Nuclear should be considered part of clean energy standard, White House says

I hope that the federal government can provide incentives to keep reactors running that would otherwise close prematurely.

5.1 gigawatts of American reactors are expected to retire this year: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46436

It's a shame that the US is retiring working reactors while still burning fossil fuels for electricity. Reactors are far safer and cleaner than fossil electric generation. It's mostly the low price of natural gas that is driving these early retirements. Low gas prices have also retired a lot of coal usage -- which is good! -- but we'd make more climate progress if those low prices didn't also threaten nuclear generation.

Some states like New York already provided incentives to keep reactors running for climate reasons:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41534

Federal policy could be more comprehensive.

if we are to come out the other side of this climate emergency we must keep our reactors online. the purity testing of what do we do with the waste is not helpful critique when we are still reliant on coal

The ignorance of the externalities of fossil fuels and a bipolar hyper focus on those of nuclear energy is mind boggling at this point.

I’m all for developing renewables, but we cannot abandon the one good technology we have for generating massive amounts of energy our base loads demand without polluting our air.

Indeed that is the strangest thing. By _any_ metric coal is far worse. Even the metric "amount of radioactive material that ended up in the atmosphere per watt of energy." (Coal contains trace amounts of radioactive material, that gets spread when burned).

The fact of the matter is, that we can dump all our waste on a couple of football fields worth of space. Or even better: store it in a cave somewhere deep and dark and away from rivers.

This is probably one of those hacker news comments where it sounds good for 1 second then when you stop to think about it it falls apart, bu here goes.

throw the waste in a bucket strong enough to survive hitting earth at terminal velocitty. place bucket in spacex falcon9 rocket. launch rocket into orbit with escape velocity. watch nuclear waste vanish into vacuum of space forever. if crash, collect bucket and restart with new rocket.

financially costly? yes. solves the 'what about in 5000 years when someone opens it or it leaks?' questions, yes.

I'm torn on which one second response is best. Contenders are:

1. Reprocessing is a better technological solution.

2. That waste is much safer in it's current location in a dry cask in the back lot behind a power plant than it would be on even the safest rocket.

3. Even if we punt waste disposal or reprocessing to future generations, we are still better off stacking waste in dry casks in the back lot behind power plants than burning coal.