42 reasons you can't disentangle nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons, and nuclear waste
by Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA
November 14, 2025
Why 42? For its deep philosophical significance, of course...
(1) Nuclear fission, by definition (that is to say, invariably) produces nuclear waste, because nuclear fission results in INCREASING radioactivity. For example, when a Uranium-235 atom is split ("fissioned" by a neutron emitted from a previous fission event), something with a very long half-life (the U-235 atom) is cleaved into several smaller things, which are almost always also radioactive and often with much shorter half-lives -- and thus more dangerous for that reason alone (and maybe for other reasons as well). For example, the U-235 atom might split into a radioactive strontium atom and a radioactive xenon atom. The Xenon atom might quickly decay into a radioactive cesium atom, and so on. At each step in the decay chain, various radioactive particles and rays will come out as well: Alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays, x-rays and/or single neutrons. The neutrons might smash into other U-235 atoms, continuing the "chain reaction." Both nuclear bombs and commercial power reactors utilize the forces released by these events, but at vastly different rates.
(2) The "Atoms for Peace" program was hogwash from the very beginning. Certainly there were a few earnest dreams that some time in the distant future nuclear power would, indeed, be "too cheap to meter" but that's all they were: The wild speculation of greedy businessmen (usually looking for government subsidies at the time). Not to mention greedy government plans to control the nuclear endeavors of other countries. "Atoms For Peace" was all about excusing Atoms For War.
(3) The Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act (P-A) of 1957 nullified the concept that the polluter pays. P-A has been renewed continuously, and is utterly immoral, because it limits the effort companies feel compelled to put into basic safety precautions. They won't go broke no matter what happens. Furthermore, since P-A allows nuclear reactors to operate practically uninsured, it artificially makes their electricity unfairly cheaper than competing options such as solar and wind (and yet nuclear is still the most expensive energy available).
(4) The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982 and every other attempt to "solve" the spent fuel nuclear waste problem have all been unsuccessful for many reasons (far more than 42!). Yucca Mountain alone had hundreds of credible scientific/engineering/geological problems (as opposed to, or rather in addition to, numerous political problems), many of which were unsolvable (such as water intrusion, volcanic and seismic activity, transportation risk issues (including terrorism), etc.).
(5) Over time, nuclear waste destroys ANY container you put it in. This is because a nuclear decay produces energetic particles and rays that can destroy any chemical bond, being a thousand to a million times (or more) stronger than a chemical bond. From Reactor Pressure Vessel Heads to Vitrified Rad Waste to cancerous tumor cells, radiation destroys the molecular connections in the steel, the glass, or the tumor.
(6) The nuclear industry is a jobs-program for former military reactor operators, offering cushy, extremely well-paying jobs that (theoretically) will last a lifetime. The post-military career path is a powerful recruitment bonus to get people to work for a couple of years on a nuclear carrier or submarine. The U.S. Navy operates close to a hundred reactors (71 in subs, 20 in carriers). That's a lot of people that are going to need good jobs when they get out.
(7) Nuclear weapons do NOT guarantee peace. Rather, they guarantee that our own nuclear reactors are vulnerable to attack, our cities are vulnerable, our military forces are vulnerable, our entire world is vulnerable. They threaten a war that must never happen -- if for no other reason, because nobody knows how to end a nuclear war, except to run out of nukes (which happened in 1945).
(8) Nuclear weapons cost an enormous amount of money to develop, to maintain, and even more to test. All other military forces -- the ones that actually go out and fight -- are depleted because the nuclear weaponry (which must NEVER be used) takes so much money, and there isn't an infinite supply of money to prepare both for wars that haven't happened yet with weapons that should never be used even if they do happen AND support our current troops (the ones actually fighting wars today).
(9) Nuclear reactors rob the country of billions of dollars that could be used to finance truly clean energy solutions such as solar power on every rooftop and parking lot, offshore wind, heat pumps, etc..
(10) Nuclear spent fuel "solutions" always fall short of what is needed because they always MUST accommodate the "need" to keep the nuclear reactor business operational and profitable, which is impossible to do. There is no way to safely store nuclear waste -- and in particular, not both cheaply AND safely. So, despite all the subsidies, despite P-AA, despite all the government research that went into basic reactor theory and design -- it's still too expensive as it is, even without having to pay to "solve" the waste problem. Never mind being: "too cheap to meter"! Nuclear will never even be: "so cheap it can compete" in a fair market.
(11) Fusion Reactors, Molten Salt Reactors, Small Modular Reactors, TRISO reactors... none of these will solve the basic problems of nuclear power, including accidents caused by poor maintenance, operator error, sabotage, war, poor design, and natural phenomena from asteroids to zirconium cracking.
(12) Rising sea level is a coming problem for many reactors, because reactors are invariably built as close to the waterline as possible so as to reduce pumping costs of the billions of gallons of cooling water the reactors use. Tsunami walls (such as the one around the reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi) are invariably built lower than optimal (see item 13).
(13) Safety standards are set based on the likelihood of "plausible" physical phenomena such as tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroids, floods and tornadoes (to name a few). But the "likelihood" is easily -- and often -- miscalculated, and even if it is calculated correctly, the risk still needs to be balanced against options that DON'T require such dire calculations. Mathematically, combined phenomena are generally ignored, and seldom engineered against as a pair (earthquakes and tsunamis, earthquakes and aging parts, tornadoes and floods, grid power outages and sabotage, emergency shutdowns and boneheaded mistakes, etc.).
(14) The nuclear waste problem is unsolved, and nuclear waste is highly vulnerable to damage by natural phenomena or war, sabotage, planes falling out of the sky, poor welding of the canisters, etc.. Because the waste was never expected to be left sitting dangerously at sites around the country, its vulnerability and associated risk wasn't included when calculating the risk/benefit of ANY civilian nuclear power plant. When taken into account, NO reactor should EVER have been built.
(15) Part of why the nuclear waste problem is unsolved is politics (no one wants the waste) but what really stops every idea ever proposed is physics. It's not even cost, though rocketing millions of tons of nuclear waste out into space would surely cost a fortune and result in numerous mishaps. (Nevertheless, it was a common proposal in the first few decades of the nuclear era, before rocket accidents became a regular thing and space debris began to build up in NEO and LEO (Near Earth Orbit and Low Earth Orbit).) Every other solution that has ANY chance of succeeding has been scratched for being too expensive, too slow, too untested, or just too difficult. So nuclear waste, vulnerable and toxic, just sits here, there, and everywhere across the nation (and around the world).
(16) Naturally-made tritium is very rare in the environment. U.S. nuclear reactors release 1000 curies of tritium every year of operation. For a long time, many experts have felt that tritium is as much as four or five times more hazardous than most government standards currently indicate -- but if the reactors had to meet that much more strict of a standard, they would have to stop operating. Naval reactors do not have to publicly report their tritium releases (or any other releases or accidents, for that matter), even while in port.
(17) ALARA is a nefarious and imprecise standard that is designed to ALLOW operation of nuclear reactors, regardless of the risk to the public. "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" is not the same as: "As Safely As Possible" and neither statement mentions that the deciding factor regarding what is possible should be risk, not cost.
(18) Solving the nuclear waste problem properly is impossible -- physics gets in the way (see item #1, above). But partially solving it is in theory better than nothing, right? THAT theory falls apart if a poorly-thought-out, too cheap, inadequate solution is considered good enough to keep the industry going. Many people in the nuclear industry are getting "desperate" to solve the nuclear waste problem -- desperate to the point of engaging earnestly with "anti-nuclear" activists with the same interest. But the ultimate goal for the nuclear industry isn't to rid the world of nuclear waste forever. It's to keep making more nuclear waste.
(19) Some examples of item 18 are the situations at San Onofre, Palisades, Three Mile Island and Indian Point. The last three are trying to restart, but all four clearly want to have licenses that can be transferred to Small Modular Reactors if they ever become available. (Many nuclear plans never play out.)
(20) America has lost two nuclear submarines at sea with their crew and their reactors, and suffered at least seven reactor meltdowns or partial meltdowns (Fermi 1, Santa Susanna, Three Mile Island, and four experimental reactors: SL-1, EBR-1, HTR-3, and TR-2). Accidents that could have become meltdowns happen with frightening regularity: San Onofre's vibrating steam generators, Davis-Besse's hole in the reactor pressure vessel head, Monticello's emergency core cooling system inoperative for the first few decades after it was built (they left shipping bolts on baffles, that would have blocked operation). That's just a small sampling. Accidents have happened and accidents WILL happen: As bad as Fukushima-Daiichi or Chernobyl, or perhaps even worse. Much worse is possible.
(21) Military reactors also have problems, we just don't hear about them. And it should be noted, since nearly ALL civilian nuclear reactor operators come out of the naval reactor program, that naval reactors don't always react (pardon the pun) the same way as civilian reactors do, to the same problems. This difference was a major root cause of the Three Mile Island meltdown: The operators' naval training caused them to expend enormous efforts to prevent the pressurizer vessel from "going solid," an expression meaning full of water instead of partially full (partially full is the normal operating condition of a pressurizer). But "going solid" is not that severe a problem in a commercial Pressurized Water Reactor, and trying to prevent it caused TMI's navy-trained operators to fail to resolve the real problem. (Additionally, a similar problem had occurred at another reactor a year or two earlier, but was handled properly, and the lesson learned apparently wasn't taught across the industry.)
(22) Enormous amounts of radioactive elements were released during the decades of nuclear weapons testing, which made numerous islands in the South Pacific uninhabitable. The Nevada Test Site will never be inhabitable, and towns downwind will have elevated cancer levels for many decades or centuries to come. About one in every eight so-called "underground" nuclear tests breached, and whenever that happened, all sorts of radioactive elements burst into the atmosphere, including plutonium.
(23) Livestock contaminated by nuclear testing was left untested for radioactivity: Contaminated sheep that were out in a radioactive rainstorm were said to be sunburned. Nuclear testing contaminated the world. Nuclear reactors do the same, fortunately by far less amounts per year and in the life a typical (undamaged) reactor, but some of the effluent that does get out is very long-lived, and thus accumulates in the environment, and some accumulates in biological systems, and sometimes a typical reactor has a very atypical (large) release. And sometimes -- about once a decade around the globe -- a "typical" civilian reactor suffers a meltdown.
(24) Spent nuclear fuel is extremely toxic, fully of plutonium and a deadly radioactive rainbow of other elements. Only a few of these toxic elements existed prior to the fuel being "burned" (a euphemism if ever there was one) in a reactor. Let me put this another way: A single nuclear fuel pellet is about the size of a single bone in an adult person's pinky finger. You might have seen pictures of a hand, sometimes with a thin white glove, holding a single pellet, or may a handful of half a dozen or so. Those pellets have never been in a nuclear reactor, so at that point, you can do that -- it's so little radiation it's not worth worrying about. Most is alpha particles anyway, which won't get through the white glove, let alone your own dead layers of skin. But that same pellet, after use in a reactor for three to five years, is so radioactive that you can't ride past it on a motorcycle at 60 miles per hour without absorbing a lethal dose (or so it's been said for many years, without opposition, but I haven't actually tried it.). Spent fuel pellets are millions of times MORE radioactive after use in a reactor than before, because numerous toxic elements were created within the fuel pellet while in the reactor. That is to say: New toxic elements were manufactured. (And you thought electricity was the main output of a nuclear reactor? It isn't: Nuclear waste is the main product created by nuclear reactors, the rest is just boiling water to turn turbines, and there are numerous better ways to turn turbines (or you can collect solar energy directly to produce electricity).)
(25) Military spent reactor fuel, pound-for-pound, is far more radioactive than so-called "commercial" (heavily subsidized, monopolized, and insured by the public at large) spent reactor fuel. And there's a lot of both kinds, what with the navy having nearly as many reactors as there are commercial reactors, and the military has had two or three times as many reactors overall (some of which didn't work very well, if at all). Every time a proposal is made to solve the commercial spent fuel problem, the military spent fuel is ignored as if they've solved their own problems. But if a site ever opens up, it's guaranteed that the military waste will need to go there too. So they'll have to plan for it. (Right now, as far as I know, submarine reactor cores are stored inside the submarine reactor pressure vessels in shallow pits in Idaho. It is an unsustainable method.)
(26) There is no nuclear reactor spent fuel solution that doesn't involve transporting the waste at least once, with the exception of spent fuel neutralization by lasers, which can be done on site, but has one real disadvantage and one imaginary one. The real disadvantage is that spent fuel neutralization (by lasers or any other method) creates fission products just like a reactor. And although MOST fission products have half-lives short enough that one can imagine safe storage is possible for 10 to 20 half-lives (roughly, about a thousand years or less) some fission products from nuclear reactors have much longer half-lives (I call them the ignoble seven). The imaginary disadvantage? Those fission products are created by destroying the fissionable atoms, mainly U-235 and Pu-239. Some people feel those particular atoms are valuable and should be extracted from the spent fuel to use again. That's neither simple nor cheap, nor clean, nor safe. (Other people want them for nuclear bombs.)
(27) The process of recovering "useful" atoms from spent nuclear fuel is, itself, fraught with problems, including the fact that it necessarily involves releasing fission products into the environment (often in gaseous form), and also involves significant worker radiation exposure. And that's if it all goes well.
(28) Mixed-Oxide Fuel (known as MOX fuel), which is made from recovered spent fuel mixed with new ("fresh") uranium, is very dangerous to extract, process, handle, use, and, worst of all: Throw away. They really have no idea how they'll EVER throw away MOX fuel! They're having enough trouble with "normal" reactor fuel!
(29) MOX fuel also is very difficult to work with, damaging reactor parts much more easily than uranium-based fuel, and increasing reactor worker radiation exposures, especially during refueling outages.
(30) The entire nuclear industry started in utter secrecy and cover stories because the Americans didn't want the Germans or the Russians to know what we were doing. It turned out the Russians had spies and knew precisely what was happening, and the Germans weren't making much progress, although there was no way to know that for sure. The secrecy inherent (or at least attempted) in America's earliest nuclear efforts never ended. Nor did the propaganda. The first nuclear propagandist was a writer for the New York Times, who was embedded in the Manhattan Project as an unpaid employee with all sorts of security clearances, who wrote complete fiction in return. The very idea of telling the truth has been frowned on by the nuclear industry ever since.
(31) Some of the ignorance is intentional: Failure to properly research the health effects of radiation in the environment, first by failing to collect the data on where the radiation from the very first nuclear bomb went (Trinity (in New Mexico in 1945) severely impacted local farmers and residents, who were never told what they had experienced. Some had seen the light -- literally -- but were told a weapons depot had exploded (with no injuries, isn't that lucky!).
(32) Is a little radiation good for you? The answer is... it depends. But no, it's not really debated. Hormesis (as the theory that "a little radiation is good for you" is called) is just something the pro-nukers bring up whenever they're getting cornered over their constant releases of nuclear materials they had claimed they would keep properly contained. In any case, "Hormesis" is irrelevant even if it's somehow, at some level, true that "a little radiation is good for you." After all, we certainly need our sunshine, but plutonium atoms internally emitting alpha particles is NOT a "sunshine vitamin"! And over a lifetime about 33% of us will get cancer (a quarter will die from it) and cancer treatments often involve LOTS of radiation -- more than you'll get in a lifetime otherwise (I've had two cancers and a bunch of other reasons for radiation treatments of one sort or another, I've got all the radiation I need and don't want any more, thank you very much (did an x-ray 50 years ago, or a CT-scan 20 years ago, cause a cancer 5 years ago?).
(33) Children also get cancer and need treatment. If Hormesis is a thing, those children are getting more than enough radiation for an entire normal, healthy life just from the treatments! Unfortunately we know of no better way to cure some cancers. If we find better ways, we'll undoubtedly switch because of all the side effects of radiation treatments. So again, Hormesis is irrelevant.
(34) Children are also much more sensitive to radiation. The younger they are, the more susceptible to cancer and other effects of radiation. Young children are as much as 10 times or more, more vulnerable to radiation effects than "reference man" and a fetus is perhaps a hundred times more vulnerable. Targeting children with weapons of war is a war crime and nuclear weapons (including so-called "depleted" uranium weapons) do just that.
(35) Females are also disproportionately more sensitive to radiation than the standard "reference man" that is universally used to estimate the potential risk of everything from radiation treatments to commercial reactor releases, to the risks to "downwinders" from nuclear tests and accidents. Much of the data for "reference man" was collected from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, starting five years AFTER the bomb blasts, so only "strong survivors" were measured at all. Currently, the official (BIER-VII) standard theory regarding radiation health effects is that it has a "Linear, No Threshold" biological effect on humans. (A simplistic but reasonable approximation: The devil is in the details, though.)
(36) DNA was discovered in the 1800s, but its atomic structure of a wound-up double-helix made of billions of atoms in very specific positions was not known until EIGHT YEARS AFTER the first atomic bomb - 1953. No understanding of how radioactive emissions (alpha, beta, gamma rays, x-rays, etc.) damage the human genome could have been complete before then.
(37) That was then, but the nuclear industry still refuses to admit the damage they cause is inevitable, and not good at all. They don't care to learn about "double-strand breaks" and "repair mechanisms" other than to say repair mechanisms exist so what's the worry? The worry is that those mechanisms aren't perfect (that is to say, imperfect repairs are inevitable), and most DNA double-strand breaks cannot be repaired at all.
(38) The biggest link between the nuclear industry and the nuclear military is a combination of the money involved and the organizational structure. The Department of Energy supports the military as well as the so-called civilian nuclear industry, but is not responsible for "safety". The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) ONLY has jurisdiction over "safety," and only on the civilian side. Furthermore the NRC forbids state and local agencies from ruling on "safety" issues -- which is absurd, since "safety" is the basis of virtually all decisions regarding nuclear power, namely: Is it worth the risk? There is enormous pressure from the military side to keep employing their ex-sailors, and most of the research into how to build reactors was done either by the military or by civilian contractors working on military contracts. Civilian reactor contractors often also have military contracts. So in many ways, the most important connection is that the military reactors could not exist unless they are supported by an entire civilian industry that makes the fuel, ships, subs, the reactors themselves, and charges a large fortune to do all that work. (Because they can.)
(39) Because of all the money involved, even the least military-oriented politicians are highly influenced by financial contributions and pro-nuclear propaganda. They assume the civilian reactors are safely built, safely run, and provide "baseline" energy (they aren't, they aren't, and they don't), and that the military reactors are vital for national security (not a chance). They assume the waste problem can be solved, even though in 60 years of effort and after billions and billions of dollars spent looking for a solution, zero progress has been made. They hear the word "safely" (as in: "things will be done safely") dozens of times in every presentation from the nuclear proponents, who have both money and access, and come with pictures of powerful ships and subs, as if we're the only country sending nuclear reactors out to sea. Russia has lost more than half a dozen nuclear submarines and has had several other very serious accidents with their poorly-operated, poorly-maintained nuclear submarines. We, on the other hand, haven't lost a nuclear sub in over 50 years, and might keep a tighter ship (so to speak) -- but American nuclear subs have run into underwater mountains TWICE this century (with the loss of one sailor) and one submarine breached haphazardly into a surface ship, sinking that surface ship and killing nine, mostly students, on board the unfortunate civilian ship.
(40) Other countries are building nuclear reactors, nuclear submarines and nuclear bombs. Must America compete? We already have more of everything than anyone -- including more nuclear waste, and more nuclear "dead zones" and otherwise-contaminated nuclear areas. If we want to compete, what are we competing for? The chance to waste money, time and effort while risking unfathomable accidents and making unmanageable waste? Who wants to win THAT competition?
(41) It is seldom considered, but ALL the non-nuclear military -- that would be the people actually doing all the fighting (except for two bombs in August, 1945) would have a lot more money, men - especially brilliant ones -- and materiel if it/they weren't wasted on endless "improvements" to nuclear weapons, such as converting the nuclear triggers from analog (capacitors and resisters and so forth) to digital (computer-controlled, which probably happened some time around the late 1980s (I'm just guessing)).
(42) The worst thing of all: We're forcing ALL future generations to suffer mutations: Random, useless mutations. Some will be from radiation we've already left in the environment that they cannot avoid encountering any more than we can. Some will be from accidents that will happen in the future. Some will be from war, in the past or MAYBE in the future. And some will be from damage to OUR DNA, our generation's collective strings of 6-foot strands of unique codes, none of which is untouched by nuclear radiation. Most random mutations are bad. Some are fatal. Most beneficial "mutations" are not completely random mutations at all, but are the result of the joining -- in seemingly random ways, but NOT randomly chosen pairs (not usually, anyway) -- of two unique strands of DNA which unite to form a single double-helix strand, which, if it survives, will be totally unique, and then replicated hundreds of trillions of times over a person's lifetime (not all cells replicate during one's lifetime (neurons and heart muscle cells don't replicate, for example, but most other human cell types do, some very frequently (stomach lining cells, for instance, divide every few days).
Nothing is more beautiful or more useful to humanity (and all life) than our DNA. It is the mathematical, physical, unique representation of each of us, and of every thing that ever lived or will live, and indeed, our DNA is the very basis of our humanity.
We must protect our DNA above all else. We must protect the future of the planet, the human race, and all living things. The so-called "anti-nuclear" movement ACTUALLY should call itself the "pro-DNA" movement. Nobody knew about the vital role of DNA to our very existence when the nuclear age began. Now we know, AND we know what we need to do to protect our DNA: We need to stop making nuclear waste.
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Note to readers:
This essay is available online at Ace Hoffman's blog:
https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2025/11/42-reasons-you-cant-disentangle-nuclear.html
Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
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acehoffman.org
Blog:
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Email: ace [at]
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