11–20 of 182 posts
The calculations don't take into account growing energy usage. But anyone who understands exponential growth already knew that from looking at the title. EDIT: Title on the article is currently 'Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years'. I recall that that was also the HN title when I wrote this comment, but I could have got mixed up.
I'm not sure I want every country in the world to have the potential to build nuclear bombs...
This seems like a HUGE understatement. The calculations for the billion-year sustainability basically assume we have extracted every single bit of uranium from seawater. We have demonstrated extracting uranium from seawater [0] using plastic fibers with a compound that attracts the uranium+oxygen ions. But this would basically require pumping all of the worlds oceans through these fibers and continually extracting.
[0] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac....
It's amazing how gasoline itself was only used from 1892 to current time. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/gasoline/history-of-gaso... So imagine 150 years of gasoline usage help lead the world to be green and change to an energy source for "4 billion years." That's so cool, and puts alot of conversation about environmentalism into prospective.
In any case, I agree! None of these fuel systems were going to be long term sustainable, thought the economics involved have created an enormous incentive for certain firms and individuals to pretend so for as long as absolutely possible. Anyway, hopefully they have been enough of a technology bootstrap to enable the jump to ones that would be. Certainly no one in 1892 was going to be inventing a commercially viable nuclear reactor or solar panel with what was available at the time.
It's amazing how gasoline itself was only used from 1892 to current time. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/gasoline/history-of-gaso... So imagine 150 years of gasoline usage help lead the world to be green and change to an energy source for "4 billion years." That's so cool, and puts alot of conversation about environmentalism into prospective.
I'm not sure I totally understand your point here. How did 150 years of gasoline usage help lead the world to be green? And we as of yet have not changed to 100% nuclear and/or recyclable and don't have the technology yet to achieve that goal of nuclear energy for "4 billion years"
1) there are no working thorium reactors 2) breeder reactors are hazardous 3) uranium seawater extraction doesn't exist 4) if uranium seawater extraction were made to work it would use enormous amounts of energy not reflected in this. The depressing truth is this shows that current uranium oxide reserves and nuclear tech could supply global energy needs for only 6 years.
2) Not in any way that is irreducible.
3) wrong. https://www.machinedesign.com/materials/article/21836993/ura...
“Oh, that’s just proof of concept.” Yes, and even 5 grams is enough to disprove your claim it doesn’t exist. Reality is we won’t need it for an extremely long time, so why would anyone do more than proof of concept?
4) still on-net easily pays for itself energy-wise. Thinking otherwise usually shows you do not appreciate just how energy dense uranium is.
Belly aching that existing reserves are small, well duh. Demand is small. No one pays massive amounts of money to “prove” reserves when demand is small just to win an Internet argument. But uranium and thorium themselves are super common and in fact there’s more energy in fissionables in a random chunk of the Earth’s crust than there is thermal energy in a chunk of coal. The only thing depressing about what you said is that so many people buy into such poor logic.
Look, I’m not a nuclear bro. We will primarily decarbonize with renewables. But so many of these anti-nuclear arguments are terrible.
It's incredibly frusturating that this isn't part of the public discourse, where are the pro-nuclear candidates? Which parties are pro-nuclear?
We still have no solution a) where to put nuclear waste, and b) how to communicate to civilizations for the next 25000-50000 years what kind of waste that is.
In Germany, the ongoing search for a permanent waste repository is going on for decades now. Funnily enough, this taxpayer's money is never calculated into the total cost of operating nuclear plants. It only makes sense if you subsidize cost by taxes of current and future generations.
The calculations don't take into account growing energy usage. But anyone who understands exponential growth already knew that from looking at the title. EDIT: Title on the article is currently 'Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years'. I recall that that was also the HN title when I wrote this comment, but I could have got mixed up.
No form of exponential growth is sustainable; another name for it is "explosion". In practice, most things that look exponential end up as S-shaped / sigmoid curves
And much of the sun's output is yet untapped.
In Europe everyone knows that. Even the craziest of our "greens" who insist on complete domestic decommissioning know it. The reason a few European countries are shutting their nuclear power plants down isn't because they think they are unsustainable, but because they fear they may be targeted and attacked. They currently view them as the combination of a sitting duck and a powder keg.