We don't need new technology, it took France only about 20 years to replace it's coal and oil based electric generation with nuclear power generation (between 1976 and 2000).
Because of lack of political will in US and many European countries we continued to burn fuels to generate electric energy.
Of the all the radioactive elements in a nuclear reactor, uranium is one of the least dangerous (is very weakly radioactive, but it's toxic, it's a heavy metal). It's all the radioactive fission products (many have short half-life and in process of decay produces lot of ionizing radiation) and trans-uranic elements (because they have very long half-life and produce a bit small bits of ionizing radiation for very long time).
One possible of measure of danger is median lethal dose LD50:
Uranium LD50 in mice 114 mg/kg (about the same as Cocaine LD50 96 mg/kg)
There are places underground with high concentration of uranium, they are called uranium ore and sometimes they are mined for uranium.
"The deposit is located at depth of 450 m (1,480 ft), surrounded by and isolated within a layer of water-impermeable illite-chlorite clay, within the Athabasca Sandstone formation. Its age is estimated to be 1.3 billion years. Due to natural containment and lack of any traces of radioactive elements on the surface, the deposit is used as an example of an effective natural deep geological repository."
On the upside, the half life of those byproducts is measured in days to decades (15 years for Pu-241, 88 for Pu-238, 30 for Cs-137 and 139 days for Po-210).
A spend nuclear fuel rod, freshly taken out of nuclear reactor, will kill you in minutes, if stand near it without any shielding. Therefor manipulation with spend nuclear fuel is done remotely under water. Few meters of water are excellent radiation shield.
With each year radioactive products decay into stable elements.
After about 400 years in storage, the most radioactive elements decay away and the dominant part radiotoxicity of spend nuclear fuel is now Plutonium. From the point of toxicity, you could now handle the spend nuclear fuel as other industrial toxic waste - you have to breathe in, or ingest the spend nuclear fuel to be dangerous.
On the other hand, from the geopolitical point of view, spend nuclear fuel is dangerous from many thousands of years (in contrast to other industrial toxic waste), because for many thousands of years Plutonium can be used make a nuclear weapons. This is the real reason why spend nuclear fuel gets so much attention.
If by "we" you mean the whole world, then we have to do a gigantic scale up of the current green tech, as current green tech produces on minuscule part of the global primary energy.
The USSR built a nuclear district heating system in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) but never commissioned it because of the general anti-nuclear sentiment at that time.
It's certainly possible and not even very hard (by nuclear standards) because the reactor can operate at ambient pressure.
The biggest issue is inefficiency and cost of district heating except for places like Finland. It's now cheaper to install heatpumps instead.
There many kinds of geothermal power and if you don't have access to hot fluids found naturally in basement rock, you have use hot dry rock geothermal energy.
Here the biggest obstacle to economy of the geothermal power is the very low heat conductivity of rock.
"The conductive heat flux averages 0.1 MW/km2. These values are much higher near tectonic plate boundaries where the crust is thinner. They may be further augmented by combinations of fluid circulation, either through magma conduits, hot springs, hydrothermal circulation. "
For comparison: Thus the solar energy arriving at the surface with the sun directly overhead can vary from 550 MW/km2 with cirrus clouds to 1025 MW/km2 with a clear sky
"Project PACER, carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the mid-1970s, explored the possibility of a fusion power system that would involve exploding small hydrogen bombs"
Building nuclear power plant underground could save significant costs, because the massive containment building is made from nuclear grade steel and nuclear grade concrete and is very expensive. But you need a low cost excavation technology.
"Nuclear-grade components don’t necessarily have higher performance requirements than conventional components. Reinforcing steel in nuclear-grade concrete, for instance, is the same material used in conventional concrete. Instead, the additional cost often comes from the additional documentation and testing required. Documentation requirements also increase costs indirectly, by reducing market competition among manufacturers. Because these requirements are difficult for manufacturers to implement, many simply don’t bother to manufacture nuclear-grade components."
"Sources of Cost Overrun in Nuclear Power Plant Construction Call for a New Approach to Engineering Design"
"Similarly, while our analysis identifies the rebar density in reinforced concrete as the most influential variable for cost decrease, changes to the amount and composition of containment concrete are constrained by safety regulations, most notably the requirement for containment structures to withstand commercial aircraft impacts. New plant designs with underground (embedded) reactors could allow for thinner containment walls. However, these designs are still under development and pose the risk of high excavation costs in areas or at sites with low productivity."
Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (reprocessing inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
The world will not run completely out of copper, be we can expect much higher prices.
"Copper and lithium are major exceptions where expected mined supply from announced projects falls short of projected demand in 2035, with implied deficits of 30% for copper and 40% for lithium"
When ranking Chernobyl accident for death toll (95–4,000+ deaths) it's very far behind Failure of Banqiao Dam (26,000–240,000), behind 2023 Derna dam collapse (11,300), behind the world's worst industrial disaster - Bhopal disaster (3,787–16,000), behind 1979 Machchhu dam failure (1,800–25,000), about as deadly as Halifax Explosion (1,950 deaths).
Most tragic thing is that Chernobyl accident could have been prevented.
Because of lack of political will in US and many European countries we continued to burn fuels to generate electric energy.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Developing countries like China and India prioritized cheap coal power generation.
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