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Nuclear Power Could See a Revival
shmG writes "As the US moves to reduce dependence on oil, the nuclear industry is looking to expand, with new designs making their way through the regulatory process. No less than three new configurations for nuclear power are being considered for licensing by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The first of them could be generating power in Georgia by 2016."
Actually, thorium should not be anymore complex (probably simpler) than a uranium/plutonium based reactor. But all the years of the cold war and the lure of nuclear weapons has prompted all the engineering to be spent on uranium/plutonium reactors. It's not a physics problem. It's just that since all the current reactors are uranium/plutonium, the engineering is far more developed. From a physics standpoint, thorium is well understood. But from an engineering perspective it is mostly still experimental. If energy production is your only motive, eventually thorium has to win over current conventional reactor designs. It's just a matter of time. Heck, even with the current reactors, the main reason we have nuclear waste is because we do not reprocess fuel. You can thank Jimmy Carter for that decision too. But fast breeders that would have used the waste make it easier to get the resources to build weapons too. War sucks. We need LFTR's!!!!!!
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
CANDU can already use spent fuel (along with dismantled warheads)
(according to wiki)
*CANDU fuel can be manufactured from the used (depleted) uranium found in light water reactor (LWR) spent fuel.*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candu#Fuel_cycles
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Now, if we could only reprocess the damn fuel we'd have a clean method of power generation with very little overall waste for a couple hundred years at least.
Integral Fast Reactors
On-site reprocessing of fissile materials to feed the reactor, with only minor extra fuel input required (almost 1.0 ratio reacted fuel, after reprocessing) and can be used to "burn" waste products of other reactors.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Highlights in the past 4 years:
Source
And of course, the article that was for this story has more information. But who reads that?
Captainpanic wrote :
Name me one nuclear power station that actually went into operation and stayed within budget while it was constructed, operated and shut down agian.
Sizewell B, a PWR that I was involved in building in the UK, was built within its time and cost budget. Hasn't shut down yet so I can't answer the last part.
"It only reduces the amount of waste if it doesn't produce other kinds of waste in equal amounts."
It doesn't produce more waste than usual.
"I highly doubt that even the newest generation of nuclear reactors takes in fissable heavy metals and outputs something at most as dangerous as CO2. I would be happy if you prove me wrong."
There will be waste, but most of it short-lived (decay to safe levels in 100-200 years). Not as harmless as CO2, but quite close not to worry about it much. As for chemical toxicity, the amount of waste is so small (even with our current reactors) that it doesn't matter. If our waste were as poisonous as arsenic but not radioactive we could have just dumped it in the sea without any problems.