Molten salt reactors, prototyped back in the 1960s at Oak Ridge, may hold the key for combating climate change and doing something about the 300,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that will otherwise be hanging around for the next 240,00 years. M. Mitchell Waldrop writes in Knowable Magazine:

Admittedly, it would take centuries for even a large network of molten salt reactors to work through the full backlog. But burning it would eliminate the need to safely store it for thousands of centuries. By consuming the long-lived isotopes like plutonium-239, molten salt reactors could reduce the nuclear waste stream to a comparatively small volume of fission products having half-lives of 30 years or less. By the 10 half-life rule, this waste would then need to be isolated for just 300 years.

The nuclear power question isn’t whether we’re going to continue to run our current reactors with their known deficiencies. Those need to be shut down, and they will be over time. We can’t keep running them forever. The real question, however, is if what we do next will be something that can help with both the current spent nuclear waste and climate problems.