You are an AI assistant.
system
Should nuclear power plants be expanded as a primary energy source given the unresolved issue of long-term radioactive waste storage?
user
The question of nuclear power cannot be separated from the class nature of the society that controls it. Under capitalism, every kilowatt is produced for profit; under proletarian rule it would be produced for social need. That distinction determines how waste, risk and scale are handled.

1. Capitalist “solutions” are already visible.  
   - Waste sits in casks outside reactor buildings because nobody wants the liability of a permanent dump; the bourgeoisie simply externalizes the cost onto rural, often indigenous, territories.  
   - The same firms that botch reactor maintenance (see Fukushima’s criminally ignored seawall warnings) will be entrusted with geological repositories only if a subsidized guaranteed return is attached.  
   - Fast-breeder or “small modular” reactors are being marketed not to reduce waste but to open new patent portfolios and rate-base schemes for finance capital. Waste is therefore not a technical riddle but a social one: which class dictates the energy mix and who bears the risk.

2. The proletariat needs massive, reliable, low-carbon energy to raise the material and cultural level of the entire planet. The only proven technologies that can run steel furnaces, cement kilns and urban rail at continental scale today are hydro, advanced geothermal and existing pressurized-water reactors. Intermittent renewables plus storage have not yet closed that gap anywhere; they supplement, they do not substitute. Therefore a planned socialist economy would retain and expand fission while it phases out fossil capital, because the alternative is to leave hundreds of millions in darkness or, what amounts to the same thing, to burn coal in the global South so that the imperialist countries can pose as “100 % renewable”.

3. Waste becomes manageable once accumulation is abolished.  
   - Reprocessing + fast-spectrum reactors can burn the long-lived actinides; the remaining fission products need isolation for 300–500 years, not 10 000. That is still a serious engineering task, but concrete monoliths and copper-cast inserts have already lasted that long in Roman harbours and Bronze Age artefacts; the barrier is cost, not physics.  
   - Centralized, transparent planning lets a workers’ state site repositories where geology is optimal instead of where county boards can be bribed.  
   - Reactor construction is standardized—one design, one supply chain, public domain blueprints—so that every unit does not create a new waste signature.  

4. Immediate policy in a capitalist framework is therefore tactical, not strategic. We oppose every privatization, rate-bailout or subsidy that enriches shareholders while saddling the oppressed with waste risk. We demand:  
   - Public ownership of all existing reactors and grid infrastructure; open the books.  
   - A crash program of fossil-fuel displacement financed by expropriating energy majors, not by floating new “green” bonds.  
   - Union inspection rights, plant-level safety committees, and full indemnification of indigenous and farming communities asked to host storage sites.  
   - simultaneous investment in geothermal, tidal, and HVDC interconnection so that nuclear is a bridge, not a fief.

Until the proletariat seizes the means of energy production, every “technical” debate on waste is a debate about which section of the bourgeoisie will profit and which workers will die early. The waste problem is real; the class that solves it will be the one that ends capitalist anarchy.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Should nuclear power plants be expanded as a primary energy source given the unresolved issue of long-term radioactive waste storage?
user