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Peter Thiel: We Need a New Atomic Age
HughPickens.com writes: Peter Thiel writes in the NYT that what's especially strange about the failed push for renewables is that we already had a practical plan back in the 1960s to become fully carbon-free without any need of wind or solar: nuclear power. "But after years of cost overruns, technical challenges and the bizarre coincidence of an accident at Three Mile Island and the 1979 release of the Hollywood horror movie "The China Syndrome," about a hundred proposed reactors were canceled," says Thiel. "If we had kept building, our power grid could have been carbon-free years ago. Instead, we went in reverse."
According to Thiel, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost. Designs using molten salt, alternative fuels and small modular reactors have all attracted interest not just from academics but also from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists like me ready to put money behind nuclear power. However, none of these new designs can benefit the real world without a path to regulatory approval, and today's regulations are tailored for traditional reactors, making it almost impossible to commercialize new ones. "Both the right's fear of government and the left's fear of technology have jointly stunted our nuclear energy policy," concludes Thiel. "supporting nuclear power with more than words is the litmus test for seriousness about climate change. Like Nixon's going to China, this is something only Mr. Obama can do. If this president clears the path for a new atomic age, American scientists are ready to build it."
According to Thiel, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost. Designs using molten salt, alternative fuels and small modular reactors have all attracted interest not just from academics but also from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists like me ready to put money behind nuclear power. However, none of these new designs can benefit the real world without a path to regulatory approval, and today's regulations are tailored for traditional reactors, making it almost impossible to commercialize new ones. "Both the right's fear of government and the left's fear of technology have jointly stunted our nuclear energy policy," concludes Thiel. "supporting nuclear power with more than words is the litmus test for seriousness about climate change. Like Nixon's going to China, this is something only Mr. Obama can do. If this president clears the path for a new atomic age, American scientists are ready to build it."
[citation needed]
Anti aging research. Put that in your Luddite pipe and smoke it, tech geeks.
It's the waste! They store it underground and tell themselfes that those bunkers will survive at least 200.000 years, wich is utter, utter, utter bullshit. So first we need an actual workable sollution for the waste.
Nuclear energy's effective demise was not of its own making.
Incessant Alamist and hyperbolic activism by extremeist turn public opinion, spurred frivolous lawsuits, and prompted overzealous regulations.
The irony is that Nuclear is the best hope to fight their new boogieman, Climate Change.
Environmentalists are looking for a foot doctor to take care of the hole the shot into it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This guy is an idiot. Renewables haven't failed, they are rapidly improving and winning against everything else on economic grounds. Nuclear isn't failing because of fear, it's because it isn't economically viable.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Peter's got the money to pull an Uber on the energy industry: break the law with a new business model, show that people like it and it benefits society, hire lobbyists to change the laws, profit!
Seriously, isn't this what the Uber experiment is all about? It's the VC experiment to show that if you have enough money, you can ignore laws that the rest of us have to follow to build new business models.
Peter's one of the few people out there with enough money to pull this off. Be bold, Peter! Make a lasting legacy! Anyone can blog about it, few have the resources to do something about it.
He is probably right that atomic energy is the way to go. However, security and protection should be top priority there. And this should not be ensured on a national level, but you'd need an international institution, as otherwise the energy producers just go there where its cheapest (=least secure). We also need to internalize the cost of an atomic incident somehow, and let the energy company pay the bill, not the taxpayer. Only under these conditions is atomic energy the way to go. But I highly doubt anyone will go this way, it requires lots of discipline.
And we should also invest more into fusion technology research. The only serious project beyond some vaporware startups is ITER, and one project is far too few.
Build a thousand SMRs and get oil down to $21 a barrel. The Sultans and power that be in the middle east will go broke. They will be back to throwing rocks at each other. Stop letting them out, make them deal with their own population explosion.
The world would be so much more peaceful.
Both the right's fear of government and the right's fear of technology
FTFY... conservatives are scaredy cats
If you take a chart comparing nuclear deaths per terawatt, you will see that it is in a class of its own, compared to the one that is the next step down; wind.
Just those numbers alone should get people to rethink nuclear.
This thought struck my mind. Carbon has an atomic number of 6, and Oxygen has an atomic number of 8. Wouldn't bombarding carbon with Alpha particles result in transmuting the carbon into oxygen? Why would that not happen, or what would have to be the controlling environment to ensure that it does? What would an allotrope of Carbon need to be? Coal, graphene, diamond, graphite, what?
If the above is possible, it would be a perfectly clean form of energy, since oxygen would be the resultant product. Only thing needed would be the usual radiation shielding in the plants, but aside from that....
Carbon-free doesn't mean 'good for the us'.
It's very easy, actually: every source of energy we're getting out of the earth, is an ending source. Be it oil, coal, gas or in this case uranium. Predictions are currently that we have enough uranium for some decades, or maybe a hundred years. And what do we do then?
Realistic, we should move to renewables as soon as we can. Wind, water, photovoltaic, tidal energy etc will last as long as the sun is available, current estimates around 5 billion years...
But for me, they can build nuclear plants as much as they want. With just three minor conditions:
1) No state funding. If an energy company want to built a nuclear plant, let them pay for it themselves.
2) Insurance. During the running time of the plant, the company must have insurance for all damages caused by an accident. For practical reasons, take the costs of all damages caused by the accidents in Chernobyl or Fukushima to calculate the insurance costs.
3) The exploiting company must build reserves to pay for the protection and securing the nuclear waste until it's not dangerous anymore.
I'm happy to live in the country with the only absolutely safe nuclear plant in the world: Austria. The only plant was built, but never went into production. So it is safe and will stay that way... :-)
What about the waste it products? You can't even get rid of it.
I don't call that a good plan. You just replace carbon with something else.
The problem isn't the stuff that lasts 200,000 years. That is pretty low level. Its also not the highly radioactive stuff since it decays quickly. It's the stuff that lasts hundreds of years that is trouble. Luckily we are getting better at nuclear chemistry and our ability to separate the bad from the not bad, or even useful stuff is improving. If we hadn't had such a short sighted policy we would have moved even further.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
You can guarantee they will do it wrong thinking it will save them 50 cents this quarter even if it causes a meltdown next quarter. That's next quarters problem.
But TPTB in America are fucking morons
And who should pay for its safe depositing.
Nuclear energy is cheap and clean. As long as those reactors are running. I just doubt that the companies that reap the fruits of cheap energy are also willing to deal with the costly time after when there is zero revenue and horrible costs. I.e. what is now being brushed off to the government.
It's the usual "privatize revenue, socialize cost" spiel. Sorry, but no game. Here's the offer: You have to show that you know where to put the waste and you have to lock down enough money to take care of it for at least a century, then you can build that reactor.
Deal?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
in the face of falling profits. The trouble with nuclear is that sooner or later somebody is going to start cutting corners on safety to maximize profit. Look at Fukushima. Completely avoidable, everybody knew about it, still a disaster. And the CEOs responsible have so far got off scott free (can't spill the blood of kings, ya know). Yeah, I know there are more oil & coal deaths per watt, but the damage from nukes lingers in a way that oil/coal doesn't.
Until it's cheaper to run the plants safely than not, and I mean cheaper in the short run not just the long run, I won't trust nuclear. Until then we're one MBA away from 100 years of elevated cancer risk.
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After having spent an inordinate amount of time research the history of atomic/nuclear power in the United States in the mid-20th century, I cannot help but notice that Mr. Thiel's discussion of the subject (hyper) simplifies the matter. But he was writing for a lay audience; you cannot add the same nuance and detail that you'd use in a journal article in a newspaper article (even if it is The Times. Though you could argue that by making a simplified argument that removes the fine details you do a better job at convincing your audience...especially if you were trying to gain political/economical/social support for your pet project. That said, he is mostly correct. Though as a card carrying Lefty, I take some small exception to concerns about environmental impact (chiefly in the form of irradiated material but also the waste heat dumped into streams); cultural hegemony (in the form of using land that was, and still is, sacred to the Native Americans as a dumping ground for the aforementioned irradiated material); and contributions to the proliferation and entrenchment of nuclear arms all being boiled down "fear of technology." Neither is there mention that the biggest obstacle in the United States took the form of utilities companies that made a unified effort to completely halt the rollout of commercial nuclear power. Their argument being that, since nuclear power was being heavily subsidized by the Federal government, it would have an unfair advantage in the market making it impossible for the utilities companies to compete. Fun fact: when it was proposed by the utilities companies and their Congressional allies that one way of evening the score would be that the Federal government make nuclear power companies directly liable for any accidents that occurred in or around their facilities, cleanup, etc., the nuclear power companies lost a great deal of interest in being allowed to deploy their technologies commercially. And on that same note, Mr. Thiel also fails to account for the fact that one of main reasons US reactor design and implementation remained the way it did was because nuclear technology was (and still is to a great extent) the Department of Defense's baby (even when the civilian companies were given "control" of it). Most of our reactor design and research operated around that principle. Now the French, who were never really under those sorts of restrictions, went further with commercial nuclear power than the United States has (and I predict ever will). Not only in terms of reactor designs, but also in commercial implementation and utilization. The French are a clear and excellent demonstration of how commercial nuclear power can be utilized as a safe benefit to society. But in the face of other options (such as the increasing turn towards more economical renewable tech), even the French began a slow turn away from commercial nuclear power years ago.
the ruskies can build cheap and get cheap (blowed up real good) but the americans can build way too expensive and get cheap (god's grace nuttin blowed up . . . yet)
the new age must be ruled by those from the democratic party and republicans must be taken out back and shot or at least sent packing to their corporate owners
i
have
spoken
anymore. I'll leave the details to the rest of the commentators, but it's a problem long since solved. You'll get way worse waste from a coal factory, just as folks back east who've had Ash Slurry in their water.
The trouble is long term safety. As plants age they need very, very expensive maintenance and then eventually need to be shut down and rebuilt. It happens in about 20-30 years. Whoever is running the plant at that time is going to want to bury this fact so they can keep bringing money in from the factory. We saw this in Fukushima, and we saw how little gov't oversight worked to prevent it. We also saw a complete lack of accountability for the disaster. Until we solve this problem nuclear is a nonstarter.
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If we had lots of nuclear power plants it would be possible to use many of them to create cheap power source materials for nuclear batteries.
Imagine smartphones, drones, electric vehicles had batteries that last for years or decades!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
Fukushima is an outrageous mess. Years on, it is still spewing radioactive matter into the environment. The human costs are catastrophic, and continue to be catastrophic.
The nuclear apologists attempt to excuse Fukushima away, but they can't. Give me a break. Where the is Diablo Canyon located?
Only a private power company is going to do nuclear in the US, given the Republican Party's hatred of public power. And the Republican Party HATES regulation. Even the numbest-nutted Ayn Rand ideologue can see where this is going.
Corporations are ideal organizations for creating a huge catastrophe, then folding--leaving the equity (and realized profits) of their investors untouched and all their victims left holding the bag.
We cannot do nuclear without massive public oversight, including highly-policed and sufficient sureties. We cannot have massive public oversight in the current political environment--it is just unrealistic.
We can talk later, maybe when the insane Republican Party comes back down to Earth.
that they only got Three Mile Island and that Chernobyl and Fukushima are far away. Could have happened to them if their nuclear energy program hadn't stalled. I don't know if it was a "bizarre coincidence", it certainly was a lucky one.
on watch in AMSUL.....
church of the better resurrection... https://betterresurrectionchurch.wordpress.com/
AmiMoJo is known to be one of those "social justice" types. So we need to run his comments through a "social justice"-to-English translation routine to make sense of them. I'll attempt to do that now, based on my limited understanding of the language of "social justice".
"This intelligent and accomplished individual has pointed out some facts which conflict with the artificial reality I have constructed in my mind."
"Renewables have failed miserably, but I can't admit this because it doesn't follow my narrative, and this hurts my feelings."
"I'm scared shitless of nuclear power because it's safe, reliable, extremely economically viable, and it proves that my carefully crafted narrative is total bunk."
In the western US, the anti-nuclear sentiment has more to do with historically bad experiences with non-commercial activities. Open-air nuclear tests. A few years ago the DOE declared the Rocky Flats site in Colorado to be clean; there's a growing body of evidence that they did the job on the cheap and the remaining plutonium will get loose. Last year the WIPP in New Mexico had a leak, and DOE agreed to pay a $74M fine. This month, DOE asked the court for a further 17 year delay to 2039 to finish the vitrification plant that is key to cleaning up the disaster that is the Hanford Site in Washington. Given Republican attacks on the DOE budget, Washington has asked the reasonable question, "What are the chances Congress will continue to fund construction for another 24 years?" On the commercial side, Yucca Flats will probably open eventually, and be substantially expanded, against the wishes of the people of Nevada.
It's not all that hard to understand why western politicians are not given to believing the nuclear scientists and engineers who say, "Yes, but this time will be different."
You can guarantee they will do it wrong thinking it will save them 50 cents this quarter even if it causes a meltdown next quarter. That's next quarters problem.
Exactly. The problem is not those wacky environmentalists or all those crybabies who don't want nuclear waste buried in their neighborhood. The problem is 50 years of massive cost over-runs, complete lack of proper maintenance, and general greed, corruption and incompetence. Nuclear power is a great idea, but not if it is run by the existing power companies.
Fallout 4: It's a cookbook!
You are welcome on my lawn.
Let them irradiate themselves.
"Both the right's fear of government and the left's fear of technology..."
Glad to hear someone say that. It seems like the usual stereotype is that the Left is full of free thinking, innovator types redefining the limits of technology on a daily basis, and that the whole country would be Tomorrowland if only the Left ruled everywhere, while the Right is full of backwards hicks, hillbillies, and rednecks, and we'd all be living like the Amish if they had their way.
People seem to conveniently forget that the Left strongly backs the media cartels (MPAA, RIAA, et. al.), which, with their "shoot first and waterboard the corpses later" approach to countless innovations through the decades, is possibly the most anti-technology group on the planet.
Nuclear is too expensive when done safely, more expansive than solar + nigh-time battery storage. Even without waste, nuclear does not make economic sense.
I don't usually flatly agree w/ something Thiel says (he never has grown out of his Ayn Rand phase), but this time I do.
Wind, solar, all the others...they are awesome and let's keep dumping cash into R&D for those...all of it.
But also do nuclear.
We have a long, long way to go before we can power our cities with renewables 100%. Nuclear has been retarded by 4 decades of fear-mongering...nuclear is safe when done correctly. The 3 Mile Island disaster killed no one and displaced only a small ammount of people...it wasn't anything like Chyrnoble.
It's 40 years later and we can make reactors that are safer by orders of magnitude than the 100s we've been using for decades that have been working perfectly.
Thank you Dave Raggett
But nuclear is the best thing for the environment. Just look at Pripyat today. It's a lush natural preserve.
tragic flaw. Is the safety systems fail then the reactor melts down. Any future reactors must be inherently safe and must generated as little radioactive waste as possible.
With reprocessing, breeder reactors can theoretically generate no waste at all. In practice they do tend to produce small amounts, but the half-life is on the order of 30-40 years, instead of the 25,000 years stuff we produce now.
Remember when the dickless EPA fucktard shutdown the Ghostbuster's containment and literally unleased hell? REGULATION IS THE PROBLEM!!!111!! NOT THE SOLUTION!!!1!!1!1!!!
Play Command HQ online
The left is the party, has always been the party, of anti-science.
Were not predicted by "The China Syndrome", which was about a shoddily built plant over an earthquake fault where corporate greed nearly destroys the plant, but the suicidal protest of a whistle blower prevents just that in the nick of time and exposes it while cameras are rolling. Nothing bad, other than the shooting of the whistle blower, happens in "The China Syndrome".
The movie did get across that corporations don't give a damn about the safety of the people living within hundreds of miles, and the public got that message. Correctly. Just ask the people who live next to Chernobyl and Fukushima plants. Oh, wait, no one lives near either of them. We got really lucky that the Three Mile Island meltdown was entirely contained: see Chernobyl and Fukushima.
See, the public at large has a much better understanding of corporate amorality, greed, corner cutting, deferred maintenance, and lowest bidder than any engineer ever born.And apparently a better understanding of the second law of thermodynamics than any engineer ever born. The public does understand that 90 tons of unstable uranium per reactor ready to spread e=mc^2 radioactive waste combined with corporate non-responsibility by shareholders, bonus greedy executives meeting the real world.
That's right, the typical mob knows more about the real world than a nuclear engineer who wants to build a plant.
Why not both?
At best a major city like Chicago or Berlin could get probably 10% of it's power from renewables.
Until we make up that 90% (which will be awhile even with the best R&D) nuclear is clearly the best choice.
Thank you Dave Raggett
I think that US companies should be clamoring to open the Chinese market for these things.
imho, personally, the idea of China with nuclear reactors everywhere is a bit disconcerting, but they are the perfect target market
They are the world's worst polluter and only getting worse...nuclear is the best option by far, but it's just not been marketed for their needs.
A company could make trillions.
Thank you Dave Raggett
No, they can't. Production of some things (especially steel) is best done at constant rates and temperatures. Starting back up invokes a huge cost.
There's a similar problem for industrial/solar grade silicon, such as that used in solar panels. If you shut the power off during production, you get this huge lump of useless, impure glass, and it's typically easier just to build a new furnace next to the old one, because if you shut off the power, that furnace is basically dead: buy a new one.
There are a lot of electricity dependent industrial processes which are continuous flow, and they've been designed that way to eke out another 10% efficiency, with the downside being 100% risk if you lose power during processing.
Nuclear and coal have this large problem that they are unable to adapt to demand variation. Instead they just waste the overproduced energy as heat.
Two words: Desalination plant.
Many of th environmentalists who initially spread the fear about nuclear waste decades ago are now coming out in support of nuclear, trying to undo their fud.
They took two facts about two -different- things and implied they were both true of the -same- thing.
Consider a candle, and some gun powder. The gun powder is dangerous precisely because it releases its energy quickly. The candle releases its energy slowly, meaning that it lasts a long time and is safe.
Nuclear radiation is a lot like heat radiation- some materials release it quickly and a lot of energy released quickly is dangerous. Other materials release it very slowly, and are therefore very safe. The ones that release quickly are dangerous- for a short time.
plutonium free not so much...
Exactly! Thanks for proving my point. We can never agree, and until we can we shouldn't do nuclear fission.
"But after years of cost overruns"
Stop there. This is the #1 reason for the failure of nuclear. The *average* cost overrun was over 2x. Once you factored that in, the cost benefits promised simply disappeared.
When this happened with the first generation reactors, they said those designs sucked, we know how to fix them, and that will be generation 2. When the exact same thing happened with with the gen 2 reactors, they said those designs sucked, and designed generation 3 reactors. And then we started to build those designs...
"According to Thiel, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost."
Yeah, except we're building a couple of these, and they immediately went over budget and continue to do so:
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/nuclear-industry-darkened-by-delays-cost-overruns-at-vogtle-summer-facil/404418/
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/09/03/edf-nuclear-flamanville-idUKL5N1182LY20150903
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/nn-olkiluoto-3-start-up-pushed-back-to-2018-0109147.html
When faced with problems like these, the "new generation" said those designs sucked, we know how to fix them, and that will be "new nuclear". And those designs exist only on paper, and offer no reasonable explanation while they will break the 50 year cycle of suck.
The basic problem isn't nuclear, it's big. Big projects go over just as often as little projects, but when they do the magnitude is larger and people notice. A million $1000 cost overruns isn't news, but one $1 billion overrun is, as the articles above note. And, sadly, nuclear needs to be big. Don't believe the hype from the small modular people, the concept is inherently flawed and thats why all the big companies dumped their design efforts and the only people still supporting them are two people and a dog shops.
Melting aluminium is an *ideal* use for unreliable power: the primary cells can run at variable rates or even in reverse to stabilize the grid, or some of the molten product can be staged for running optimized Al air batteries. Germany is already doing this,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
From that link, other energy-intensive processes may be suitable, "including those used to manufacture cement, paper, and chemicals. Making chlorine, used to produce paper, plastic, fabric, paint, drugs, and antiseptics, also requires electrolysis."
Don't forget Ammonia, by fixating Nitrogen from the atmosphere.
About half the "green revolution"(*) was due to availability of Ammonia due to the Haber process, which means our ammonia production supports about half the food production on the planet.
Haber is energy intensive, requiring half a million Joules of energy per mole (17g) of ammonia produced, which comes out to about 5% of all energy used worldwide.
It's largely startable/stoppable, so would make another good choice for unreliable or unneeded (ie - solar panels in uninhabited areas) power.
(*) The other half due to pesticides.
The 100 cancelled projects would have provided all the power needed.
Go build your Liberty ship/island and do it.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
but let's not save them for space travel, or anything; nooooo, by all means, let's burn 'em now and use the juice to charge iPods! And similarly with crude oil. Because reasons.
"Outdated business models" is code for "I don't like paying for things, but want them anyway"
We currently have 440 nuclear reactors in the world and majority of them are reaching the end of their lifespan when accidents are way more likely. The Chernobyl accident is estimated to have cost Russia $235 Billion thus far: http://chernobyl.undp.org/russian/docs/belarus_23_anniversary.pdf And construction to bury the reactor in a sarcophogus will continue to cost tens of millions for decades to come. In Fukushima less than 5 years in they've already spent $13 billion and will continue to spend at that pace for decades to come. Add to this whole cities that are permanently evacuated at both these sites and all the loss of real estate and business... There simply is no way to pay for this with insurance... And with 440 aging reactors all over the world many more accidents and many more cities are going to be permanently evacuated. There simply is no way anyone is going to invest in nuclear power because of these unfathomable liabilities of existing reactors. Interest in nuclear power investments directly relates to nuclear accidents. Every time there's an accident the future of the industry is declared over. Then, after some time goes by without an accident you get an idiot-show like Thiel claiming it's still safe and viable. What's even worse is that even without an accident decommissioning nuclear power plants cost billions of dollars. For example the San Onofre Nuclear power plant was shut down in 2012 and it is going to cost $4.4 billion dollars just to safely decommission. People who see a future in nuclear power are about as smart as someone who decides to place their mobile home right next to the ocean at the lowest tide of the year. They just don't make anyone more stupid than that!
We have big mainstream (tobacco) companies denying any linkage between smoking and cancer. We had a major energy trading firm (Enron) that was a total scam. We had a major automobile manufacturer (Ford) leaving a substandard gasoline tank in place ... and preventing information about it from leaking to the public. We had a major oil company (BP) skimping on safety measures and keeping mum about it, plus a major engineering firm (Halliburton) doing a substandard cement job on a wellhead (Deepwater Horizon) and keeping mum about it when it blew. We have a major car manufacturer (Volkswagen) deliberately falsifying emissions tests. And so forth and so on.
And you really really think it's a good idea to entrust an enitity of a similar ilk with the building and management of a load of fast breeders across the country? Because I don't.
In addition, fast breeder reactors tend to be sodium-cooled, plutonium-generating contraptions [see e.g. http://www.scientificamerican.... ]. So in return for burning U238 you get a lot of Pu239. Neat, from an engineering perspective, plus you can use the high neutron flux to "burn" all kinds of waste too. So far so good.
Only (as has been rehashed ad-nauseam) you need extensive reprocessing to separate the Pu239 from fuel rods that contain U238 and its end-product, Pu239. So you take the rods out of the reactor, cart them to a reprocessing plant, dissolve the rods in acid, and chemically separate the Pu239 from the rest, reconvert the Pu salts and the U salts into metals, produce new rods (or pellets or whatever), cart the reprocessed rods back ... and think of something clever to do with the rest of the (highly radioactive and highly poisonous) salts. Doable. Only ... neither the salts nor the metallic plutonium is nice stuff to produce hundreds of kilograms of (as you will with a fast breeder). It's extremely toxic, highly radioactive, and lasts for millennia.Oh, and it can be used to cobble together nuclear weapons (with a bit of stabilization added, etc.).
In addition, there is plant safety. The sodium coolant for the primary loop will react spectacularly with the water coolant for the secondary loop if you ever get leaks in your piping or your heat exchanger (as seems to be quite often).
Am I the only one who thinks this is an extra set of vulnerabilities vulnerability the US doesn't need when there are squads of potential suicide terrorists looking for an opening?
So yes, there are all kind of restrictions to ensure safety and security at all stages of the plutonium-cycle. Expensive. So err ... your plan would be to relax the safety restrictions in order to make fast breeders economically competitive on top of the security risks already inherent in having a plutonium-based reactor scheme? Really?
Well, I don't. I'm unhappy about fast breeders and their inherent fuel cycle, and that's with pretty darned heavy (and costly) security restrictions in place. Unfortunately, we need a nuclear industry, if only to keep current and to maintain a certain nuclear arsenal. It's dangerous and costly ... but probably better than *not* having it.
However I'm dead against anything like it _without_ the heavy security restrictions.
Science is currently trending towards an electric universe model. This also means the Sun is electrical in nature where fusion reactions occur as a result of electro-chemistry on its surface. With this very simple and basic understanding it is possible to create a fusion reactor with some basic elements and electric current. We have been traveling the wrong path for a long time.
The ashes have to be guarded from terrorists by armed guards for at least 184000 years and the companies would have to save that money beforehand.
How on earth can that be considered even remotely possible is beyond me.
Because they've never seen how they work, they don't know how it fails, and it DOES inevitably fail. And then they learn that way it fails and how to stop it or deal with it before failure is critical. Then it finds another way for it fail that they've never found before.
Twenty years later, it's just about working.
US industry got out of the reactor business... all we have is servicing companies.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
That is wrong.
Reprocessing produces more waste than just depositing the spent fuel.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
We should hold up progress because you're scared of a relatively small risk?
"Failed" push for renewables? [citation needed]
Indeed.
What strikes me about that is he cites the government-subsidized, market-distorting, winner-picking, scam-promoting "renewable energy push" period, with the Solyndra scam held up as the poster child, as a TECHNOLOGICAL failure.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Is this true?
No explanation should be needed oil and coal were the destiny of the dynasty that rules you.
Citation? My impression was that it produces less waste that has a higher level of radioactivity. There might be additional shielding needed, plus the reprocessing equipment might be irradiated faster, but it still seems like it'd produce less waste overall.
Fukushima was blamed on a once in a 100 year disaster. The amusing thing being that it'd been about 100 years since the last time such a disaster was recorded. There were also tons of safety measures that should have been taken and weren't. It was all 100%, completely preventable. It was also really, really expensive to prevent...
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I give the domestic AP1000s a 50:50 chance of every being fueled. If there are ever put on line it will be at a tremendous cost, I'd guess on the order of $10 billion each. Large scale nukes will die with these reactors. SMRs may have a chance with a different fuel cycle, but licensing a new fuel cycle will take 20 yrs in the current regulatory environment. PV seems like a possibility, domestic nukes aren't likely to happen.
I honestly didn't know, so I looked him up.
He's the founder of PayPal.
IOW he's a rich guy who got that way stealing from his customers.
I think we're done here.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Yup, Solar is still less polluting than coal... Just not less polluting than nuclear:
http://news.yahoo.com/solar-in...
Doesn't matter - none of those regulations apply in China, India or Russia and nowhere else has both the will and resources to build reactors.
US civilian nuclear ate it's own children. An example is the lobbying of the nuclear industry AGAINST the Clinton-era thorium research and FOR many of those regulations as a deliberate barrier against potential competition.
Just another FUD article. It does not give any numbers and does not even mention what waste during solar panel production is produced. Not even to mention: which of the waste might be "hazardous" .
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
the left's fear of technology
Seriously? this is not a characteristic I've ever seen (or heard) ascribed to the left? Typically progressives are more apt to adopt new technology (especially compared to conservatives), so I'm at a bit of a loss as to where this assertion comes from?
I would have thought the left's concern wrt nuclear power is centered around relevant environmental concerns over the problem of nuclear waste disposal? (which I also think is more of a limiting factor on new-nuclear-development than cost)...
-AC
Erm, you are mixing up the two.
Solar, if we talk about PV, is based on _sand_. You use simple sand for making the panels, just like your windows are made from sand. No mining at all.
On the other hands you have strip mining for uranium ore. No idea how one can mix that up ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
all those crybabies who don't want nuclear waste buried in their neighborhood
Okay, so you're saying that if the NRC sends you a memo saying they'll be dropping by next week to bury a coupla 50gal drums of spent fuel-rods in your's and all your neighbour's back yards, you're going to be all like, "okie-dokie! I'm no wacky environmentalist crybaby! Bring extras!"?
Ya, right....
-AV
You are lying
You have exactly zero knowledge.
Recent developments in compact particle accelerator technologies means that safe, thorium burning, sub-critical fission reactors are possible. http://www.kurzweilai.net/phys...
While not as ideal as fusion reactors they have the benefit of not being able to "melt-down" and can be used for waste transmutation.
And it sure has hell wasn't Greenpeace or the Clamshell Alliance.
It was the 1980s oil glut that did the deed. That was especially devastating following on the heels of the 1970s oil crisis, because so many companies who entered the alternative energy business in the late 70s only to have the floor cut out from under them in 1980. I had a good friend who quit his job at a software company in 1980 to go to work for a company developing a seasonal thermal energy storage scheme. He was an accountant and according to him the numbers were solid as long as oil prices were north of $100/bbl. That was in May of 1980 when oil was trading at $114/bbl. 13 months later the price of oil had fallen to $60/bbl. For the next five years the Saudis tried to prop up falling oil prices by cutting back production, but in '85 they gave up, opened the spigots, and oil prices dropped to $23/bbl.
The economic reaction was entirely what you'd predict with oil prices at a 40 year low. The development of new energy technologies stalled. Cars got bigger again and SUVs of unprecedented size and low fuel economy became wildly popular. And new nuclear plant starts dried up. Oh, the industry pointed the finger at the big, bad environmental movement, which is laughable because so far as I know they only nuclear power plant ever canceled due to protests was the monumentally stupidly sited Bodega Bay in 1964. Imagine for a moment the Clams and all those guys didn't exist; it wouldn't have mattered in the least. Nobody is going to invest in new nuclear power plants when oil is priced at $18/bbl. But it sounds better to say that the Greens have put you out of business than to say the prices you used in your revenue projections were off by an order of magnitude.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think the main reason that nuclear power, whether fusion or fission, is never going to be a major source of power is just pure economics.
The US Department of Energy forecast fission and fusion plants costing more than alternatives, including solar/wind.
Citation: http://web.ornl.gov/~webworks/...
Also, there are people who have argued that *just the steam conversion to electricity* part of a nuclear plant (either fission or fusion) is going to push the cost up over any direct conversion technology (wind, solar, hydro, natural gas turbine). Even if the fission/fusion plant were to be free, the argument goes, the steam generator would, by itself, cost more than the same MW generating capacity of solar/wind/hydro/natural gas.
Citation:
https://matter2energy.wordpres...
The most interesting inherently safe reactor design can also use nuclear waste as fuel and transmute it into less harmful radionuclides.
Instead, of course, we're giving welfare to fusion research, which is going nowhere instead of funding and developing a proven technology we had working in the 60s.
Is it a perfect solution? No. It's just simpler, cheaper, safer and more sustainable than any other power engineering solution out there if your goal is to continue to run a global industrial society at its current scale.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Breeder reactors could burn up all that waste.
Breeders do not burn transuranics. They do create more of them, this is why they are called "Breeders".
Fast Neutron reactors are harder to control than the current type of Boiling and Pressurized Water reactors because operators have less time to get situations under control to prevent accidents or disasters, where you are dealing with much more energetic radio-isotopes. As we observed in disasters like Windscale, TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima human factors are the leading cause of creating *and* mitigating these accidents so you have to keep that in mind.
What you are thinking about is actually called a "Burner" reactor like the Integral Fast Reactor. Called "Integral" because the design incorporates fuel reprocessing and storage in a closed loop. They are called "Burners" because it refers to the "burn-up" rate of the fuel. Fuel, such as pu-239 and u-238, goes into such a facility and, after the reactor has "burnt" them, you have the fissile ash of those products to store, with greatly reduced, though highly radioactive, halflives of daughter products to deal with (roughly 600-1000 years).
Build those inside some mountains and you have your new Atomic age.
Combine that with true renewables like solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and what ever other technologies can be invented and you have a 21st Century energy infrastructure.
What I'm saying here is the technology for a new Atomic age has already been built and tested that had an honest look at the problems with the existing one and asked "how do you fix those problems". If you are selecting a new technology to use, then you have to understand why you do, or do not, use it.
Whilst this might not be a popular thing to point out, the downside of the Thorium fuel cycle is creating Thallium 233 as spent fuel and a new spent fuel storage issue. Whilst I like the anti-weapons proliferation feature of that fuel cycle, it doesn't solve the existing problem of what to do with existing stocks of transuranics, in the form of spent fuel, from existing reactor technology. Thorium is a great idea, if we chose that fuel cycle first, however we chose Uranium and we have to deal with that reality.
IFR does and the upside is if we can deal with that reality there is enough energetic potential there to power, at least the US, for the next 5000 years. Since you don't have to mine the fuel IFR has a roughly 100Tw advantage over refining fuel for each Thorium, AP1000 or EPR reactor deployed (I said roughly because I'm using energy figures from uranium mining), you don't have a Thallium waste stream to deal with, you are burning up existing fuel stocks whilst keeping the anti-proliferation features. The technology isn't perfect however it has been operated, tested and has good safety features compared to Thorium which has not.
If you build them in a mountain with suitable geology you gain an additional (roughly) 100Tw advantage over reactors deployed above ground because you have arranged the disposal of the reactor at the end of its service life to be "in-situ". This also accounts for failure modes we don't yet understand (that also exist for Thorium) that are a part of that reality. So whilst building spent fuel storage infrastructure underground, why can't we plan to build all these facilities underground exactly the way the existing Nuclear industry itself recommends?
That is why I support IFR over every other reactor technology, we really need to deal with these problems so we just hand down a energy infrastructure instead of waste problems to future generations. There is nothing wrong with having Nuclear technology, however the reality is most of the radio-isotopes we are dealing with do have human health and genetic consequences that manifest well beyond our life time, so we have to plan with respect to the properties of those materials and lessons learned.
We either engineer the next atomic age properly and pay attention to those lessons or we don't do it all.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
is powered by nukes. We could potentially get to Mars or maybe the asteroid belt without them, but much beyond that we're going to need them. All the probes we've slung away have been nukes (RTGs, but still atomic not chemical nor solar). Getting to another star system is going to absolutely mandate nukes.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Perhaps not zero, but I admit the info came from a quick google search (link). If you have some more insight into the subject I'd love to be corrected.
I think in the end, what will happen is that we'll end up choosing molten-salt reactors fueled by thorium-232 dissolved in molten fluoride salts as fuel--the so-called liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR).
The advantages to LFTR's are numerous:
1. Thorium-232 is as common in the soil as elemental Lead--indeed, one of the huge problems with rare-Earth element mining is figuring out how to get rid of the thorium. Suddenly, all that thorium is in high demand for nuclear reactor fuel.
2. LFTR's can even use re-processed uranium-235 fuel rods and plutonium-239/241 from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten fluoride salts as fuel, making it a very viable way to get rid of a huge current nuclear waste problem.
3. You don't need expensive pressurized reactor vessels.
4. The reactor size can be scaled from 40 megawatts to over 1,000 megawatts power output. That means they could be used for powering installations as small as computer server farms all the way up to powering whole cities, and they can generate power 24 hours a day constantly.
5. Because the fuel is in liquid form in the reactor, there is no such thing as a reactor meltdown if the coolant is cut off for any reason.
6. A SCRAM emergency shutdown of the reactor is dumping the liquid fuel out of the reactor quickly, a lot easier to do than the complex safety systems found in today's uranium-fueled reactors.
7. Using closed-loop Brayton turbines to generate power, you eliminate the enormously expensive need for big cooling towers or locating the reactor near a large source of water.
8. The amount of radioactive waste generated is tiny compared to uranium-fueled reactors, and that waste has a radioactive half-life of under 320 years, which means really cheap nuclear waste disposal using disused salt mines or salt domes (if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!).
Note that scientists think that the Moon and even Mars may have large quantities of thorium-232 that could be mined. As such, we may enough thorium-232 to power LFTR's for potentially _tens_ of thousands of years at current power consumption rates.
exactly how is he going to push the atomic age? the dude couldn't even keep his election promises (the first election that is....).
And.. we're outa here.
Reactors can be made safer, but the problem of nuclear waste remains - and nobody wants that shit in their backyard.
If it was technically feasible (and safe to do), people would send it to the moon or into the sun.
Reducing energy consumption of devices and appliances, improving energy storage capacities - and re-evaluating settlement areas, that's the way to go.
Cities like Las Vegas (practically uninhabitable without air-conditioning) are probably a thing of the past.
New York may turn out the same, though.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Don't let petty accidents stand in the path of progress. And Thorium.
C'mon, what you folks want is to continue dreaming the dream of unlimited growth, all the bad symptoms notwithstanding. That's where all those thorium nutjobs come from, all those nuculars.
Fact is, the Earth is a limited resource. Times are over where we could get more land by just killing a couple of Indians and other primitives. If the limit is not in the energy, it'll be in drinking water, rare earths, arable land, whatever.
Time we invested our intellectual energies in *using better what we fucking have*
We STILL AFTER DECADES have not resolved the issue of what to do with all the radioactive waste and these BOZOS want to tel you we need more of that irredeemable garbage piling up ... WHERE?!?!!
We want CLEAN energy. Come back when you have some to offer.
Thorium is more dangerous than the actual reactors.
The problem with thorium/sodium reactors is not so much the reactor, but the chemical plant that needs to be online all the time nearby the reactor reprocessing continuously molten fuel
- the complete chemical plant needs to hold the fuel. Each leak will basically condems the whole site.
- there is no known material capable of containing this molten fuel for a long time.
- there are dangerous by products. An example is Tritiated fluorhydric acid. Extremely dangerous.
- there is a continuous stream of toxic and radioactive waste, of much higher volume, and much more dangerous than traditional.
etc.etc.etc.
It's basically adding the complexity and problems of a chemical processing plant operating over extremely radioactive molten metal over a nuclear reactor. Combining the problems of both.
Yeah. that's not dangerous at all.
aaaaaaa
Thorium is more dangerous than the actual reactors.
The problem with thorium/sodium reactors is not so much the reactor, but the chemical plant that needs to be online all the time nearby the reactor reprocessing continuously molten fuel
- the complete chemical plant needs to hold the fuel. Each leak will basically condems the whole site.
- there is no known material capable of containing this molten fuel for a long time.
- there are dangerous by products. An example is Tritiated fluorhydric acid. Extremely dangerous.
- there is a continuous stream of toxic and radioactive waste, of much higher volume, and much more dangerous than traditional.
etc.etc.etc.
It's basically adding the complexity and problems of a chemical processing plant operating over extremely radioactive molten metal over a nuclear reactor. Combining the problems of both.
Yeah. that's not dangerous at all .
aaaaaaa
I read the article, did you?
If you find a "hazardous" material mentioned in the article, quote it. I might have overseen it.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes, I read the article.... And you blatantly lied about it. It mentioned specific toxic/carcinogenic wastes produced as a byproduct of the manufacturing of solar panels and specific amounts of millions of tons of toxic waste in California alone...
Too much warming means civilisation collapse. +2 degree already means big changes in ecosystems worldwide, it's already a major challenge. More and we're almost certainly doomed.
So we must decarbonize quickly. But we use so much energy. Savings and renewables are necessary, yet far from enough. See e.g. http://www.manicore.com/documentation/energie_graph1.jpg (primary energy use in the world / year / person in kWh), renewables won't play a major role any time soon. It'll be too late. Also, most people are strongly against living a peaceful monastic life. No going back to 1920's standards, even with added perks like modern health care and internet. Not enough savings.
It looks like replacing coal plants with nuclear plants is the only thing that may work.
Major nuclear accidents look bad only until you compare them with wars. A civilisation collapse would be worse that many wars (except for a global nuclear war).
New designs would be nice but current ones would do the trick.
I honestly don't see a way out of this. IA taking over maybe?
The real problem is that it's insanely profitable to pull something (provided free by nature) out of the ground for the cost of labor and sell it at a rate determined by demand. If you can pull oil at costs of $2 a barrel (possible in some fields, not fracking) and sell it on the market for $40, up to well over $100 a barrel depending on the market, collecting the difference as pure profit, you have not only huge motivation to keep doing that, but also huge amounts of power to use to influence laws and markets to keep allowing it.
Nuclear generation as a business might be profitable, but it's not a "limited resource" in the way that fossil fuels are. The material needed is abundant enough to meet all of our needs. Therefore, nuclear, if opened up politically to make power generation competition possible, won't be nearly as profitable for investors.
As long as corporations can have controlling rights to sell limited natural resources without paying market value for them, those businesses will be where the money and power is.
Hopefully this is all moot, and the technology in sustainable energy production continues to improve and pricing crosses the threshold where other energy sources simply can't compete, soon.
Middleeast conflicts are boondoggles for arms mfg and gov programs. Abandon middle east, problems there disappear and alt energy flourishes here. Spend 20% on atomic age that we do on foreign aid(any money leaving USA) WIN WIN for USA taxpayers.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
China has about a dozen different nuclear technologies under development and if even one of them work they'll simply roll it out internally and externally so we can just buy the nukes from China. Brilliant plan isn't it?
China has also shortened the deployment of their first LFTR / molten salt reactor up from 25-30 years to 10-12. They are serious and the west is not.
Plus we need clean coal, and other renewable fuels like oil, natural gas, bio methane, ethanol (grown on government "set aside acreages", essentially land that farmers are paid not to plant on to maintain market prices of corn), biodiesel, steam power, flex fuel everything
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
like all the nuke apologists like to keep mentioning:"radiation is natural" thus we already ARE and always have been in an atomic age. unless it means to be in a "more atomic age" or "more radioactive age".
as far as i can tell, we're living under a nice geo-magnetic umbrella that keep us safe from alot of "cosmic radiation" and it completely (not!) makes sense to generate more radioactivity under this umbrella, eh? damn! that's like pooping in a corner in the hospital and letting the bacteria flourish?
I don't think Thiel's characterization of the left as "fearing technology" is either accurate or fair. What the left _does_ exhibit is a justifiable distrust of the sociopathic nature of corporations and venture economics; a distrust firmly founded in the historical record of exploitation of our common wealth resources, abuses of workers, and opposition to all regulation by civil institutions that have been repeatedly perpetrated by capitalism and consumerism in the blind pursuit of greed.
The nuclear industry has often seemed both cavalier and deceitful about the many risks and real long term costs of nuclear energy (just as the fossil fuel industry continues to be). When responsible behavior might impose on profiteering caution is thrown to the dogs. The distrust of the people is earned and rational, and the reality is finally starting to be recognized by the right wing as much as the left.
I personally think that nuclear solutions should be on the table as sound avenues for addressing energy needs, especially when facing the urgency of climate disruption from carbon fuels. I just have serious doubts that our sociopath economic institutions and radicalized government representatives can sanely manage the risks well enough to realize the benefits.
in peace,
(not so) anonymous aaron
So where does the nuclear waste in the new style nuclear plants go? Nuclear is a dangerous dead-end.
"less waste" is a vague amount ... like 1% less?
Renewables have not failed. The central tenet of this rant is false.
Hidden cost shifting from fossil fuels has.
When the 300 bn / year in military occupation / combat / infiltration costs in the M.E. are factored back onto the costs of fossil fuels (and that IS ALL the military does these days, no matter how you plane the orange) fossil fuel outcosts solar by 7:1 or more depending on how you figure the pittance of subsidies (40 billion to oil companies this year, 8 billion to nuclear EVERY year plus unmentioned costs of waste disposal), solar comes out DIRT cheap by comparison
Stop hiding the subsidies for coal, oil and natural gas, the market will make the correct choice
The Koch brothers will go broke however, and that is why nothing happesn
Could it be Democrats and their ever-faithful attack dogs, the "environmental movement"? Could they be the reason electric cars emit more CO2 than internal combustion? That they were the ones who scuttled a promising 0-carbon-emitting technology over their paranoid worries that it might cause problems, thereby leaving a vast number of carbon-producing power plants "known" to be killing people in place? Not to mention augmenting all those plants with high power solar bird-blasters and wind-power eagle-shredders? No! Say it isn't so! Say they really had their hearts in the right place even while the rest of us told them to stop with lawyer attacks driving nuclear power into a financial hell they didn't deserve. Say...or maybe this was their plot all along! Maybe they knew they'd have more clout by swinging the CO2 club than if they kept quiet and let the engineers finish developing nukes. Maybe they really never did give a damn about the environment and were only using it as a stalking horse to implement Nazi-style socialism with repression of free speech, the right to bear arms, and all those other pesky little "rights" thingies those miserable Libertarians do go on about. Maybe that was all they really cared about the whole God-damn time. 'Cause, looking at their raging success in nearly 50 years of doing things their way, we seem to be a lot closer to WWII than we do a peaceful, clean, modern, or safe environment.
So then you are a liar?
Or are you just bad in reading? And even worse in quoting?
The article does not say which toxic or carcionic byproducts are resulting as waste. Should I repeat that? The article more or less made the stupid claim you made in your last sentence.
And that claim is wrong ... solar cells, PV cells are made from sand. The sand is doted with phosphor and/or arsenic, both are unhealthy, but they end up in the product and not as waste.
A million ton of arsen or phosphor would be a fortune, no one is putting that on a waste deposite.
So:
a) the article is FUD
b) the article is a lie
c) you are an idiot
Feel free, to read the article again and quote a concrete example for waste produced in PV production which is mentioned in the article, perhaps I'm still blind and oversaw it :)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Solar pollution from just that article: "The state records show the 17 companies, which had 44 manufacturing facilities in California, produced 46.5 million pounds of sludge and contaminated water from 2007 through the first half of 2011. Roughly 97 percent of it was taken to hazardous waste facilities throughout the state, but more than 1.4 million pounds were transported to nine other states: Arkansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Nevada, Washington, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona."
"Solyndra, the now-defunct solar company that received $535 million in guaranteed federal loans, reported producing about 12.5 million pounds of hazardous waste, much of it carcinogenic cadmium-contaminated water, which was sent to waste facilities from 2007 through mid-2011."
That 12.5 million pounds of waste was from panels that could power 100,000 homes for about 20 years... During the day when it isn't cloudy and then they need fossil fuel power plants to come online
OK Anonymous wasn't my intention anyway here is my short 2 cents worth... Where and how will they store the nuclear waste materials? Probably up north somewhere where there is scant population. Then as then as the dump fills what happens to the waste? I don't think this issue is too popular among the scientific/political community. Anyone have a comment on this issue. Nuclear power is well and good as long as the waste is not in my back yard!!
Newbutold47
That is wrong. Reprocessing produces more waste than just depositing the spent fuel.
You are right, they are wrong. Two other metals (IIRC, lithium, and something else I can't remember right now) go into the reactor process with pu-239, 1:1:1 ration and only plutonium comes out. That is why it is called a 'Breeder" but as usual people are "idealising" Nuclear Power based on some vague notion provided by social proof. The English language is being used in a specific way here, "Breeder" means it "Breeds" fuel.
FYI, the reactor this article is talking about is (light on detail) based on the EBR, if I have it correctly identified, it is the core technology of a set encapsulated into a closed loop called IFR, which I posted about before. The closed loop design was revolutionary and the burn-up rate of the radio-isotope was around 20% compared to the 0.3% of the currently deploy water and pressure reactors and, consequently, much more radioactive. The main problem though, was that it was sodium cooled - roughly 70tons of lava hot, radioactive sodium, and it's not a good idea to have that around water. The other idea was to cool it with lead. Make no mistake though these reactors become extremely radioactive.
What is interesting though is that the claimed advancement they have is cooling this reactor with salt. This actually is an advance in this type of technology, specifically because having this technology available means that U-235 becomes more valuable as a fuel (so as not to use it as mass for munitions) and also for nuclear disarmament.
As is usual for todays 'commercialized' Nuclear industry, you can see that the features to 'integrate' the fuel cycle (reprocessing and fuel storage) have been removed from this design to make it more cost effective. Safety is a design decision. To remove the safety features and then claim that this design is 'walk away safe' and transportable on a flatbed truck is close to the most insane thing I have ever heard. Once a design like this is placed and has been operational it will never be moved again because it will be highly radioactive and wherever it is installed it will stay for a minimum of 1000 years while the extremely radioactive fissile ash (probably sr90) decays. Asides for wondering how it would be defueled, I'd imagine you would want to keep water out of a decommissioned reactor full of radioactive salt.
To put it in a car analogy as often inappropriately used to describe something as complex as a nuclear reactor technology, it's like having an extremely powerful engine, with steering brakes and all neccessary mechanical requirements for a vehicle, however with seats and no vehicle body, doors, windsheild or seatbelts, driving down a freeway and bringin the family along for the ride. They are called "Fast" reactors for a reason and fast neutron reactors are more demanding to control.
Still, if they sited the reactor and designed to be geologically disposed of in place it could be a good way to end the radionuclide warfare that is being conducted which is already manifesting as genetic abberations and failed pregnancies. This is the distastful reality that also needs to be addressed.
I am highly dubious though about the reliability of such a device, would you also need to click start to scram it? ;)
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
With reprocessing, breeder reactors can theoretically generate no waste at all. In practice they do tend to produce small amounts, but the half-life is on the order of 30-40 years, instead of the 25,000 years stuff we produce now.
That is only for the first daughter product. You would then repeat the same time approximately 20 times as it decayed into each daughter product.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Yes. Democracy. I'm glad we don't live in an authoritarian technocracy ruled by (radioactive) engineers.
The greater point is that renewables can't power nearly enough of a city to be the sole solution now.
Thank you Dave Raggett