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France To Shut Down All Coal-Fired Power Plants By 2023 (independent.co.uk)
French president Francois Hollande announced at an annual UN climate change conference on Wednesday that France will shut down all its coal-fired power plants by 2023. He also "vowed to beat by two years the UK's commitment to stop using fossil fuels to generate power by 2025," reports The Independent: Mr Hollande, a keynote speaker at the event in Marrakech, Morocco, also praised his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama for his work on climate change, and then appeared to snub president-elect Donald Trump. "The role played by Barack Obama was crucial in achieving the Paris agreement," Mr Hollande said, before adding, in what has been perceived as a dig at Mr Trump, that becoming a signatory to the treaty is "irreversible." "We need carbon neutrality by 2050," the French President continued, promising that coal will no longer form part of France's energy mix in six to seven years' time. France is already a world leader in low-carbon energy. The country has invested heavily in nuclear power over the past few decades and now derives more than 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear fission. It produces so much nuclear energy, in fact, that it exports much of it to nearby nations, making around $2.66 billion each year.
Sure there is: Lower cancer rates (Burning coal releases more actual Uranium into the atmosphere), and lower asthma, COPD, etc. from lower NOX and particulate pollution. Radioactive waste can be contained and when reprocessed as part of waste disposal generates more electricity and limits hard storage time to decades.
Read some of the recent articles by the elder statesmen of the environmentalist movement, such as one of the founders of Greenpeace. They are now acknowledging that they spread a lot of FUD about waste. Here are the two biggest lies:
Intentionally conflating alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. They really hyped things up, through out a lot of numbers and such, about "radiation", carefully cherry-picking things about completely different types of radiation, while making it sound like all the statements went together. Of course you know there are different types of radiation - light from a light bulb is radiation, warmth radiating from a fireplace is radiation. When discussing nuclear waste, the two main types are alpha and beta. Here's the funny thing - alpha is stopped by almost anything - tissue paper, a few centimeters of air, moisture in the air, etc. Unless you press the uranium against your skin, the alpha can't get to you. So when any old 1980s article talks about radiation, ask "are they taking about ALPHA radiation, the kind that's blocked by even tissue paper?" Often they are.
The even bigger lie is intentionally conflating short half-life with long half-life. You know a candle radiates visible light, heat, uv, etc. Gunpowder radiates the same wavelengths - light, heat, etc. The difference between a candle and a bomb is that the candle releases the energy slowly, a little bit a time, while gunpowder releases it's energy quickly. So quickly, in fact, that there's a dangerous amount of energy, for about 50 milliseconds. Nuclear materials are the same. Some release their energy quickly, so there's a dangerous amount of radiation for a short time. Roughly 14 days, in one common case. Other nuclear materials release their energy incredibly slowly, over thousands of years. At any given time, the slow ones are releasing such a small amount of energy you could WEAR the waste on your head all day and it would have absolutely zero effect. In fact I, and many others, DO wear tritium on our belts.
There is waste that releases enough radiation in a year to be dangerous, and there's other waste that releases so little as at a time that it takes a thousand years before most of it is used up. Dumping the energy fast is like a firecracker which burns metal powder very quickly - it's dangerous, for a very short period of time. Releasing it over a thousand years is like the heat generated as a bolt rusts - it's an almost indetectable, and completely safe, level of energy being released.
It's really it like showing somebody a firecracker and saying "this is metal oxydizing" (true) and "the metal in your car could oxydize at any moment" (also true, your car is oxydizing all the time).
Actually, most of that "waste" can be reused as fuel. Modern light water nuclear plants only use about 3% of the energy in uranium. That's why the waste is "hot" for so long
That's not quite right. The uranium has a half life of billions of years, so it will be radioactive for a long time but that is not what makes spent fuel "hot". Just as a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long a radioactive material with a long half life puts out very little radiation. Uranium has such a long half life and therefore very little radiation from it that uranium is routinely used as a shield against radiation.
Another thing about uranium is that most isotopes of the element are alpha emitters upon decay. In a solid fuel reactor the uranium is encased in a metal tube, an alpha particle would not leave the tube. Even if it did about a foot of air would stop it.
What makes spent fuel "hot" is the fission products, and to a lesser extent the transuranic elements. A fission product is from the uranium nucleus taking in a neutron and fissions into two smaller nuclei. The transuranic elements are from when the uranium takes a neutron and doesn't fission but instead decays into a heavier element, such as plutonium. These fission products and transuranic elements can be beta and gamma emitters upon decay, these require more shielding to stop, such as a few feet of water or other dense material.
In a solid fuel reactor it is very difficult to remove these elements. This is a problem because some of these elements like to soak up neutrons with a greater affinity than the uranium fuel. At some point the fission products will take up so many neutrons that a chain reaction cannot be maintained in the reactor, when this happens the fuel is "spent" even though there is still a large amount of uranium fuel in the fuel rod.
There's several ways to address this problem but one that is gaining traction is to use a liquid fuel. The uranium in a solid fuel reactor is usually a ceramic (an oxide), because in that form it can hold up to a lot of heat and radiation without turning into something else. In a liquid fuel reactor the uranium fuel is in the form of a salt, usually a fluoride (like the sodium fluoride in toothpaste). This salt can also withstand the radiation but it melts at a relatively low temperature, which make it easy to turn into a liquid. In liquid form many of the worst fission products, like xenon, will bubble out of the fuel and get collected at the top of the reactor tank. Many of the others, like noble metals, will fall to the bottom. With these fission products out of the way just about all the fuel can be burned. With the addition of a chemical processor on the liquid fuel the transuranic elements can be removed before they can become a problem of soaking up neutrons, becoming a weapon proliferation problem, or generally a nuisance. Some of these fission products and transuranic elements are quite valuable and would become a salable product for medicine and industry.
With a solid fuel the spent fuel rods are effectively worthless because the valuable elements are mixed in with the really radioactive stuff that built up over time. This is difficult to process until it has "cooled" which also means a lot of the really valuable elements have decayed away. A liquid salt reactor would save a lot of trouble by not producing this waste, and potentially save a lot of lives because many of the fission products the reactor could produce is used to treat and diagnose a lot of medical conditions. Some of them could also be used to disinfect surgical tools, find leaks in pipes, and make it easier to explore space.
A very good reactor using this liquid fuel is called the liquid fluoride thorium reactor, designed by Flibe Energy. Look it up.
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