alt Hacker News> Something that's mostly aluminium, glass, silicon and silver can't be recycled?
There's no point in engaging him, he already is moving the goalpost of the discussion however it fits for his opinion.
I mean, we're talking about solar panels that are made of standard materials vs. uranium-enriched fuel rods that have to be stored at least a 100 years in salt mines in the middle of nowhere, without any possibility to recycle them anyhow. Let alone leaving what happens with those power plants after they've been shut down.
Modern SMRs (small nuclear reactors) can literally use spent fuel rods from legacy nuclear reactors as their primary fuel. This isn’t conjecture but simple fact. The engineering has dramatically improved even if public sentiment hasn’t. Modern nuclear reactors can not melt down in same way the reactor at Chernobyl did.
The new “fast reactors” are explicitly designed to take spent fuel rods as fuel to lessen the requirement of creating more enriched uranium.