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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

#101

Post by DanielBMarkham »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #97
InclinedPlane wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many nuclear power plants of any sort has the US build in the last 4 decades? That's the reason why it's hard to get the concept of reprocessing nuclear fuel off the ground.

Agreed, I've always wondered how it would fair from a regulatory perspective if such a thing was positioned as a 'nuclear waste disposal system', probably not much better.

What I'd like to know is how come so many informed people, from all political sides, understand and want nuclear power, yet still we seem unable to endorse it?

This is simple math. Worried about energy? For the price of the stimulus you could give nuclear energy production a huge kick in the ass, make electricity cheaper for electric cars, and still get the stimulus you wanted.

Politics. Meh.

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

#102

Post by ars »

pstuart wrote: post #80
ars wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I agree - it probably would be significantly cheaper and safer.

But it will also cost a lot of money to develop, and even though it's safer, it's still nuclear, i.e. opposition to it will be unchanged. The worst is some people are demanding that they be installed with full containment domes, which wipes out any cost savings.

Anyone who wants to actually install one will probably be stymied, so no one wants to spend the money to develop something they can't use. And especially not if it costs the same as a regular reactor.

Instead people just stick with the tried and true since it minimizes risk of failure.

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

#103

Post by ars »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #101
ChuckMcM wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I've always wondered how it would fair from a regulatory perspective if such a thing was positioned as a 'nuclear waste disposal system', probably not much better.

What I'd like to know is how come so many informed people, from all political sides, understand and want nuclear power, yet still we seem unable to endorse it? This is simple math. Worried about energy? For the price of the stimulus you could give nuclear energy production a huge kick in the ass, make electricity cheaper for electric cars, and still get the stimulus you wanted. Politics. Meh.

> yet still we seem unable to endorse it?

It's mostly financial. It's more expensive than alternatives. So unless you have someone "pushing" it, no one will install any.

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

#104

Post by rbanffy »

DennisP wrote: post #94
rbanffy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume if you can extract Uranium from sea water, you are very close to extract Thorium. In any case, we are all set up to use Uranium and Thorium still require a lot of R&D, politics and safety regulation before we can start generating commercial power with it.

Thorium isn't soluble in water. (But there's enough thorium on land to last us for millennia, if we ran all of civilization on it at our present usage rate.)

Some salts are soluble in water:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solubility_table

But I agree - for sea water extraction to be practical, we would need to more or less exhaust the cheaper supplies. I suspect that, even if our consumption continues to grow at the present curve, if we don't figure out other ways to power civilization by the time we exhaust Uranium and Thorium, we really deserve to run our of fuel...

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

#105

Post by rbanffy »

maxerickson wrote: post #96
rbanffy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why not check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK There have been extensive (safety oriented) modifications to the design since the Chernobyl incident: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf31.html The second article says the modified reactors account for almost 50% of Russia's nuclear power generation.

That's the point - the retrofitted reactors are much safer than the original design. Even if 10 are still in operation, they are much safer (and better staffed).

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

#106

Post by ericd »

ars wrote: post #103
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd like to know is how come so many informed people, from all political sides, understand and want nuclear power, yet still we seem unable to endorse it? This is simple math. Worried about energy? For the price of the stimulus you could give nuclear energy production a huge kick in the ass, make electricity cheaper for electric cars, and still get the stimulus you wanted. Politics. Meh.

> yet still we seem unable to endorse it? It's mostly financial. It's more expensive than alternatives. So unless you have someone "pushing" it, no one will install any.

I think reprocessing specifically is illegal, which means there's a pretty huge volume of high-grade waste to dispose of by sealing it in future-proof (expensive/limited) containment. If we repealed that ban and educated people about the realistic relative benefits of nuclear, I think it'd be a lot easier to sell the idea of a scale-up. I'm not really sure how we could educate everyone on the subject, though, without it getting drowned in noise.

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

#107

Post by maxerickson »

rbanffy wrote: post #105
maxerickson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK There have been extensive (safety oriented) modifications to the design since the Chernobyl incident: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf31.html The second article says the modified reactors account for almost 50% of Russia's nuclear power generation.

That's the point - the retrofitted reactors are much safer than the original design. Even if 10 are still in operation, they are much safer (and better staffed).

I took "Chernobyl like" to mean "of the same design family".

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

#108

Post by ericd »

DennisP wrote: post #91
ericd wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

Argonne National Laboratory tested a cohabited breeder called the Integral Fast Reactor. The reprocessing would happen on-site, using a process similar to electrolysis which never separates plutonium from the other transuranics. The material would never be in a form usable for bombs, and making it bomb-ready would be more difficult than just enriching uranium. But the fast neutrons in the reactor would easily burn up…

Oh nice, thanks for all the info. Most of mine on the subject comes from the book form of this: http://www.withouthotair.com/

I was thinking that the bigger problem that would be bandied about about reprocessing would be with having the middle-lifetime contaminant isotopes concentrated in one place, for convenient pilfering and then manufacturing of a dirty bomb. Plutonium is obviously a worry as well, though.

Would it make sense to build those in conjunction with every nuclear reactor? (Would one reactor create enough waste for that other reactor to be worth building vs. dealing with shipping to a central location)

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

#110

Post by adimitrov »

anigbrowl wrote: post #98
adimitrov wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 v…

That's great, but in this case we're discussing the environment around the Fukushima nuclear plant, where we have a distinctly abnormal radiological environment. The teratological damage we have observed in butterfly populations around that area is not necessarily going to show up in the human population or food chain, but I find it easy to see why people would lose sleep over the possibility: it is widely acknowledg…

I'm not a nuclear advocate, though. And, I was responding to the GP, who distinctly mentioned nuclear power plants, plural, so not Fukushima in particular. I wouldn't want to eat anything that has been in a ten-mile radius around Fukushima. Not because it's likely going to cause me any harm, just… you know… to be safe.
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