There are a variety of wastes, but most of the stuff sitting in cooling ponds can easily be fissioned away to about 10% of its mass and then is so 'hot' it only needs to be stored for about 300 years. It's simply NOT the problem you're pretending it is.
If it was really as easy as you suggest, don't you think someone would have done it by now? Why hasn't someone made a fortune by charging the government to process the waste for them? I don't believe it's quite as "easy" as you suggest or it's likely someone would have figured a way to do it cost effectively already.
Sure it is expensive to reprocess the fuel but fuel is really only a small fraction of the cost of nuclear power. Building the capital investment, the plant, is the main cost! Fuel is cheap, and reprocessing it worth it to keep the lights on and the money flowing in!
One would think that if it was "worth it to keep the lights on", we'd already be doing it.
James Hansen supports GenIV Integral Fast Reactors being deployed as fast as we can commercialise them.
That's fine by me, but I'd like a design that doesn't go up in smoke during a power failure.
I don't see why you're hedging your bets with unreliable sources of power that have to be backed by nukes anyway!
For starters, our sun is not all that unreliable and solar panels do not tend to leak radiation when they fail, and they don't require years worth of environmental studies.
Why try to 'back up' nuclear power with an unreliable source of power?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Because it's there and it's relatively cheap for starters. Wind energy is already as cost effective as a standard coal plant. PV systems are almost competitive with sequestration coal plants these days and they are increasing in efficiency all the time. Natural gas is cheaper, but mainly because we simply ignore the pollutants, and natural gas has remained relatively cheap. Secondly, most cars (and therefore most homes) will have a battery storage device within a decade. In case you had not noticed, gas isn't cheap anymore. Even a high mileage gasoline vehicle is unlikely to be much cheaper than about 10 cents a mile, whereas a good electric vehicle might bring the cost of a trip down to 3 cents a mile. Once the price of batteries comes down, and they become more efficient, electric vehicles will take off. They are already designing "smart homes" that can charge the car during optimal off peak hours and reuse the energy in the car during peak loads. That's the kind of technology that will make it easy to marry reliable and less reliable energy sources into one big electrical grid.
That's just nuts! Power is so cheap these days precisely BECAUSE we know how to build baseload power plants.
When you really look at the energy costs of an average family, energy isn't that cheap, particularly if they commute to work. Any serious switch to electric vehicles will require a lot more power from the US grid.
The 10% or 15% of the year they are down is largely planned, and we have a few extra plants running ready to back them up them. But the MORE time our power supplies spend down, the MORE extra plants we have to back them up. Not only that, but renewables are unreliable. You simply cannot book in when the wind is not going to blow, a month in advance, the way you book in a nuclear reactor's down time. It means you have to have all these other power plants in spinning reserve. It's madness!
It's not nearly as mad as you seem to think and electric companies are already balancing Photovoltaic loads and wind generation loads and power plant loads on a daily basis. There are some down sides to renewable energy of course, but there are a lot of pluses as well. Like I said, PV systems don't typically cause whole towns to be evacuated even when they fail catastrophically.
