommisioning a nuclear plant. Not to mention the cost which can be twice what the reactor cost to build, which is already six to eight times what a gas fired plant costs and three to four times what it costs to get power from the wind. Wind, which actually produces zero CO2 and has no deadly waste and is perfectly safe...wind power costs far far less than nuclear.

There are no benefits to nuclear, and there are horrific costs both in safety and pure dollar terms.

. . . inherent to the fuel production process, or the result of lazy fuel producers? Meaning, why couldn't all those furnaces be solar-based? Or all those vehicles run on electricity generated by a nuclear or reneweable power plant?

Much of it is inherent but in any case...far easier to not use nuclear and develop renewable technology for everyone than to develop it so that we can continue to pursue nuclear without creating so much CO2. Mining machines, for example, use extremely large amounts of energy in remote locations and are therefore one of the most difficult scenarios to apply renewable energy sources to. Way easier to power homes directly with renewables than it is to make nuclear a truly CO2 low emission energy source by converting the nuclear fuel creation process to renewables.

Many Uranium mining areas seem to be in desert areas; setting up solar power plants to produce electricity for the mining and processing wouldn't seem to be too difficult. Nuclear power plants would be a bigger challenge, but potentially one worth tackling since these mines produce fuel for said plants. Given a consistent source of electricity, electric mining vehicles could become practical.

I'm not saying this because I'm a big fan of nuclear, btw. And as my comments about the ease of solar power in remote areas demonstrates, I'm not opposed to solar and other renewable resources. I'm just unwilling to write off ANY source of energy at this time. Every source of energy has its advantages and disadvantages, and overdependence on a single source leaves us vulnerable to the disadvantages of that source--be it radioactive waste from nuclear, greenhouse gasses from fossil fuels, or the limited availability of renewables.