But they are against pipelines to send it anywhere. Instead they load it on trains which crash and blow up small Quebec towns.
I think you are confusing North Dakota with Canada. Its an easy mistake to make but all those protests against the keystone pipeline were in the US, not Canada. Canadian politics are refreshingly intelligent compared to the shit show that is US politics.
Think you will find even Canada has excessive regulation and the same issue with delusional morons who "think" they are environmentalists that would fight things like this that actually help the environment.
And you would be wrong. They actually license MSRs in Canada and there a lot more empty space to put reactors far away from where anyone would care. Also, keep in mind that Canada is OK with strip-mining huge chunks of their country for oil sands.
Some explanation...depleted Uranium (U-238) is the more common form of Uranium found in nature. It has a very small amount of U-235 which is the fissile stuff (enriched Uranium is almost all U-235 and very little U-238). The way this reactor works is that it breeds the U-238 into Pu-239 and that's what fissions. It also uses water as a coolant which is a bad idea we need to retire. A coolant that increases the intensity of the chain reaction is a really, really bad idea. The explanation for why this design is pushed is that the U-238 isn't useful for a bomb (and we have a lot of it) and the waste that comes out is very long lived which is something the anti-proliferation folks like (I think this is a stupid way to do anti-proliferation). However, this design produces more waste than some more modern designs and in my opinion isn't really suitable for civilian power.
The breeding of U-238 is exactly what you do when you make a modern bomb and PUREX (how you separate out the Pu-239 from the Uranium) isn't exactly a secret process as it was developed 70 years ago. It seems safer to just use 50% enriched Uranium (which still require enrichment) and make less waste or ever better use a Th-U fuel cycle as no Pu-239 is produced in that fuel cycle. Anti-proliferation folks often come from foreign policy or military backgrounds and often don't have the science background to understand all the subtleties of nuclear power. So they choose the "more power" approach and often force civilian operations to run in a far more nasty and waste producing way in an effort to ensure nobody ever reprocesses the waste to make a bomb. This is classic risk telescoping as the pollution from the waste is far more likely to endanger lives than this fantasy that couldn't even happen in a movie because the audience wouldn't buy it.
Batteries scale pretty linearly. There's no reason to start with large scale commercial and "scale down". In this context, the scale you're looking for is widespread deployment, so that battery manufacturers get into a competition frenzy.
Some numbers for you to consider. The Gigafactory produces ~20GW/h/yr. The US grid (3 separate grids actually) uses at least 500GW all the time and that figure is only growing. So that means if we only used Tesla's batteries (the world's largest maker of batteries) for grid backup, it would take 5 years to make enough to backup the wind and solar we already have deployed. And that doesn't count the rest of the world that uses another 2TW all the time. To backup a grid, you need to be able to handle all your renewables being down for a significant period. 6hrs won't cut it, 18hrs would be cutting it close but might be doable, especially if you can buy power from your neighbors. Otherwise, you are going to have a lot of natural gas on your grid making the point of wind and solar a bit moot.
The proponents need to own the sins of the industry. Otherwise they'll just be cranks, squealing how everyone who doesn't agree with them is stupid. When in fact, as Shakespeare said it so well - "a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more - it is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Ok, so every other way we make power needs to do the same. Hydro is responsible for every broken dam in history. Coal for all the black lung. Oil for all the wars in the Middle East. Wind for everyone who has fallen off of a windmill. Solar for everyone who fell off a roof and broken their necks while installing panels. Every source of power kills people sometimes. We can even chart the deaths per kilowatt and guess what? Nuclear still has the least. Your goal of 0 deaths is naive at best. At worst you are a shill of the natural gas industry. Either way the cost of not building nuclear plants isn't 0. Its in the millions of deaths and despite this fact you get obsessed with a single death of someone who worked in a badly run plant for 38 years. Own your own sins Pollyanna.
Renewables will have a more difficult time becoming ubiquitous, while fighting against the entrenched interests. Also - jerbs!
I think the massive increase in electricity prices they bring due to insufficient battery technology has more to do with it. Renewables are about as big a part of the energy mix as they can practically be right now, without some breakthrough in battery tech. Past some point, more renewables means more natural gas with means more CO2. We are probably already past that point now.
Electricity demand is highest during the day, and lowest at night.
That is 100% false. Here is a graph of power usage over the course of the day. The peek is at 8pm to 9pm. It tends to rise slowly over the day but about the time that solar drops out is when you need to be ramping up power production.
According to the WHO and Japanese gouvernment, the direct death toll of the Fukushima disaster was: Zero.
https://ourworldindata.org/wha...
The indirect results from radiation related issues and evacuation stress was not zero, but I find it hard to argue that the executives are directly responsible for the deaths of so many people. The tsunami itself caused tremendous devastation and evacuation was a given, with or without the nuclear plant there.
Don't even wonder why the general citizenry doesn't trust the pro-nuc clan. You are the personification of why.
Do a little research as to exactly why there was no other outcome but catastrophic failure for the Fukushima site.
All human decisions that from a safety, standpoint are inexplicable outside of straightforward explanation that there was corruption involved.
The GP did provide a link which backed up his assertions. You provided insults. Just saying...
And yes, the goalposts start moving again. We were not talking about deaths caused by renewable power, we were talking about deaths from the Fukushima incident.
All sources of power cause deaths. Anything that cause be used for power can be used to kill people. Plus, accidents happen, period. The question is which power source and how many deaths for how much power. One issue with nuclear has always been the fear of a high casualty event which has never materialized. The question of 0 or 1 death from an old PWR designed plant run so poorly in the face of a huge natural disaster is pretty amazing right? That's the point. Not that it is OK, but when everything went sideways things didn't go as badly as some fear. We can still do better but nuclear has always faced a problem with impossible expectations.
The actual Fukushima death toll is still zero, no matter how much you hate capitalism.
You seem to be out of the loop regarding something we call: news.
You and I both know that he's going to come up with some wild thing like "Well - people who were hiding in caves at the time - not one of them was even affected, much less killed!"
Also bizzare how some pro nucs have taken to claiming that having evidence based concerns are somehow anti-capitalist. Especially with extensive Guvmint subsidies and the Price Anderson act just to allow them to exist, Nuc plants are the very embodiment of socialism.
The number is either 0 or 1 depending on who you believe. While tragic, its not the huge numbers that many predicted.
There is no known way of making that many batteries to cover all that wind and solar.
The more you build, the less battery you need, because you have more insolated solar panels, and more wind turbines currently being spun.
Exactly backwards. The more you deploy wind and solar, the more batteries you need. Think about it, as wind and solar make larger and larger amounts of power, when that power supply drops out you need a larger and larger amount of backup to prevent blackouts. Which is why as you deploy more solar and wind, you burn more natural gas. And the more intermittent you make the grid's supply, the less efficient the burning of natural gas will be as more and more are burned when the plant is warming up as it will have to be warm for longer and longer periods.
So we back your solar and wind with natural gas which is 33x more potent a GHG than CO2
Way to torpedo your own argument there, sport. If we burn the natgas it turns into CO2, and then it's less potent, as you say.
Is that before or after a significant amount of that natural gas leaks from the wellhead? What about the other natural leaks that just ramp'ed up 200% because of the fracking happening there? Wouldn't it be better to leave the hydrocarbons in the ground?
Also, if you plan is so good, why are CO2 emissions in both CA and Germany going up during periods of historic wind and solar deployments?
Although reprocessing in a LFTR is a massive proliferation risk in it's own right of course. The LFTR49 concept would intentionally breed pure U233 to feed LFTR33s down the line.
I'm assuming you are talking about a specific company's proposed line of reactors. Yea, those LFTR49s will never get licensed duh. You are not going to get a license for a new reactor that mostly makes enriched nuclear material (especially a shitty bomb material). But you don't really need them in the first place. The first round of reactors can be kick-started with something already enriched like old Pu weapons material or old reprocessed spent fuel (LEU probably isn't potent enough). The second generation of reactors (LFTR33s) can use the U-233 reprocessed out of the spent fuel from the first generation. Not sure why someone would try to license a LFTR49 at all. U-233 is nice fuel and all but its not the only way to kick-start a breeder. Its just that the reprocessing in those first rounds of reactors would be more complex this way. But I'm sure the anti-proliferation folks will require it. Also, some of the waste processing is more complex this way as whatever you use to kick-start the first round will probably make a different mix of elements to process than the pure Th-U fuel cycle reactors which come later.
The Protactinium produces U232 if it decays while still mixed with the Thorium.
The same reactor concept LFTR lovers promote to reprocess fuel, ie. LFTR49, was meant produce near pure U233 for use in different reactors. In which case you also don't want it contaminated with significant amounts U232, it has to be processed, stored and transported after all. So as long as I'm going to entertain promises of LFTR in the first place I'm just going to take their word for the fact that processing the Protactinium with sufficient purity is possible as well.
You can still control the isotopic mixture of Th-232 vs Th-230 in the Thorium fuel. This ratio controls the amount of U-232 vs U-233 the reactor produces. We don't live in a world where we can have Thorium reactors without U-232 in them. I really hope that not too much time and resources when into trying to reduce the U-232 produced from normal breeding operations of the LFTR because it wasn't time well spent.
A gas plant doesn't take decades to build or contaminate half the world when it fails. It's also cheaper and more reliable. Capacity factor gas, 40% LOL
No instead natural gas poisons entire neighborhoods like Porter Ranch. Can every single natural gas plant in California has a capacity factor between 40%-45% according to CalISO.
The big radioactive elements on a human timescale are strontium 90, and cesium 137. They each have a half life of about 30 years. After about 300 years, their radioactivity is down by a factor of 1,000. Next is Americium-241, which emits alpha particles, and has a half life of ~400 years.
So, after guarding the spent fuel for several hundred years. I'd then consider it not so dangerous, and dump it in some out of the way place, like Antarctica, and not worry to much about leaks.
Americium-241 is also fissile so can be put back into a reactor to make more energy. Also, I like dry deserts more than Antarctica for long term disposal. Uranium is water soluble. I also like storing the Uranium as a salt (either a fluoride or a chloride) which is a crystal instead of oxidized as it will become a powder more easily when oxidized.
My first sentence stands even more now.
How many actually running, delivering power to the grid, molten salt thorium reactors can you name?
There has only been 1, the MSRE at Oak Ridge in the late 60's and early 70's. Only Canada has recently begun licensing MSRs so there is a limited amount of operation experience. However, the results from the MSRE were so good that its hard to believe we didn't pursue it further. Nixon wanted Fast Breeders instead (because they were in CA) of the MSRs (because they were in TN). Also, the existing nuclear industry didn't want to switch to Th-U as investments had already been made and they wanted to see them play out. However, at this point all those investments have either been enshrined (they are already producing money) or dashed on the rocks (investments in fast breeders) which is why its a good time to switch to the Th-U fuel cycle. Also, there is a lot of Thorium (at every rare earth mine) pilling up in the world and it would be nice to do something with it rather than let it just leach into the groundwater.
It also only exists on paper and when chosing between two non-existent designs one might as well go directly for fusion as the more promising option. At least ITER is already in construction.
Even the most optimistic estimate puts fusion at 20-50 years out. Several problems, 1) the easiest form of fusion (D-T) creates radiation, 2) the D-He3 fusion, easiest that makes no radiation requires He3 which can be gotten from the moon, or from letting this nasty gas called Tritium decay which is very hard and a bit dangerous, 3) how do you harness 1,000,000C heat as the most we usually do is 3000C and under 300C is far more common? Once we actually can do fusion in a way that makes power, then we can start looking at it realistically. Otherwise, we can't depend upon it happening anytime soon without a major breakthrough.
But nukes produce power whether they need it or not -- they don't start and stop on demand. So they are only good for baseline power, or you have to start throwing away their output.
MSRs can load follow as can many of the more modern nuclear designs. The alternative I like for existing nuclear (and other baseload power) is methane extraction to produce synthetic natural gas which can be sold (at which point the rest of the efficiency issues are someone else's problem). But that's wouldn't make a good or efficient chemical battery because you would only get 16-40% of the power back after burning the natural gas. Most conversions between different forms of energy are less than 50% efficient which is why batteries are hard and why powerplants that make electricity for immediate consumption are preferred.
Advanced Small Modular reactors that use physics to avoid meltdown are perfect.
That's nice - but at the end of the day, no nuclear vaporware is going to be more cost effective than wind and solar. So lets just go on skipping dangerous & expensive ways to heat water, and go with tech that poses no security or long term storage issues.
And the batteries necessary to store the power generated from wind and solar are going to come from where? If we made them with existing technology they could be seen from orbit. There is no known way of making that many batteries to cover all that wind and solar. So we back your solar and wind with natural gas which is 33x more potent a GHG than CO2 (luckily it only staying the in atmosphere about 1/10th as long but still does more damage while its here). Also, all of our calculations around natural gas pretty much assume no leaking of methane which you can bet isn't true.
Nuclear power is simply the release of energy stored over a very long time. As such it is simply adding heat to the environment. Solar power and wind power simply use heat that would be here anyway. Thus it is far better at preserving the environment than operating a nuke.
Wrong. It was stored when the supernova exploded pretty much instantaneously. Its just been stored for a very long time. And Solar and wind require batteries big enough to be seen from orbit. When you back solar and wind, you are also backing natural gas and pretty much embracing climate change. If you believe otherwise, you simply haven't done the math or understand how power is used. Both CA and German CO2 releases have gone up during the same period when wind and solar were being deployed in great number and electricity prices rose in those places over the same period. And this is only accelerating as we double down on these policies. Hopefully you realize how much damage your solar and wind policies are doing before its too late for all of us. If not, guess who will be blamed first?
Reprocessing is only useful for one thing, getting plutonium for weapons. To reduce waste it's not very useful, because it's a once through process... MOX fuel waste is almost impossible to reprocess. So all it really does is waste a colossal amount of money and increase the risks of pollution.
To reduce waste, you need fast reactors.
False on all counts. Its true that you do do reprocessing when extracting plutonium (specifically Pu-239) and its true that fast reactors are better at breeding U-238 to Pu-239. But you can also reprocess and ignore the Pu or simply choose a fuel cycle that doesn't involve Pu. Why on earth do you want to breed U-238 in the first place? Its rare and produces pretty nasty actinides under neutron flux which means worse waste that can last for 10,000 years.
There is no reason you can't burn waste in a thermal spectrum reactor. Its just that the Pu-239 doesn't produce as much energy this way for certain neutron energies. It also produces less nasty waste this way. Fast reactors were tried, and tried again, and again, and again. They were tried with sodium coolant and they were tried with liquid metal. They are a bad idea (partially because they need more shielding) and we need to quit trying them as that's a big reason its hard to get away from LWRs. Because people keep pushing the ideas that didn't work and ignoring the ones that did, specifically MSRs which can't meltdown or release enough radiation to harm a population outside of the exclusion zone.
LFTR: We're looking at an investment of about $40 billion and at least a 10 year Manhattan Project style gathering of the greatest physicists in the world to catch up to where the last research team left off in building a molten salt reactor. On top of that, we have to drill through the whole Thorium cycle to prove it out. Theoretically, it is very promising on paper. We'll have to see how well it proves out in reality. It has all the added benefits of being less toxic than the current Uranium cycle, with little to none of its byproducts that can be weaponized, and the end result material after the cycle is complete is only radioactive for a few hundred years, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of years in the Uranium cycle.
Nobody is asking for $40b to commercialize LFTR. The real problem is developing the commercial infrastructure to move it around. LEU (low enriched uranium) is cheap and has a commercial infrastructure (which is aging and crumbling), a spot market, and a set of regulations. Thorium has none of these things but also much less technical risk and problems. Moving LEU around is dangerous. Moving Thorium around is safe (its not water soluble or toxic to people) but the regulations don't make this distinction. There is also more than enough interested investment dollars to do all of this, but US regulations still prevent it. And part of that in the past was the those that invested in the U-Pu fuel cycle didn't want Thorium but now with the US nuclear industry in shambles, maybe we can finally make some progress.
Slashdot Mirror
But they are against pipelines to send it anywhere. Instead they load it on trains which crash and blow up small Quebec towns.
I think you are confusing North Dakota with Canada. Its an easy mistake to make but all those protests against the keystone pipeline were in the US, not Canada. Canadian politics are refreshingly intelligent compared to the shit show that is US politics.
Think you will find even Canada has excessive regulation and the same issue with delusional morons who "think" they are environmentalists that would fight things like this that actually help the environment.
And you would be wrong. They actually license MSRs in Canada and there a lot more empty space to put reactors far away from where anyone would care. Also, keep in mind that Canada is OK with strip-mining huge chunks of their country for oil sands.
The breeding of U-238 is exactly what you do when you make a modern bomb and PUREX (how you separate out the Pu-239 from the Uranium) isn't exactly a secret process as it was developed 70 years ago. It seems safer to just use 50% enriched Uranium (which still require enrichment) and make less waste or ever better use a Th-U fuel cycle as no Pu-239 is produced in that fuel cycle. Anti-proliferation folks often come from foreign policy or military backgrounds and often don't have the science background to understand all the subtleties of nuclear power. So they choose the "more power" approach and often force civilian operations to run in a far more nasty and waste producing way in an effort to ensure nobody ever reprocesses the waste to make a bomb. This is classic risk telescoping as the pollution from the waste is far more likely to endanger lives than this fantasy that couldn't even happen in a movie because the audience wouldn't buy it.
Batteries scale pretty linearly. There's no reason to start with large scale commercial and "scale down". In this context, the scale you're looking for is widespread deployment, so that battery manufacturers get into a competition frenzy.
Some numbers for you to consider. The Gigafactory produces ~20GW/h/yr. The US grid (3 separate grids actually) uses at least 500GW all the time and that figure is only growing. So that means if we only used Tesla's batteries (the world's largest maker of batteries) for grid backup, it would take 5 years to make enough to backup the wind and solar we already have deployed. And that doesn't count the rest of the world that uses another 2TW all the time. To backup a grid, you need to be able to handle all your renewables being down for a significant period. 6hrs won't cut it, 18hrs would be cutting it close but might be doable, especially if you can buy power from your neighbors. Otherwise, you are going to have a lot of natural gas on your grid making the point of wind and solar a bit moot.
The proponents need to own the sins of the industry. Otherwise they'll just be cranks, squealing how everyone who doesn't agree with them is stupid. When in fact, as Shakespeare said it so well - "a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more - it is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Ok, so every other way we make power needs to do the same. Hydro is responsible for every broken dam in history. Coal for all the black lung. Oil for all the wars in the Middle East. Wind for everyone who has fallen off of a windmill. Solar for everyone who fell off a roof and broken their necks while installing panels. Every source of power kills people sometimes. We can even chart the deaths per kilowatt and guess what? Nuclear still has the least. Your goal of 0 deaths is naive at best. At worst you are a shill of the natural gas industry. Either way the cost of not building nuclear plants isn't 0. Its in the millions of deaths and despite this fact you get obsessed with a single death of someone who worked in a badly run plant for 38 years. Own your own sins Pollyanna.
Renewables will have a more difficult time becoming ubiquitous, while fighting against the entrenched interests. Also - jerbs!
I think the massive increase in electricity prices they bring due to insufficient battery technology has more to do with it. Renewables are about as big a part of the energy mix as they can practically be right now, without some breakthrough in battery tech. Past some point, more renewables means more natural gas with means more CO2. We are probably already past that point now.
Whale poop can be quite valuable.
I believe Ambergris is actually more like whale puke than whale poop.
Electricity demand is highest during the day, and lowest at night.
That is 100% false. Here is a graph of power usage over the course of the day. The peek is at 8pm to 9pm. It tends to rise slowly over the day but about the time that solar drops out is when you need to be ramping up power production.
According to the WHO and Japanese gouvernment, the direct death toll of the Fukushima disaster was: Zero. https://ourworldindata.org/wha...
The indirect results from radiation related issues and evacuation stress was not zero, but I find it hard to argue that the executives are directly responsible for the deaths of so many people. The tsunami itself caused tremendous devastation and evacuation was a given, with or without the nuclear plant there.
Don't even wonder why the general citizenry doesn't trust the pro-nuc clan. You are the personification of why.
Do a little research as to exactly why there was no other outcome but catastrophic failure for the Fukushima site.
All human decisions that from a safety, standpoint are inexplicable outside of straightforward explanation that there was corruption involved.
The GP did provide a link which backed up his assertions. You provided insults. Just saying...
And yes, the goalposts start moving again. We were not talking about deaths caused by renewable power, we were talking about deaths from the Fukushima incident.
All sources of power cause deaths. Anything that cause be used for power can be used to kill people. Plus, accidents happen, period. The question is which power source and how many deaths for how much power. One issue with nuclear has always been the fear of a high casualty event which has never materialized. The question of 0 or 1 death from an old PWR designed plant run so poorly in the face of a huge natural disaster is pretty amazing right? That's the point. Not that it is OK, but when everything went sideways things didn't go as badly as some fear. We can still do better but nuclear has always faced a problem with impossible expectations.
The actual Fukushima death toll is still zero, no matter how much you hate capitalism.
You seem to be out of the loop regarding something we call: news.
You and I both know that he's going to come up with some wild thing like "Well - people who were hiding in caves at the time - not one of them was even affected, much less killed!"
Also bizzare how some pro nucs have taken to claiming that having evidence based concerns are somehow anti-capitalist. Especially with extensive Guvmint subsidies and the Price Anderson act just to allow them to exist, Nuc plants are the very embodiment of socialism.
The number is either 0 or 1 depending on who you believe. While tragic, its not the huge numbers that many predicted.
There is no known way of making that many batteries to cover all that wind and solar.
The more you build, the less battery you need, because you have more insolated solar panels, and more wind turbines currently being spun.
Exactly backwards. The more you deploy wind and solar, the more batteries you need. Think about it, as wind and solar make larger and larger amounts of power, when that power supply drops out you need a larger and larger amount of backup to prevent blackouts. Which is why as you deploy more solar and wind, you burn more natural gas. And the more intermittent you make the grid's supply, the less efficient the burning of natural gas will be as more and more are burned when the plant is warming up as it will have to be warm for longer and longer periods.
So we back your solar and wind with natural gas which is 33x more potent a GHG than CO2
Way to torpedo your own argument there, sport. If we burn the natgas it turns into CO2, and then it's less potent, as you say.
Is that before or after a significant amount of that natural gas leaks from the wellhead? What about the other natural leaks that just ramp'ed up 200% because of the fracking happening there? Wouldn't it be better to leave the hydrocarbons in the ground?
Also, if you plan is so good, why are CO2 emissions in both CA and Germany going up during periods of historic wind and solar deployments?
Although reprocessing in a LFTR is a massive proliferation risk in it's own right of course. The LFTR49 concept would intentionally breed pure U233 to feed LFTR33s down the line.
I'm assuming you are talking about a specific company's proposed line of reactors. Yea, those LFTR49s will never get licensed duh. You are not going to get a license for a new reactor that mostly makes enriched nuclear material (especially a shitty bomb material). But you don't really need them in the first place. The first round of reactors can be kick-started with something already enriched like old Pu weapons material or old reprocessed spent fuel (LEU probably isn't potent enough). The second generation of reactors (LFTR33s) can use the U-233 reprocessed out of the spent fuel from the first generation. Not sure why someone would try to license a LFTR49 at all. U-233 is nice fuel and all but its not the only way to kick-start a breeder. Its just that the reprocessing in those first rounds of reactors would be more complex this way. But I'm sure the anti-proliferation folks will require it. Also, some of the waste processing is more complex this way as whatever you use to kick-start the first round will probably make a different mix of elements to process than the pure Th-U fuel cycle reactors which come later.
The Protactinium produces U232 if it decays while still mixed with the Thorium.
The same reactor concept LFTR lovers promote to reprocess fuel, ie. LFTR49, was meant produce near pure U233 for use in different reactors. In which case you also don't want it contaminated with significant amounts U232, it has to be processed, stored and transported after all. So as long as I'm going to entertain promises of LFTR in the first place I'm just going to take their word for the fact that processing the Protactinium with sufficient purity is possible as well.
You can still control the isotopic mixture of Th-232 vs Th-230 in the Thorium fuel. This ratio controls the amount of U-232 vs U-233 the reactor produces. We don't live in a world where we can have Thorium reactors without U-232 in them. I really hope that not too much time and resources when into trying to reduce the U-232 produced from normal breeding operations of the LFTR because it wasn't time well spent.
A gas plant doesn't take decades to build or contaminate half the world when it fails. It's also cheaper and more reliable. Capacity factor gas, 40% LOL
No instead natural gas poisons entire neighborhoods like Porter Ranch. Can every single natural gas plant in California has a capacity factor between 40%-45% according to CalISO.
The big radioactive elements on a human timescale are strontium 90, and cesium 137. They each have a half life of about 30 years. After about 300 years, their radioactivity is down by a factor of 1,000. Next is Americium-241, which emits alpha particles, and has a half life of ~400 years.
So, after guarding the spent fuel for several hundred years. I'd then consider it not so dangerous, and dump it in some out of the way place, like Antarctica, and not worry to much about leaks.
Americium-241 is also fissile so can be put back into a reactor to make more energy. Also, I like dry deserts more than Antarctica for long term disposal. Uranium is water soluble. I also like storing the Uranium as a salt (either a fluoride or a chloride) which is a crystal instead of oxidized as it will become a powder more easily when oxidized.
My first sentence stands even more now. How many actually running, delivering power to the grid, molten salt thorium reactors can you name?
There has only been 1, the MSRE at Oak Ridge in the late 60's and early 70's. Only Canada has recently begun licensing MSRs so there is a limited amount of operation experience. However, the results from the MSRE were so good that its hard to believe we didn't pursue it further. Nixon wanted Fast Breeders instead (because they were in CA) of the MSRs (because they were in TN). Also, the existing nuclear industry didn't want to switch to Th-U as investments had already been made and they wanted to see them play out. However, at this point all those investments have either been enshrined (they are already producing money) or dashed on the rocks (investments in fast breeders) which is why its a good time to switch to the Th-U fuel cycle. Also, there is a lot of Thorium (at every rare earth mine) pilling up in the world and it would be nice to do something with it rather than let it just leach into the groundwater.
It also only exists on paper and when chosing between two non-existent designs one might as well go directly for fusion as the more promising option. At least ITER is already in construction.
Even the most optimistic estimate puts fusion at 20-50 years out. Several problems, 1) the easiest form of fusion (D-T) creates radiation, 2) the D-He3 fusion, easiest that makes no radiation requires He3 which can be gotten from the moon, or from letting this nasty gas called Tritium decay which is very hard and a bit dangerous, 3) how do you harness 1,000,000C heat as the most we usually do is 3000C and under 300C is far more common? Once we actually can do fusion in a way that makes power, then we can start looking at it realistically. Otherwise, we can't depend upon it happening anytime soon without a major breakthrough.
Even with battery backup wind is cheaper. Even offshore wind.
False, by every measure wind is the most expensive power source. And offshore wind is even more expensive than onshore wind.
But nukes produce power whether they need it or not -- they don't start and stop on demand. So they are only good for baseline power, or you have to start throwing away their output.
MSRs can load follow as can many of the more modern nuclear designs. The alternative I like for existing nuclear (and other baseload power) is methane extraction to produce synthetic natural gas which can be sold (at which point the rest of the efficiency issues are someone else's problem). But that's wouldn't make a good or efficient chemical battery because you would only get 16-40% of the power back after burning the natural gas. Most conversions between different forms of energy are less than 50% efficient which is why batteries are hard and why powerplants that make electricity for immediate consumption are preferred.
It can be, if cost is irrelevant to you.
They said grid scale batteries wouldn't work. They have now been demonstrated to work. We don't need to wait, we need to get on with this.
Citation required that we can see from orbit
That's nice - but at the end of the day, no nuclear vaporware is going to be more cost effective than wind and solar. So lets just go on skipping dangerous & expensive ways to heat water, and go with tech that poses no security or long term storage issues.
And the batteries necessary to store the power generated from wind and solar are going to come from where? If we made them with existing technology they could be seen from orbit. There is no known way of making that many batteries to cover all that wind and solar. So we back your solar and wind with natural gas which is 33x more potent a GHG than CO2 (luckily it only staying the in atmosphere about 1/10th as long but still does more damage while its here). Also, all of our calculations around natural gas pretty much assume no leaking of methane which you can bet isn't true.
Nuclear power is simply the release of energy stored over a very long time. As such it is simply adding heat to the environment. Solar power and wind power simply use heat that would be here anyway. Thus it is far better at preserving the environment than operating a nuke.
Wrong. It was stored when the supernova exploded pretty much instantaneously. Its just been stored for a very long time. And Solar and wind require batteries big enough to be seen from orbit. When you back solar and wind, you are also backing natural gas and pretty much embracing climate change. If you believe otherwise, you simply haven't done the math or understand how power is used. Both CA and German CO2 releases have gone up during the same period when wind and solar were being deployed in great number and electricity prices rose in those places over the same period. And this is only accelerating as we double down on these policies. Hopefully you realize how much damage your solar and wind policies are doing before its too late for all of us. If not, guess who will be blamed first?
Reprocessing is only useful for one thing, getting plutonium for weapons. To reduce waste it's not very useful, because it's a once through process ... MOX fuel waste is almost impossible to reprocess. So all it really does is waste a colossal amount of money and increase the risks of pollution.
To reduce waste, you need fast reactors.
False on all counts. Its true that you do do reprocessing when extracting plutonium (specifically Pu-239) and its true that fast reactors are better at breeding U-238 to Pu-239. But you can also reprocess and ignore the Pu or simply choose a fuel cycle that doesn't involve Pu. Why on earth do you want to breed U-238 in the first place? Its rare and produces pretty nasty actinides under neutron flux which means worse waste that can last for 10,000 years.
There is no reason you can't burn waste in a thermal spectrum reactor. Its just that the Pu-239 doesn't produce as much energy this way for certain neutron energies. It also produces less nasty waste this way. Fast reactors were tried, and tried again, and again, and again. They were tried with sodium coolant and they were tried with liquid metal. They are a bad idea (partially because they need more shielding) and we need to quit trying them as that's a big reason its hard to get away from LWRs. Because people keep pushing the ideas that didn't work and ignoring the ones that did, specifically MSRs which can't meltdown or release enough radiation to harm a population outside of the exclusion zone.
Nuclear pipe dreams:
LFTR: We're looking at an investment of about $40 billion and at least a 10 year Manhattan Project style gathering of the greatest physicists in the world to catch up to where the last research team left off in building a molten salt reactor. On top of that, we have to drill through the whole Thorium cycle to prove it out. Theoretically, it is very promising on paper. We'll have to see how well it proves out in reality. It has all the added benefits of being less toxic than the current Uranium cycle, with little to none of its byproducts that can be weaponized, and the end result material after the cycle is complete is only radioactive for a few hundred years, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of years in the Uranium cycle.
Nobody is asking for $40b to commercialize LFTR. The real problem is developing the commercial infrastructure to move it around. LEU (low enriched uranium) is cheap and has a commercial infrastructure (which is aging and crumbling), a spot market, and a set of regulations. Thorium has none of these things but also much less technical risk and problems. Moving LEU around is dangerous. Moving Thorium around is safe (its not water soluble or toxic to people) but the regulations don't make this distinction. There is also more than enough interested investment dollars to do all of this, but US regulations still prevent it. And part of that in the past was the those that invested in the U-Pu fuel cycle didn't want Thorium but now with the US nuclear industry in shambles, maybe we can finally make some progress.