So they are certifiably several orders of magnitude safer than the safe ones running today.

Plus there is is an emerging solution for high level long-lived nuclear “waste” now .

Recycling saves and solves 90% of the waste problem. The rest of the World does that routinely, and no one followed the loopy Carteresque ideas of not re-cycling. No country has built a single bomb from commercial reactor waste, while thousands and on the way to tens of thousands of nuclear warheads from the Cold War are being permanently burned up in power reactors everyday.

LWR-based “Actinide Burning” removes the even numbered atomic waste isotopes, that constitute half of the “Transuranics” or long lived waste. The French do that today. The tougher to crack odd numbered atomic isotope Transuranic waste, about 1/2 of 1 % of the waste, can be “Actinide Burned” in future Fusion plants or a few Gen IV plants constructed for the purpose, or a couple of special Accelerators meant for the purpose.

The result is NO LONG LIVED waste older than 100 years before it innocuous and the definition of “innocuous” is that it equals the radioactivity of natural uranium ores. Problem solved.

(The guys who did that job of destroying lots of nuclear warheads, should have received the Nobel Peace Prize, Democrat Senator Shuman, and Republican Senator Lugar, and others including the Vice President, and their Russian equivalents)

Long haul driving in cars is a much different thing. Diesels are suitable for that for a few more years only though, and there are not very many such vehicles for sale. But as they show up, they will start to meet competition form HCCI ICEs, that obtain similar fuel economy but are much, cheaper, much cleaner, while burning cheaper fuel.

Toyota’s Prius on the other hand is literally a traveling mine of rare earth metals. It motor and electronics will eventually have to be re-designed, and the electronics scrapped and replaced to convert to an AC motor design.