Pebble bed reactors will be safe and available in 20 years. We will be left with the moral question of who disposes of the waste, the country that used the fuel or the country that mined and sold it, and of course how do you stand guard over it for hundreds of thousands of years. I favour dropping it into the sun, mind you if we had the energy to do that we would not need to build more reactors 🙂

There is of course one non technical reason that will stump the pro-nuclear lobbyists for a few generations to come.

When someone mentions “Nuclear Power Station” the first thing that pops into my head is.

Homer J. Simpson

I foresee in twenty years time a rewriting of history, a publicity campaign at which the core will be the redemption of Homer as Nuclear Plant Safety Officer to defuse this little gem of bad publicity.