I’m gonna say it!
thorium
They are Scary if you don’t do any research into it to find out that the amount of scare mongering in the world right now is unjust.
The biggest, best argument against nuclear energy is the limited fuel supply.
If the world replaced base load power with nuclear (as a nuclear plus solar plus wind energy mix) we would only have enough uranium for something like 50 years
The waste storage problem isn’t worth it for so little time, but OTOH we need to solve the storage problem anyway, and 50 years of CO2 clean power would be useful for aiding decarbonising the energy supply
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spent fuel can be recycled and it isn’t a terrible complex process to do so
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even if we didn’t recycle spent fuel there’s far more than 50 years worth left on land
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even if we ran out of land sources spent fuel there’s 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in the ocean
- Doesn’t that require breeder reactors? They’re a nuclear proliferation risk, so can’t really be allowed in untrusted countries
- I think the 50 year number excludes resources that are unavailable, for example an enormous uranium deposit in Australia, which cannot be extracted because the indigenous owners of the land have traditions about the area which make it untouchable
- Extracting elements from sea water is stupidly expensive
- No, not breeders, but reprocessing. There is still a lot of usable fuel left in an “expended” fuel cell, just not in enough concentration.
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no, just simple reprocessing. Breeder reactors are even better and can generate fuel from u-238, but wouldn’t be necessary for several centuries at least
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I think the 50 year number comes from anti nuclear activists, there’s about 8 million tons of uranium out there only considering proven reserves, if we restarted prospecting we could find more
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if you’re desalinating anyways and reprocessing spent fuel you don’t need much, the average nuclear plant needs 27 tons per year per 1000 MW of capacity, and 95% of that can be recycled without breeder reactors
Yes, because energy companies would never cheap out on safety for the sake of profit.
NAVSEA’s safety record is 100% due to explicit, institutional anal-retentiveness. Rickover was a power tripping dick, but God damn was he effective. PG&E would shut down if they had to get ORSE’d
So, are those small modular reactors in the room with us now?
I’m not certain what you mean by that but if you are asking how small they would be and where they would be placed the normal recommendation would be you would want a warehouse sized facility with an Olympic sized swimming pool to submerse a standard container sized reactor. You would probably house one to three reactors per facility. You would probably want an exclusion zone of 1 mi. Minimum. Depending on the model a single reactor would be able to power roughly 50,000 to 100,000 homes. Ideally you would build one of these 20 miles from a city. Plug in the SMRs and after 15 to 20 years unplug them and replace with newer models ship them off to a long-term storage facility and eventually process them for fuel once a we have functional thorium salt reactors at scale.
I don’t even know how to argue with that viewpoint. Are they denying that we have small modular reactors what? It’s a technology that’s been employed since the '50s. I literally have a link at the top of the post.
