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New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

theregister.co.uk

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Re: New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

#71

Post by bdunbar »

pjscott wrote: post #50
bdunbar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several. One is to dump it in the Mariana trench, let nature push it back down into the crust. If we're foresighted, we'll bombard a crater in the moon with it. It won't go anywhere, and if we need to get it back, there it is.

Shorter term (e.g. next century or so) there's also the easy option of just storing it somewhere safe and keeping an eye on it. There's so little of the waste, by volume, that it's not too hard to manage. The advantages of this scheme are: 1. It's easy. It's what we're doing right now. 2. It lets us recycle the slightly used fuel that comes out of our reactors. Nuclear waste is not useless. Waste from conventional re…

'Someplace safe' would be the Trinity site. It's already irradiated, owned by the government, and no one is ever going to live there.

I now this, you know this ... preaching to the choir.

Bombarding the moon would have the side effect of kick-starting a space program, however.

Re: New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

#72

Post by wazoox »

rbanffy wrote: post #52
baq wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think that the biggest problem is the potential for making places on our planet unsuitable to live in forever (for all practical purposes). people look at chernobyl and see a place that will be dangerous to all life long after they're dead. they don't want that to happen again. fukushima is potentially the next such place, albeit on a lower scale. the fact that radiation doesn't hurt doesn't help either. if our civ…

I don't think there are any Chernobyl-like reactors in operation today. Even if the design of reactors like ones at the Fukushima plant may be considered horribly flawed (they should be able to cool themselves passively, with no external power input whatsoever, after someone hits the scram button) the magnitude of the disaster is much smaller. An article posted here a couple days back mentions the hot zones around Fu…

> An article posted here a couple days back mentions the hot zones around Fukushima are 3x less radioactive than downtown Denver. This is something to think about.

Radiation is like cancer: one word to describe many different, related phenomenons. Denver radioactivity comes from radon, which is a relatively harmless gas as long as you allow it to disperse rapidly. OTOH pollution from nuclear accidents mainly comes from caesium which mimics calcium and get fixated on bones, thus provoking long, continuous, deep exposition to radiation.

Re: New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

#73

Post by ChuckMcM »

ars wrote: post #63
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24

Let's reverse the logic. Instead of talking about how much radioactive material we're pulling from the ocean, how much could we put in? Am I mistaken in saying that we could put back in every bit of radioactive material we'd use until 5000AD and only double the natural background radiation amount? I know the math isn't exact -- it's not a symmetry -- but on a rough-order-of-magnitude basis, is that a reasonable concl…

> but on a rough-order-of-magnitude basis, is that a reasonable conclusion? No. Uranium is barely radioactive. In contrast the waste from a power plant is very radioactive. Radioactivity is directly related to half life: The longer the half life, the less radioactive, and the reverse as well. Uranium 235 has a half life of close to a billion years, and 238 (the much more common kind) of nearly 5 billion years. So it'…

The DoE actually did extensive research into subduction encapsulation and while expensive (you are working at depths that crush most stuff we build up here) was technically quite acceptable (their design ended up essentially drilling what amounted to bore holes 5000' below the surface and dropping in waste from the top until its half full then covering it up and moving on. The advantage was that containment was expected to be lost but the material would diffuse into the mantle. In terms of cost though is was a couple of decimal orders of magnitude higher than Yucca Mt.

Why folks wont let engineers reprocess it and use a fast breeder to incinerate it is simply fear. (well and the fast that a fast breeder can also make stuff you don't want made)

Re: New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

#74

Post by ktizo »

tokenadult wrote: post #70

I thought that the Hacker News community was a lot more alert to avoiding upvoting linkbait articles like this. First of all, the entire main story point of the article is based on PRESS RELEASES, not on peer-reviewed articles published in good-quality scientific journals. Second, even if a statement like the premise of the article were published in a peer-reviewed article in a good-quality scientific journal, you wo…

The register can be good on tech issues, however it just goes completely mental if anyone mentions the words climate, nuclear, green or wikipedia anywhere within the editors earshot. Or if anyone shows Lewis a picture of some guns.

After a while I have decided that the most likely explanation for their behaviour is that they are mostly just trying to troll hippies and don't necessarily actually believe a lot of what they print. Trolling the readership is fairly common in the UK press anyway, the Mail having turned it into something of an art.

Re: New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

#75

Post by adimitrov »

crpatino wrote: post #38
chc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article isn't very specific on the specific vectors at work here, but from what the scientists did, it sounds like those butterflies were very close indeed and literally ate radioactive materials. So it may not be relevant to local parents unless their kids eat a lot of dirt right outside power plants.

> ... unless their kids eat a lot of dirt ... You don't have any kids yourself, I take. They are entropy machines! You never know what stupid (from adult perspective) thing they are going to do next. Besides, it may be nitpicking, but kids eating dirt right outside power plants would die horrible deaths within days. It is the lesser doses in the rear by populated areas whose effects may not be so well understood.

> Besides, it may be nitpicking, but kids eating dirt right outside power plants would die horrible deaths within days. It is the lesser doses in the rear by populated areas whose effects may not be so well understood.

Nah, it's not nitpicking. It's just totally wrong.

The radiation that upon ingestion kills you is alpha/beta radiation, i.e. particle radiation. This radiation doesn't otherwise cause harm (except in very large doses,) because it's a particle radiation that can't penetrate solid matter.

Nuclear reactors handle their fuel carefully (well, that's the default assumption. I don't know if all do,) and so, only gamma-radiation actually escapes the power plant, except in emergencies, of course. Gamma-radiation permeates through solid matter without too much difficulty (well, depending on the (amount of) matter, but the human body is basically translucent to gamma radiation. This is why X-Rays actually work.) and therefore it really doesn't matter whether the kids do ingest it or not.

Now, coal power plants on the other hand are an entirely different thing. Fly Ash, which coal power plants exude in large quantities contains Thorium and Uranium in rather high concentrations. Ingesting that might indeed be hazardous, though I don't know if you'd die a "horrible death" from the amounts typically in the vicinity (around 1 mile or so) of coal power plants.

Fun fact: coal power plants actually cause more radiation pollution to their surroundings than nuclear power plants (during normal operation.)

EDIT: I was wrong, nuclear power plants also emit alpha and beta radiation, as well as gamma, neutron, neutrino and positron radiation and other stuff. But apparently in such small quantities that I really can't imagine anyone dying from eating the soil around a nuclear power plant. Proof: this is a German AKW (Atomkraftwerk, nuclear power plant) in Phillipsburg. Notice how it is entirely surrounded with fields where crops is grown? People and animals eat all this stuff. http://goo.gl/maps/jydz1 Actually, Biblis (another AKW) is even more impressive: http://goo.gl/maps/LP1Hi

Re: New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

#76

Post by ars »

mrinterweb wrote: post #23
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #5

I really thought this was going to be about Thorium. Surprise - its about extracting Uranium from seawater.

I can not figure out why more effort is not put into thorium nuclear technology research. The only reason I have heard why thorium is not being considered is because it is not weaponizable. Are there any other reasons why thorium based nuclear fission is not being pursued as an energy source?

> Are there any other reasons why thorium based nuclear fission is not being pursued as an energy source?

Mainly because we don't need it. It's got some advantages, sure, but not enough of them to make it worthwhile to spend on the money on it.

Re: New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

#77

Post by nickik »

gliese1337 wrote: post #29
aidenn0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but growth sucks. Assuming 3000 years in the article means what you think it means, consider exponential and linear growth: If energy usage doubles every 30 years (pulled that out of my ass, it's not likely the trend but divides nice into 3000) then it will last us less than 200 years If energy usage grows linearly increasing by the current amount every 30 years (so in 2042 we are using double, and 2072 we are u…

And in any case, 3000 years is still finite. There will come a time, if we don't go extinct or experience the rapture, when nuclear fuel will run out, and we'll have to use renewables anyway. Fortunately, the sun puts out a rather large amount of power, and even 200 years is a pretty good amount of time for figuring out how to capture it better.

The question really is if going to something 'harder' now is worth while. We do something more expensive (and have large oppertunity cost) to avoid problem we will only really have in 200 years.

If you look at the change of technology in the last 100 years you can only assume how small this problem will be then. I mean in 200 years using solar energy will possibly be cheaper then fossil fuel, and if it is not we will be better equiped to solve the problem then.

I do not want to say that we should not keep working in direction of renewable energy but I think it is a valid question.

Re: New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

#79

Post by ericd »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #73
ars wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but on a rough-order-of-magnitude basis, is that a reasonable conclusion? No. Uranium is barely radioactive. In contrast the waste from a power plant is very radioactive. Radioactivity is directly related to half life: The longer the half life, the less radioactive, and the reverse as well. Uranium 235 has a half life of close to a billion years, and 238 (the much more common kind) of nearly 5 billion years. So it'…

The DoE actually did extensive research into subduction encapsulation and while expensive (you are working at depths that crush most stuff we build up here) was technically quite acceptable (their design ended up essentially drilling what amounted to bore holes 5000' below the surface and dropping in waste from the top until its half full then covering it up and moving on. The advantage was that containment was expec…

So we'd essentially need a very tightly controlled fast breeder reactor or 20 that handle the world's less pleasant nuclear byproducts? It seems that if the breeder reactor is cohabitated with the reprocessing facility, most of the danger would be nullified (I imagine that transport is the riskiest part). Or perhaps people simply don't want those things to exist in concentrated form, ever, to eliminate the risk of someone getting their hands on it.

Re: New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

#80

Post by pstuart »

ars wrote: post #76
mrinterweb wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can not figure out why more effort is not put into thorium nuclear technology research. The only reason I have heard why thorium is not being considered is because it is not weaponizable. Are there any other reasons why thorium based nuclear fission is not being pursued as an energy source?

> Are there any other reasons why thorium based nuclear fission is not being pursued as an energy source? Mainly because we don't need it. It's got some advantages, sure, but not enough of them to make it worthwhile to spend on the money on it.

Its proponents seem to think that it would be significantly cheaper and safer [citation needed], which sounds worthwhile.

Could briefly expound upon your reasoning?

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