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10% of US Energy Derived From Old Soviet Nukes
Nrbelex writes "The New York Times reports that about 10 percent of electricity generated in the United States comes from fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, mostly Russian. 'It's a great, easy source' of fuel, said Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an analyst at Renaissance Bank and an expert in the Russian nuclear industry that has profited from the arrangement since the end of the cold war. But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn't secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers.'"
For about 10 percent of electricity in the United States, it's fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, INCLUDING Russian ones.
10% from all not all from Russia . Dammit it is the first sentence.
No. In the path uranium -> nukes -> nuclear fuel, it is cheaper to go directly from A to C. This is talking about going from B to C only because people already went overbroad going from A to B as a solution to "security" problems. You can't justify going from A to B from an energy standpoint.
That type of breeder reactor isn't the only alternative.
Try this one instead:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
The IFR (Integral Fast Reactor) would be able to extract 99% of the energy in the fuel, rather than the 1% we get from the types of reactor used today.
- The Sigless Wonder
I don't know about Russia, but the US military frequently uses it's old launch vehicles (or at least the engines) for suborbital weapons tests and satellite launches. For example, the Minotaur series of rockets by Orbital Sciences use old Minuteman and Peacekeeper engines. I'm sure there are many other examples.
Dnepr_rocket reuses SS-18 Satan.
I would guess that they were referring to a figurative pipeline, however, part of the enrichment process for uranium is to convert it to Uranium Hexafluoride (UF6) which is a gas.
The problem is that you can't recycle nuclear fuel. There are always residual byproducts that last for long and have a potential to pollute eveything around them.
Well that's funny. France has recycled their fuel for years, and Japan is following suit.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
You can burn up the long-lived actinides resulting in waste that's 'hot' for 100's of years instead of 100's of thousands, not to mention reduce the volume of waste by a factor of almost 100. See this paper for some really good information.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
... if we'd use common sense and recycle the fuel, as many other nuclear nations already do. The whole terrorist argument against this was bogus from the start. Recycle the damn fuel, and you can reuse 93 percent of it.
Not in any existing reactor you can't. The fissile content (U235+Pu) going into a reactor in fresh fuel is about 4%, the rest is unusable U-238. Burning the fuel fissions about 4% of the actinide nuclei present, and leaves a fissile content of something slightly under 1% (due to plutonium breeding) at the end. Recycling this spent fuel would extend existing fuel supplies by only 25%.
The fundamental problem with doing this is that it is extremely expensive. The cost of plutonium extracted from spent fuel is equivalent to natural uranium costing $700/kg or so. The actual market price of natural uranium is about $100/kg and for $300/kg you could extract natural uranium from seawater and have a 1000 year supply. Even if the extracted plutonium were free (instead of being far more expensive than the uranium) the cost of fabricating and handling plutonium-bearing fuel is so high that it would still be more expensive that uranium-only fuel. In fact the DOE has to pay utilities to use the mixed plutonium/uranium MOX fuel it makes from ex-Soviet weapons.
France has conclusively proven that a nuclear fuel cycle with recycling is more expensive than one without it. See: http://www.fas.org/press/_docs/021507PlutoniumRecycle3L.pdf.
Reprocessed plutonium is that rarest of industrial products: one that it worth less than nothing (even if the extravagant production cost is completely written off).
Now a breeder reactor fuel cycle could use the U-238 to produce power in principle, but the cost would be much more than conventional nuclear power, and it is hampered by the fact that every breeder reactor project thus built has failed. It may be possible to build a workable breeder pwer reactor, but no one has yet succeeded in doing it.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
More expensive to the industry, yes, but overall it is much more expensive to produce highly enriched uranium (weapons grade) and later thin it out to fuel grade.
A more accurate pathway is Unenriched -> Enriched (fuel grade) -> Highly Enriched (weapons grade) -> Warheads. The path to go from low enriched to highly enriched is VERY time consuming and expensive. So even though going from D->B is cheaper now because we have a surplus of warheads produced with taxpayer money, it's still cheaper overall to go from A->B instead of A->D->B.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
So even though going from D->B is cheaper now because we have a surplus of warheads produced with taxpayer money, it's still cheaper overall to go from A->B instead of A->D->B.
To be even more specific, there are a number of reactor designs that don't require enrichment at all for usage in a nuclear power plant. There are efficiency gains to be had using higher enriched stuff, but it's not absolutely necessary.
Right now the Civilian uranium mining and enrichment industry is supressed due to the materials flowing out of our former stockpiles. It'd be like if during the cold war we built up trillions and trillions of barrels of oil as an 'emergency war stockpile' and now are releasing it - we wouldn't be bothering much with drilling for oil at the moment.
From my readings, fuel cost is pathetically cheap and even if we have to mine the stuff it won't raise the cost of electricity by a penny per kwh.
I don't read AC A human right