Technically true, but not in the way a casual reader may think. The storage and ultimate disposal of spent nuclear fuel (i.e. "nuclear waste") is a small fraction of the overall cost of the nuclear power enterprise. The Nuclear Waste Fund has been accumulating capital from rate-payers for years and has about $50B in it in the USA, from ~100 operating plants that have sold ~$1T of electricity in their lifetimes.
It's the short-term handling of fission products (that eventually cool off and become nuclear waste) that makes fission expensive. Since fusion products are much less radioactive than fission products, fusion has a major advantage over fission in terms of worrying about containing radioactive material. To contain it in fission reactors, we have lots of redundant cooling systems, control systems, instruments. We have a powerful regulator checking everything, and requesting major changes. We have teams of people planning maintenance work to minimize dose to the workers. We have big 50km radius emergency planning zones with sirens and drills and all that.
Nuclear fusion is the dream energy source because it has all the positive elements of fission (24/7, zero-carbon, can build anywhere, tiny fuel requirements b/c nuclear) without the major downside of radioactive fission products and transuranics.
I got into the nuclear industry specifically to help solve climate change with fusion, but I got distracted by advanced Gen-IV fission reactors for now, assuming they'd be shorter-term developments. Fusion is still the dream though, for sure.
The major downside of fission isn't fission products or transuranics. Would that those were! The major downside of fission is that it's too expensive. Fusion would take this, THE showstopper for fission, and make it worse.
It's an example of not focusing your problem solving on the actual problem.
Cost is the proximal issue, but why? My claim is that if the fission products and TRU were not radioactive it would not be expensive. This point is pretty easy to argue, as most cost ratcheting has been related to protecting against radiation hazards.
Fusion products are far less radioactive but the engineering to get to the proper physical conditions is very hard and expensive. Fission is the opposite. Trivial to get fission chain reactions given the material (done in 1942 by Enrico Fermi with natural uranium), expensive to deal with radiation.
Fresh fission products will always be radioactive, that problem isn't going away easily. Engineering challenges of fusion could possibly be solved by good engineering and fancy materials. That's a lot easier to postulate.
Thus, fusion remains a potentially-attainable dream.
Your claim is that because fusion doesn't have fission products and transuranics, it will be cheaper?
This doesn't make any sense to me.
For one thing, those isotopes are packaged up nicely in fuel elements. They don't get spread around the reactor. And disposal of spent fuel is not what makes fission expensive or uncompetitive.
Perhaps you are talking about decay heat from the isotopes leading to safety engineering costs. This has nothing to do with transuranics. Cooling does demand high reliability, which adds to expense, but it's not the only thing that leads to a need for high reliability. Another problem is that anything in the reactor proper is very difficult to repair if it breaks. This will push designers to try to make the reactor as reliable as possible, and designing complex systems that don't experience breakdowns is really expensive. This problem will be worse for fusion, not better, since the fusion reactor itself (which will be far too radioactive for hands on maintenance, even after prolonged shutdown) will be much more complex than a fission reactor, and under higher stress.
Oops, I clarified my point above while you were responding.
See last two paragraphs above. Fission is expensive because of radiation hazards. Fusion is expensive because of engineering/physics. The latter is easier to postulate solving.
Now you are claiming that not only fission products make fission expensive, they do so in a way that is immune to engineering solution (unlike, you are saying, the problems of fusion.) I cannot understand how this makes any sense.
Fusion reactors will be regulated by the same regulators as fission reactors. The NRC has already said that fusion reactors fall under their purview. Tritium release alone would be sufficient to ensure they will be regulated -- the tritium burned by a 1GW(e) fusion reactor in a year would be enough (if all released) to raise 2 months of the flow of the entire Mississippi river above the legal limits for tritium contamination in drinking water. Fusion reactors will be regulated to contain even small amounts of tritium, and this will not be cheap.
I explained already why the redundancy and expensive reliability engineering of fission plants will also be necessary for fusion. It's not for the reason of safety, but because any breakdown in the hands-off part of a fusion plant will be catastrophic for the economics of the plant.
Fusion is starting way behind fission in the struggle to be sufficiently reliable, because fusion reactors are so much larger, under much higher stress, and are much more complex.
It's the short-term handling of fission products (that eventually cool off and become nuclear waste) that makes fission expensive. Since fusion products are much less radioactive than fission products, fusion has a major advantage over fission in terms of worrying about containing radioactive material. To contain it in fission reactors, we have lots of redundant cooling systems, control systems, instruments. We have a powerful regulator checking everything, and requesting major changes. We have teams of people planning maintenance work to minimize dose to the workers. We have big 50km radius emergency planning zones with sirens and drills and all that.
Nuclear fusion is the dream energy source because it has all the positive elements of fission (24/7, zero-carbon, can build anywhere, tiny fuel requirements b/c nuclear) without the major downside of radioactive fission products and transuranics.
I got into the nuclear industry specifically to help solve climate change with fusion, but I got distracted by advanced Gen-IV fission reactors for now, assuming they'd be shorter-term developments. Fusion is still the dream though, for sure.