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Planned Nuclear Reactors Will Destroy Atomic Waste
separsons writes "A group of French scientists are developing a nuclear reactor that burns up actinides — highly radioactive uranium isotopes. They estimate that 'the volume of high-level nuclear waste produced by all of France’s 58 reactors over the past 40 years could fit in one Olympic-size swimming pool.' And they're not the only ones trying to eliminate atomic waste: Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin are working on a fusion-fission reactor. The reactor destroys waste by firing streams of neutrons at it, reducing atomic waste by up to 99 percent!"
The article doesn't make it clear which technology they are referring to... however this google tech talk on LFTR is absolutely fascinating.
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
Using energy more efficiently isn't a solution in itself, but it can be part of a solution. If you can cut energy use by just 30%, that's 30% fewer nuclear power plants we'll need to build.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
No he knew exactly what he was doing, and remember all he did was to remove a huge subsidy for weapons materials that were no longer needed due to the size of the stockpile.
He did nothing at all to stop nuclear succeeding on it's own merits instead of on taxpayer funded life support. The US nuclear industry has done nothing much since then apart from spend a lot of money on PR to get their free gift from the taxpayers back. Other places have actually put some work in and produced far more viable efforts - hence the established USA civilian nuclear industry being twenty years behind South Africa, China and India. The only real exeption is Japanese technology brought in to a US company that had otherwise been sitting around waiting for the handout for twenty years.
Startups and imports will bury them, and should have done it long ago.
But you've been completely wrong, it's exactly like calling what you excrete food. While there is plenty of energy that can be recovered from that it takes a lot of work or something else with a completely different digestive system.
The whole reason people have been saying for years that Uranium is running out is only because ore of very high purity was running out - there was a lot of other stuff but it was a lot more expensive to turn it into fuel.
One of the things about some newer designs is they are nowhere near as fussy about their fuel, so a shortage of high purity Uranium ore doesn't matter to them, or they can use retired or stockpiled weapon material, or even some kinds of waste. It's a lot better than the reprocessing attempts by the French over the last thirty years that resulted in fuel a lot more expensive than making new fuel from ore in the first place - use something that can use the waste without so much reprocessing instead.
Hm. I think the two examples you gave mostly substantiate my understanding of the problem with the anti-nuclear mentality.
"...even after they were informed of the right answer, they still didn't change their opinions..." This is the crux. Despite revised knowledge, there's some kind of emotional resistance to nuclear. The emotional resistance started as fear of catastrophe which was not undone by learning different. The fear remained regardless of knowledge change. Emotions don't necessarily respond to logic/information. (Which you see in every online debate.)
Emotional inertia that happens all the time. Mostly it causes willful ignorance and confirmation bias, but I guess even a few weeks of education won't necessarily overcome it.
What needs doing is figuring out how that inertia works. Step 3, profit. Anyone understand psychology well enough that they can give pointers on research starting points for this issue?
You're wrong (sorry). As humans we tend to have a horrible idea of how things scale outside of our instinctive narrow range. The energy density of a solar-thermal plant is indeed considerably less than a coal plant - but not that low, and plenty for all but truly heavy industry (and that's what nuclear is for) once you understand the engineering involved. Also, it's not just watts:area of the plant, it's watts:area:cost where cost is capital plus maintenance and supply, and area is plant plus its logistics chain.
Coal plants have coal mines, heavy road/rail infrastructure to transport fuel and waste, emit large quantities of pollution (not just at the plant but also at the mines and along the transport routes, and not just heavy metals but also more radioactives by mass per watt than nuclear plants), high maintenance costs, high worker casualties, etcetera.
Solar-thermal plants have the sun, light road/rail infrastructure to transport workers, emit no pollution, low maintenance costs, low worker casualties, etcetera. The use of heat storage/recycling (e.g. molten salt tanks) allows night-time power distribution.
Or to put it another way - sure, you need orders of magnitude more surface area for solar-thermal than coal - but we've got that available, and while your capital costs work out higher your ongoing costs are orders of magnitude less to your civilisation as a whole.
Coal: Quicker, easier, more seductive. But you end up ugly and alone.