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Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

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Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#181
post #178
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sensitive enough that 0.5% land use change would do that?

I don't remember the exact numbers from studies, but EU-funded research in that area suggested vastly higher numbers as part of removing fossil fuel dependency

I suggest following the Wolfram Alpha link I gave above. My assumptions, to explain the magic numbers visible in that formula, are 20% efficient and 25% capacity factor.

(And the other person was actually saying electricity, which is what WA is inferring in that calculation)

Re: Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

#182
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd put your waste in a breeder reactor until it has turned into short-lived isotopes that you only have to worry about for a few hundred years. Without breeder reactors we probably wouldn't have enough fuel anyway.

1. there are no working production-grade breeder reactors 2. you can't convert ALL of the waste into short-lived isotopes, just a fraction of it. Sure, we can invest time and money into researching these topics, why not. But why not put the same energy into researching renewables?

Actually the goal is to have no medium lived isotopes. Long lived isotopes are simply not a problem, as their level of radioactivity can easily be low enough to be safer than the original uranium ore. Short lived half lives, will decay down to nothing in more manageable time frames.

Like if we had no medium half life isotopes, we may only need to keep waste safe for a few hundred years, perhaps 1000 at most, before remaining short lived isotopes contribute negligible radiation, leaving just the long half life isotopes. If those are long enough we have waste not meaningfully more dangerous than the original uranium ore, and can simply bury it.

A lot of this does depend on the specifics of input fuel and breeding cycles used, but there have been designs that would be able to reprocess any medium lived half-life outputs, leaving only reasonably short lived, and very long lived outputs.

The real question is what is the overall effect of such reprocessing on the cost efficiency. Presumably, breeder reprocessing entails some level of cost (additional equipment, additional monitoring, etc), and we may end up with some not completely optimal components in the fuel after reprocessing, which would mean lower operating efficiency. But by how much? How much less cost efficient doing the right thing here makes the plants is a critically important concern.

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