Planned Nuclear Reactors Will Destroy Atomic Waste 344
separsons writes "A group of French scientists are developing a nuclear reactor that burns up actinides — highly radioactive uranium isotopes. They estimate that 'the volume of high-level nuclear waste produced by all of France’s 58 reactors over the past 40 years could fit in one Olympic-size swimming pool.' And they're not the only ones trying to eliminate atomic waste: Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin are working on a fusion-fission reactor. The reactor destroys waste by firing streams of neutrons at it, reducing atomic waste by up to 99 percent!"
Doesn't matter (Score:2, Insightful)
Yea and what about that 1% (Score:2, Insightful)
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Same thing as every other steam turbine power plant - a water source to act as the heat dump.
(I think I may have missed your point)
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appose [thefreedictionary.com]
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The anti-nuclear group will always come up with something to deter nuclear plants from taking off.
Sure, but there are detractors for almost all ideas, good and bad. There are people who hate animal testing. We're still going to continue making sure medicines are safe though. Animal testing is one of the only real ways to do that, like it or not. Furthermore, good ideas don't implement themselves even when there's not vague misgivings about them, as there is with nuclear power. Most people don't know why chernobyl happened, they think it's inherent to nuclear power. That could be changed, it would
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Most people do not hate animal testing, just unnecessary cruelty and waste. Destroying animals that are no danger to others and would make suitable pets is one example. Another is not sharing data properly so many different labs conduct the same tests on similar animals. Even worse are tests that seem to serve no purpose, for instance dripping known irritants into the eyes of rabbits. When animal testing is done in a rational and ethical manner few would oppose it.
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Destroying animals that are no danger to others and would make suitable pets is one example.
It's a liability issue. My S.O. is taking a biotech course, and has learned that most animals in studies are euthanized as a matter of course. The reason is apparently the fear of lawsuits should the animal ever do anything and it being blamed on whatever treatments they gave it. This made her very sad. It sounds retarded and lazy to me. Is it not possible to sign a waiver that says "This animal was once treated
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
And the pro-nuclear group will always have a reason why nuclear plants are never a danger, any accident would never happen again, and nuclear waste is absolutely no problem because waste from burning coal is more radioactive, so that means concentrated nuclear waste has to be safer than diffuse coal plant waste, just like a glass of arsenic is safer to drink than a glass of sea water because there's more arsenic in the ocean than in a glass of arsenic. Strawmen are fun on both sides!
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X is dangerous. Y is more dangerous than X. Therefore X is not dangerous.
That's a logical fallacy known formally as "stupidity."
Scientific discussions in Texas?!? (Score:3, Funny)
Pardon me if I wait for a few non-Texas sources on scientific topics.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
The last time a reactor like this came up, then President Bill Clinton signed the bill killing at, after Senator John Kerry led the charge to end the program. Read the wikipedia article on the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). Oh, and that was 1994.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
And the times before that it was Reagan and Bush Sr. who killed the breeder reactor research project. And before that is was Carter. This is not a partisan issue, both parties are equally retarded in respect to nuclear power.
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Carter is the stupidest of them all, because he had the education to at least know he was making a retarded decision.
He only took away the sit-down money (Score:5, Interesting)
He did nothing at all to stop nuclear succeeding on it's own merits instead of on taxpayer funded life support. The US nuclear industry has done nothing much since then apart from spend a lot of money on PR to get their free gift from the taxpayers back. Other places have actually put some work in and produced far more viable efforts - hence the established USA civilian nuclear industry being twenty years behind South Africa, China and India. The only real exeption is Japanese technology brought in to a US company that had otherwise been sitting around waiting for the handout for twenty years.
Startups and imports will bury them, and should have done it long ago.
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Carter banned the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. He knew reprocessing was a good idea (the French do it right now, to great effect), but he did it anyways for political reasons.
Reality makes things difficult at times (Score:5, Informative)
Spend a bit of time thinking about the concept of handling this material to reprocess it. Spent fuel rods are highly radioactive so everything you have to do with them has to be done remotely - you can't walk up to one with an angle grinder. Also the stuff is quite strong mechanically so it's a fairly major effort to cut it into small enough parts to reprocess.
It's a hell of a lot more expensive than digging up new Uranium, Carter and everyone who advised him on nuclear matters knew that. It made it a cheap bargaining chip for a treaty that has now long expired.
A few typos above (Score:3, Informative)
Superpheonix was supposed to solve it all but it just threw up more problems so a different approach is needed. There's been some work done since then but it's not the solved "clean, too cheap to meter" thing that makes any commerical sense yet - it's a very messy and dangerous industrial pro
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"Succeed on its own merits..." Boy, that's a laugh.
The US nuclear industry has lagged behind because for the past 50 years, the regulatory and political environment allowed anti-nuclear activists to delay the completion of plants indefinitely. You can't make a profit from a power plant without actually producing power; the anti-nuclear groups simply stalled the completion of plants until the companies gave up on the existing projects and walked away. Nobody tried to start new projects because they weren'
Re:He only took away the sit-down money (Score:4, Insightful)
The US nuclear industry has lagged behind because for the past 50 years, the regulatory and political environment allowed anti-nuclear activists to delay the completion of plants indefinitely.
Oh the hyperbole. 50 years ago (53 for you nitpickers) Shippingport came online. You know, "the first fully civilian nuclear reactor." Nuclear power industry was just starting to appear, and the "regulatory and political environment" was anything but inimical to it. Rather gung-ho, in fact.
The past 30 years instead of 50? Probably. But not without good reason. An industry mired in secrecy and obfuscation stemming from its military origins, where screw-ups can happen and are serious -- potentially disastrous -- if they do, does not inspire confidence. Neither does pooh-poohing genuine concerns. "Waste? Oh, that's easy, we'll just reprocess it!" Sure. Hanford did that for years. Recovered tons of weapons fuel, ended up with additional megatons of extremely nasty waste. (Ditto Sellafield in the UK and La Hague in France.) There are better ways to do it for civilian use, and actinide burners may be one of them, which is why they should be built and studied; but they -- and all other things nuclear -- should not be presented as a silver bullet, in an arrogant and condescending tone.
Some may get an impression that I am too opposed to nuclear power. Not in the least. IMO, nuclear is the only sufficiently plentiful energy supply which we can comfortably use for the next thousand years, and is not geographically or otherwise limited like solar or wind. But it is not without risks, and while those risks should not be overstated (like the shrillest environmentalists do), they should not be swept under the carpet, either.
Will corporation making promise guarantee it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Will the corporation trying to sell this reactor design guarantee it's promises will be backed up with real cash?
Fuck NO! Not one has. Not one corporation has stood behind a reactor it built through decommissioning.
Every damn one of these power utilities that has built a nuclear reactor has abandoned the reactors along with and the cost for decommissioning the reactors on the US Federal Government.
Re:Will corporation making promise guarantee it? (Score:4, Informative)
Companies which run plants pay a small portion of their income over the life of the plant to the federal government to pay for the eventual decommissioning costs.
So no.
They have not just walked off and left all the cost to the federal government.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
"I guess we don't have you to thank for civil rights, women's rights and now healthcare. I mean, why bother ?"
Those are emotional issues, which attract the same sort of emotional activists who HATE nuclear power. Their particular flavor of idealistic outlook is not pro-technology.
Come up with something that uses solar, ponies, or solar ponies and they might bite.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
Come up with something that uses solar, ponies, or solar ponies and they might bite.
And then you'll have the animal right activists complaining.
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Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Funny)
Come up with something that uses solar, ponies, or solar ponies and they might bite.
Your solar ponies are an affront to God, a crime against Nature, and completely Awesome. Please make more!
And for the record, they definitely bite.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Funny)
Solar *is* nuclear power. The reactor is just rather... large.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Funny)
And unlicensed, we must shut it down ASAP!
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I'm sending shitloads of free energy your way every day...why the fuck are you wasting it?"
Because nobody's making a shitload of money with it. When they invent a way to cover the sun and charge you for sunlight, solar will be a success!
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Funny)
"By the way, I'm sending shitloads of free energy your way every day...why the fuck are you wasting it?"
You think the sun's trying to help us? Ha! The sun's been trying to murder us for as long as we've been around, but the stupid ozone layer and magnetosphere keep getting in the way!
You realize you're basically teasing it right? It's like you're wearing a bulletproof vest that turns impacts into electricity for your iphone, and you're telling the guy in the machinegun turret "Hey thanks for the free kinetic energy!"
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Solar-thermic power plants? Helooohooo?? ;)
Water, glass, steel, aluminium, desert wasteland, perhaps some ceramics, DONE!
Cheap as shit, simple design, completely recyclable, out of the most abundant resources, and shitloads of free energy from the sun.
If someone doesn’t like that, he’s not an activist, but mentally insane. ^^
If you want to use them at night, create liquid hydrogen or a similar clean fuel. With the amount of power that the sun delivers, it doesn’t matter much that that is a
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Re:Doesn't matter (Score:4, Interesting)
You're wrong (sorry). As humans we tend to have a horrible idea of how things scale outside of our instinctive narrow range. The energy density of a solar-thermal plant is indeed considerably less than a coal plant - but not that low, and plenty for all but truly heavy industry (and that's what nuclear is for) once you understand the engineering involved. Also, it's not just watts:area of the plant, it's watts:area:cost where cost is capital plus maintenance and supply, and area is plant plus its logistics chain.
Coal plants have coal mines, heavy road/rail infrastructure to transport fuel and waste, emit large quantities of pollution (not just at the plant but also at the mines and along the transport routes, and not just heavy metals but also more radioactives by mass per watt than nuclear plants), high maintenance costs, high worker casualties, etcetera.
Solar-thermal plants have the sun, light road/rail infrastructure to transport workers, emit no pollution, low maintenance costs, low worker casualties, etcetera. The use of heat storage/recycling (e.g. molten salt tanks) allows night-time power distribution.
Or to put it another way - sure, you need orders of magnitude more surface area for solar-thermal than coal - but we've got that available, and while your capital costs work out higher your ongoing costs are orders of magnitude less to your civilisation as a whole.
Coal: Quicker, easier, more seductive. But you end up ugly and alone.
emotional inertia (Score:4, Interesting)
Hm. I think the two examples you gave mostly substantiate my understanding of the problem with the anti-nuclear mentality.
"...even after they were informed of the right answer, they still didn't change their opinions..." This is the crux. Despite revised knowledge, there's some kind of emotional resistance to nuclear. The emotional resistance started as fear of catastrophe which was not undone by learning different. The fear remained regardless of knowledge change. Emotions don't necessarily respond to logic/information. (Which you see in every online debate.)
Emotional inertia that happens all the time. Mostly it causes willful ignorance and confirmation bias, but I guess even a few weeks of education won't necessarily overcome it.
What needs doing is figuring out how that inertia works. Step 3, profit. Anyone understand psychology well enough that they can give pointers on research starting points for this issue?
Do not fear nuclear power (Score:2)
This is a good start (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is a good start (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is a good start (Score:5, Insightful)
No one ever mentions the other possible solution: Use less energy.
That's because it isn't a solution. Unless you're also going to somehow make there be fewer people, and have them do less, with fewer luxuries like sanitation and refrigeration, it won't work. Energy powers civilization. Hybrid cars, taking the train, fluorescent lighting, and turning the thermostat down to 68F/20C in the winter is not going to make a fart in a thunderstorm worth of difference where it really matters. A ridiculously optimistic projection would have it reduce our dependence on coal from 60% to 40%. That doesn't solve the problem, it just puts it off a little longer. Reducing power use enough to where we can all live on fluffy bunny wind generators and happy little solar panels essentially requires us to throw away the very technological pyramid which supports the manufacture those very same windmills and panels. There simply isn't enough "waste" to make conservation a workable plan for fulfilling our future energy needs.
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That's the dirty little secret a lot of green leaders don't mention; they believe a severe population reduction is inevitable, sometimes even necessary.
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citation?
Or you just making this shit up?
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Re:This is a good start (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it a little dirty secret ? It is pretty evident, isn't it ? If the population is smaller, everyone has a bigger part of the global cake.
Re:This is a good start (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This is a good start (Score:5, Insightful)
No, if we can cut energy use by 30% (try it sometime, by the way), then that's 30% more coal plants we can shut down after we build some nuclear plants.
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Or you could just build that many more Nukes. Is there some sort of energy generation cap I don't know about?
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Yellowcake is one of the smallest costs involved in nuclear power plants. If your plant is a reprocessing plant, it's even smaller. With a sufficiently advanced plant (and by "sufficiently advanced" I mean "we know how to build them, we just haven't done it yet thanks to politics") it's nearly economically feasible to extract uranium fuel straight out of seawater, which has enough reserves dissolved in it to last for literally tens of millions of years.
That's a conservative estimate.
Nuclear fuel is not limi
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is not going to make a fart in a thunderstorm worth of difference where it really matters. A ridiculously optimistic projection would have it reduce our dependence on coal from 60% to 40%
60% to 40% is "a far in a thunderstorm"? That actually sounds like an enormous amount to me. Even half that is damn good.
The error you make is thinking there's some magic bullet that's going to solve our energy problems. The solution is probably about 10-20 different things. Efficiency is one of them.
Re:This is a good start (Score:5, Informative)
The Japanese happen to use roughly half the energy per capita as the US. The same with Denmark, Switzerland, Germany and several other developed, high tech societies all use maybe 40-50% less energy per person as the US. How you can honestly say there's not much that can be done is baffling.
Re:This is a good start (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is a good start (Score:4, Informative)
Smaller power plants that generate more power with less fuel and waste
AFAIK, bigger power plants are more efficient than small ones.
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Apparently it takes the humidity out of the air.
Not helping (Score:3, Insightful)
Educating, not sensationalizing, is what the nuclear industry needs. Or at least not exclamation marks.
Alas, I can can guarantee you that 1: it will take another decade minimum of legal wrangling to get large-scale stuff like this in the works
2: This type of research in general is old news. It's still viable, but from reading the summary (I'm lazy) it doesn't seem to be anything new that I haven't heard of before.
P.S. I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough to be one who does the educating. (Oh wait, I don't need credentials to educate on the internet, do I? :P )
Converts to energy? Burns? Or fissions? (Score:4, Funny)
Destroy as in convert matter to energy?
Wait, so it's a chemical reaction (rapid oxidation)?
Or is this fission, where they convert the actinides into other less-dangerous elements via fission?
Re:Converts to energy? Burns? Or fissions? (Score:4, Funny)
Destroy as in convert matter to energy?
That is, broadly speaking, the way that nuclear fission works. Got it in one.
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That is, broadly speaking, the way that nuclear fission works.
That's also (speaking just as broadly) how combustion works. What a coincidence.
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The terms burn, burning, ignite, etc., are frequently used in the nuclear community for nuclear reactions as an analogy to chemical reactions.
Re:Converts to energy? Burns? Or fissions? (Score:5, Informative)
It's fission. They are fissioning minor actinides which normally do not completely fission. This needs a reactor with improved neutron economy (such as a fast reactor), because these MAs will need more than one neutron per atom to fission (usually they will first capture one more neutrons (transmuting in the process) before fissioning).
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Or is this fission, where they convert the actinides into other less-dangerous elements via fission?
It's not really so much induced fission as in a normal reactor, it's that you push the isotopes past the point where they are long term active into really unstable ones. It's like a fast breeder reactor in reverse. Since they are French, they are probably talking about using a magnetic confined fusion reactor [wikipedia.org] as the neutron source.
The 'burn up' analogy isn't bad really. Partially burnt products of normal combustion like soot and carbon monoxide are toxic. Add more oxygen and heat, and the problem goes away
Someone informed here? (Score:2)
Re:Someone informed here? (Score:5, Informative)
After reprocessing you don't just pour the waste into storage tanks, you want to stabilize it first. There's two ways to do this. You either mix it with glass and cast it into a stable solid, or you separate it into noble metals and other waste products, the latter of which is usually turned into a ceramic.
Because the amount of material you need to add to the waste to stabilize it can vary depending on the wastes' exact composition ( in particular how much heat it generates ) it's not really possible to accurately know the final waste volume before you've worked out the entire process.
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Too early for April fools (Score:5, Funny)
French Scientists?
A university in Texas?
I think you tried a little too hard on that one. Less is more.
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shrugs, they elected a gay mayor in Houston. Sometimes people can surprise you.
LFTR (Score:5, Interesting)
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nice link, thanks!
So I heard! (Score:4, Informative)
Watch this [ted.com]
You might not like Gates because of Windows, but if you're a fan of nuclear power this might stop your assassination attempt.
The problem?? (Score:2)
After 99% of the waste is eliminated, the 1% left is the pure blood of Cthulhu ready to make mankind wilt in horror??
Re:The problem?? (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite. Nuclear waste is mostly made up of un-burnt uranium. The long-lived stuff is mainly even heavier elements than uranium, such as plutonium, americium and neptunium. What these new processes do is to recycle the heavy elements like uranium and plutonium from the waste so that it is all burnt. Thus while you still get the same amount of fission fragments per kilowatt hour of electricity, you don't get any of the heavier stuff mixed into it.
There are three huge benefits to this.
a) The waste fits in a much smaller volume
b) You can get almost 100 times as much energy from the same amount of uranium
c) The resulting waste decays to safe levels within a few hundred years as opposed to many thousands of years.
Since we can easily construct structures that can last a few hundred years, and because the waste volume is so much smaller, this technology would essentially solve the nuclear waste problem. The improved utilization of uranium also makes sure that the fuel will last for any foreseeable future.
The snag is that so far all reactors of this type has been prohibitively expensive compared to existing technology, and there are concerns about how to implement the recycling step in a manner that makes it possible for inspectors to monitor the process to ensure no plutonium is diverted for weapons use.
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Burnt? No argument with the rest of what you said, but "burnt?!?" As a geek, I deeply resent this dumbing down of the science.
My main complaint about nuclear power has always been that people weren't willing to spend the money to do it right. This would be a step in the right direction, but there are so many other necessary steps...
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I'd like to see complete studies of this before jumping on the bandwagon.
For example, all the neutrons don't nicely run into uranium atoms and make the bad stuff disappear - there will be fallout from this process (so to speak), there will be other bad byproducts created, and there will be byproducts of the normal fission process that are not "made to dissappear" by this new magic (as portrayed) process.
Does anyone have a link to a study conducted over several weeks/months/years analyzing all the products o
Re:The problem?? (Score:5, Informative)
Do a google search on LFTR, a Liquid Fluoridic Thorium Reactor. A LFTR does the same thing as described: It consumes 99 percent of its waste or, even better, you can feed it existing nuclear waste and it will happily consume most of it while generating electrical energy. Check this Youtube video out (16 minutes) Thorium LFTR described in 16 minutes [youtube.com]
Also this forum is, in a sense, developing the "open source reactor" by its forum members Click Here [energyfromthorium.com]
BTM
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Some argue that typical waste contains way to much Plutonium 240 along with the Plutonium 239 (Pu-239 is what Plutonium bombs use) for making bombs out of it. Pu-240 causes the would-be bomb to pre-detonate. So yes, it explodes, but only in a small area. It's the so-called fizzle. And Pu-239, being chemically identical to Pu-240 presents a problem of separation, in the same way that it's hard to enrich uranium without gas diffusion or centrifuge techniques.
clean nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
Clean nuclear is far more realistic than the fantasy that is clean coal.
Re:clean nuclear == Thorium (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone remember this article?
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/01/02/1330245/Thorium-the-Next-Nuclear-Fuel [slashdot.org]
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I searched for thorium in the comments and found only your post. So that's two people.
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Right, the fantasy of the extractive industries. Nobody who's interested in clean energy thinks that clean coal is anything other than a fantasy. Unfortunately, they have bigger PR machines than we do.
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A nuclear reactor consuming atomic waste? How perverse!
the classics are the best... (Score:2)
http://www.northernsun.com/n/s/0016.html [northernsun.com]
Mutants for Nuclear Power!
*)
Greenpeace (Score:2)
Time to go upstairs and find the nearest Greenpeace doom-sayer (I work on a Uni campus, there's usually 2-3 around trying to snag them some suckers) and hand them a print out of this. Lately they've been deriding Obama's nuclear power policy.
Of course they'd probably call me a tree killer, you can't ever win with them.
See? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of us have been saying for decades that another way to say "nuclear waste" is "nuclear fuel." The current view of "spent" fuel is akin to refining crude oil to make gasoline and then having to store all the waste diesel, fuel oil and other petroleum byproducts until the end of time.
Re:See? (Score:4, Funny)
The current view of "spent" fuel is akin to refining crude oil to make gasoline and then having to store all the waste diesel, fuel oil and other petroleum byproducts until the end of time.
So to make sure I have this car analogy right... you're saying that these new reactors are like a Volkswagen Jetta?
Re:See? (Score:5, Interesting)
But you've been completely wrong, it's exactly like calling what you excrete food. While there is plenty of energy that can be recovered from that it takes a lot of work or something else with a completely different digestive system.
The whole reason people have been saying for years that Uranium is running out is only because ore of very high purity was running out - there was a lot of other stuff but it was a lot more expensive to turn it into fuel.
One of the things about some newer designs is they are nowhere near as fussy about their fuel, so a shortage of high purity Uranium ore doesn't matter to them, or they can use retired or stockpiled weapon material, or even some kinds of waste. It's a lot better than the reprocessing attempts by the French over the last thirty years that resulted in fuel a lot more expensive than making new fuel from ore in the first place - use something that can use the waste without so much reprocessing instead.
Breeder reactor comparison (Score:2)
Yeah, sure, for about a millisecond... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why do the nuclear industry always trot out these cutesy metaphors? They're so easy to pick fun of that even people who are reasonably friendly toward the industry can't resist. I mean, yes, it would all fit into an Olympic swimming pool. For about a millisecond. Then it would go critical, and your swimming pool would be an area
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No, it wouldn't. However, well done for acting as a perfect example of the idiotic "OH GOD WONT SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN WE CAN'T HAVE TEH NUCULAR!" response. I hope that was your intention?
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I mean, yes, it would all fit into an Olympic swimming pool. For about a millisecond. Then it would go critical, and your swimming pool would be an area the size of texas covered in a very thin layer of radioactive waste, plus a big glass pit in the middle.
But for that millisecond, you'd have the most awesomely radical Olympic swim meet in the history of mankind.
The anti-nukers still have a fall back position (Score:2)
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So we sell it to the Chinese who can make kids toys out of it, problem solved.
Dupe (Score:2)
Olypic swimming pool (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Olypic swimming pool (Score:5, Informative)
I'm kind of pro-nuclear power, but ... (Score:3, Interesting)
... WTF are these guys smoking?
Actinides aren't the big problem as far as nuclear waste is concerned - fission products are. Especially the long-lived ones that are very mobile in the environment, easy to incorporate (iodine, cesium, strontium) and basically impossible to separate from the rest of the waste chemically (unlike actinides). Heck, many actinides are actually nuclear fuel or could be turned into nuclear fuel. Fission products are just nasty, deadly poisons.
That's why I'd rather spend more on researching fusion power - you'll still end up with some radioactive waste, but you have some degree of control over its composition and you will not create any of the problematic isotopes mentioned above.
Re:and yet (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see a problem with diversifying. I assume we'll run out of fissionable material at some date, and if solar can help slow that down, then bring it on.
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indians are working hard on thorium cycle stuff. they figure enough thorium for 155k years. nice deals with the russian, so we can see some international interest here.
a useful question about solar installations is whether they are just batteries
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Enough energy falls on the surface of the earth from the sun every day to power the US for a year - capturing and harnessing that energy is the tricky part. Even if you can only grab a small part of that energy, it is still more than "adept" as powering much more than just calculators.
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If you ask me, I think it was very irresponsible of them to put all of that material in a swimming pool. They are lucky they didn't suffer a massive criticality accident. [wikipedia.org]
BTM