Reminder: Microreactors mean more radioactive waste, not less. No country has solved the safe long term storage radioactive waste. No, not even Finland, even though they are close. Expanding nuclear power, especially through microreactors means expanding access to extremely toxic radioactive material. And make sure the government is stable (for the next few hundred years) and there's no war in the area.
Reminder: solid radioactive waste is many times more safe than pumping waste into the air we all breathe. Fossil fuels kill many people per year by their waste and radioactive waste is an easy to solve problem comparatively speaking. Additionally some SMRs are designed to be thrown out wholesale because they are already the container for the nuclear waste. Finally, radioactive waste can be used as a power source.
The idea that radioactive waste is safe is at best misleading, if not outright false. You ignore that fossil fuel is not the only alternative to nuclear and vice versa. Then you hand-wave over the amounts of waste and climate gases.
If nuclear waste disposal is so easy to solve: Why has nobody ever solved it? You talk about some hypothetical SMR designs? Yeah, in theory, future nuclear technology is safe. Unfortunately even current technology, nuclear power projects always run over time and over budget on top of an already unwieldy upfront budget. Using radioactive waste as a powersource sounds nice and smart, but turns out to be unfeasible so far and at least one or two decades in the future.
Next, the danger from nuclear power, both during and after the runtime is impossible to calculate. Which is were those "impossible accidents" come from, which happen a bit too often. Yeah, in the theory from the nuclear power lobby, nuclear power is totally safe. But reality has to deal with things unforeseen, and on top of that, with bad intentions. Just that nobody tried (or succeeded) yet in building dirty bombs or destroying another country's nuclear plants doesn't mean that won't ever happen. Very small risks with catastrophic consequences are impossible to calculate and should be approached about as carefully as radioactive material itself.
Reminder that reprocessing (in addition to being the dirtiest part of the fuel cycle and incredibly expensive) doesn't really produce much energy.
All you are doing is getting the tiny leftover fissile scraps, 95% of the material is irrelevant U238 and 4% is fission products (the really bad waste) which just gets leaked everywhere. It adds 15% to your energy output and quadruples the fuel cost (bringing it close to the total cost of solar).
The Russians found that when they put their artillery pieces near a nuclear power plant, the Ukrainians don't shoot back. Funny that.
And almost every time there is a cruise missile attack the nuclear power plants have to go offline as a precaution (not even because of them getting targeted though, which also may happen in the future).
Please don't spoil the party. We have been lazy for so long and absolutely don't want to cut back on luxury or use the cleaner solutions that producing nuclear waste with expensive subsidies and all the other downsides is now cool again and full green! Big innovaton here, that counts!
