Yeah, but the governments make too much money on taxing oil to want to research other forms of energy production fully. If governments were to fully commit to nuclear power for instance, I bet we'd see a major increase in the efficiency of nuclear power stations and the standard set of processes used within them and for storing/disposing of the waste products.
While I am sure that there is plenty of lobbyists who represent interests against furthering the science behind nuclear power...the govt making money on the taxation of petroleum products could easily be traded off by increasing taxes to nuclear power plants which opt not to use a modern reactor to reduce waste volume and half-life .
Nuclear power plants in the US are for the most part owned and maintained privately with inspections conducted by the govt.
The problem is there is no incentive for a private business to make use of a reactor that uses waste when that company is already setup to make power with older style reactors.
In light of that, the control over the price of oil has almost nothing to do with this issue directly.
The main issue is that current reactors are at best like 10% percent efficient, these new reactors can take that 90% waste byproduct and convert 96% of that into usable energy which produces a waste product that has a radioactive life of about 100 years or 10 times less time than the radioactive life of the waste they used as a fuel source.
This solves two problems, energy without using more source radioactive materials, and conversion of radioactive waste into an energy source and making a byproduct that is dangerous for .1% of the time of the original waste it sourced as fuel.
By the govt. simply providing incentive for the private sector in the business of producing nuclear power to use reactors which are more efficient and use waste as a fuel, a process can begin where companies start using these style of reactors.
We should move away from safely storing these waste products for the long term and allow for a method that changes the designation of these materials as waste into materials we can call fuel.
One incentive is to provide these waste materials that we have stored to companies utilizing theses new reactors at an incredibly low cost or free (since they are currently costing us to store them for 1000+ years anyways) and in the end...companies using these reactors get fuel to convert to power to sell (almost all profit) which in less than a year covers the overhead of installing one reactor at their facility.
Once enough companies have these reactors there can begin a supply line where what was once waste being shipped to a secure storage facility, will become fuel being used by companies who can utilize it. By charging companies more money to have the waste stored that it costs them to transport that waste to facilities who can use it...you almost guarantee that you only have to store about 1% of the waste normally produced and stored each year.
If one of the new reactors costs 1.5 billion and produces power equivalent to trillions of dollars a year out of nothing more than waste as a fuel source...I don't see the overhead of the new reactor being a problem whatsoever.
