This sounds intuitively correct but it is not so. Entropy is a bitch and the energy needed to extract lower concentrations grows exponentially. Uranium mining follows the logarithm law also seen elsewhere in mining.
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To produce the 25 tonnes or so of uranium fuel needed to keep your average reactor going for a year entails the extraction of half a million tonnes of waste rock and over 100,000 tonnes of mill tailings. These are toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The conversion plant will generate another 144 tonnes of solid waste and 1343 cubic metres of liquid waste.
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A 100MW coal fired power plant will use about 300,000 tons of coal in a year. Agreed - coal is bad but nuclear is not clean either.
Ah I see. Just like the bioethonol lobby saves the environment by cutting down trees, making more land for corn farming, use more water, use more petroleum derived fuel for fertilizer, transport and distilling. But hey - we got bio-ethanol !! right !!
Incidentally, you do realize that the sulfuric acid is reacting with carbonates in the rocks and making CO2 - right ? Or wait - we don’t have to count that CO2.
Sure why not ! As long as we are here - lets also convert all the mining vehicles and equipment to run on Hydrogen - maybe fuel cells. Oh wait - that idea never took off inspite of the billions of dollars of government funding
Thanks. I probably saw that, but don’t remember everyone’s name and position. I agree entirely with post #24
What we have is also long to build, and I don’t know if we have time to build all of the current generation reactor designs that we need. Every one of them is a one-off, a prototype, and there are not many people who are qualified and skilled to work on them.
One of the massive benefits of newer designs, whether they be MSR’s (which I’m biased towards), or conventional fuel, is their modularity.
Being able to mass produce the reactors in a ship yard and then transport them out to where they are needed will allow us to roll out a nuclear fleet much faster.
If all the site needs to produce is a turbine hall and heat exchangers, and the reactor just gets swapped out every 15 years or so for a new and refueled one, then that drastically reduces the infrastructure and resources needed to be brought to that site.
I consider an increase to proliferation only if it is actually easier than producing a nuclear weapons program from scratch.
There are designs that would let you pump out as much fissionable material as you like, and there are designs that are pretty much self contained, no user serviceable parts inside, and any attempts at diverting any of the material would end up with the reactor no longer operable.
A big chlorine accelerator driven fast reactor is going to be breeding quite a bit of fissionables, we should keep that under very close lock and key in countries that have the security and stability required, and already have a robust nuke weapon program, so no need to mess around with it.
This can be used to feed the smaller reactors that can go to less secured areas, where they will actually use more than they consume, and never have enough fissile inventory to make even a single bomb.
I’ll agree, I don’t think that we should wait until these “perfect” reactors are available before going with the ones we have that are “good”. Even nuclear done in the least efficient way that it is currently done in the US is better than anything else.
However, we should also be researching newer designs, both from an efficiency standpoint and from the standpoint of having a design that is more easily deployable large scale.
I think that Kirk Sorensen is probably the best speaker, and best PR person for the Thorium movement, and I would recommend watching most of the videos he is in for a good overview of the technology and where it stands today, but there are videos also on just about every aspect of nuclear technology on that channel.
You are probably right that many plants will be natural gas plants, but it has two major problems.
The first is that it, while currently plentiful, is a fossil fuel, and is a finite resource. It will not be cheap and plentiful forever.
The second is leakage. Natural gas plants leak. Natural gas pipelines leak. Methane is actually a worse greenhouse gas than CO[sub]2[/sub], so it doesn’t take much leakage for them o be worse than a coal fired plant.
Also, nuclear is not all that hard to follow base load. Current generations aren’t built for it, so aren’t great at it, and MSRs would be even better, but they can vary their power. The main reason that they do not, is because the fixed costs are the overwhelming majority, so it is only economical to run it at as close to 100% capacity as possible.
Even if you do not actually reduce the reaction in the core, you can divert the heat to other uses than electricity production when demand is low, like desalination, hydrogen production, or even liquid fuels production.
You average reactor is a 1000MWe, so to compare, your coal plant would be using 3,000,000 tons of coal.
And that is in our current reactor designs, that only use a fraction of a percent of the available energy. That is also in our current reactor designs, using Uranium. An advantage of Thorium is that is is 4 times as abundant as Uranium.
Then there is all the uranium and thorium dissolved in seawater. It is entirely possible to extract it, and, given the massive potential energy trapped in these elements, even if we don’t develop more efficient capture systems than we currently have, it will still be a very good ROI.
**No type of power generation is perfect. ** *Every type has environmental issues. *
Wind? Well, you have to make the turbines and that costs energy. And the turbines kill birds.
Solar- Well, you have to make the panels and that costs energy. Large plants require clearing a large amount of fragile desert area.
And so forth.
However, what you need to do is what type of energy causes the least environmental impact:
And that is hydroelectric. But you can only make so many, and of course damming rivers causes havoc downriver ecology. (And the Sierra club wants to tear down most dams)
Solar and wind come in next. (and the Sierra club fights solar power installations)
Then Nuclear. Which all the tree huggers fight tooth and nail. Mostly because of the anti-nuke propaganda. Since a nuclear war could end all civilized human life, that means we have to make nuclear war unthinkable. That blends over to nuke power.
Then natural gas. Mostly clean but lots of CO2.
Coal is by far- the very very worst.
So all the arguments that nuclear power has issues pale in comparison to the fact that coal is 100-1000 times worse. Maybe 10000 times worse.
Nuclear energy isn’t necessarily ‘all that bad’, but very unlikely to be a large part of future global generating capacity for a lot of reasons other than knee jerk opposition or NIMBY’ism. China, where for all the quite bad aspects of their political system the ruling authorities can in general override non-rational NIMBY objections, is building nuclear plants but it’s still not the main thing they are doing wrt electricity generation.
A lot of times ‘we’ in these discussions implies the US. In the US nuclear isn’t a little more expensive than natural gas. It’s way the hell more expensive, risk adjusted*. Utterly competitive with no explicit price attached to carbon emissions. And it would take a very high explicit cost now to change that. And that thing is renewables aren’t necessarily more expensive now than nat gas plants, under the important limitation though that either one is adding marginally to total generating capacity. A grid run mainly from wind/solar is still not a practical reality, though might become one at some point. Also the assumption that electricity could largely replace oil as the main transportation fuel and heating method (at least in colder areas) is another concept that isn’t actually that close to reality.
Anyway limiting to ‘baseload’ electricity plants, huge advantage for gas at zero explicit GHG tax. And methane leaks can be reduced. A much more realistic prospect than overcoming nuclear’s big cost problems, especially in the US (gas is cheaper than in China while big construction projects are a lot more expensive, and not realistically changeable features of the governance and legal system impose other higher costs).
Nuclear is not ‘so bad’ but has become irrelevant in the US except as a talking point about hypocrisy among greens. And it may be true that many greens would still reject if it cost less, but it costs a lot more so that puts the non-political economic system against nuclear also.
Virtually nobody is building new coal fired generating plants in the US, so that’s a question of either shutting down plants with remaining useful life (throwing away usable plants is another cost), or how ‘we’ are going to get China etc to stop building more coal fired plants.
*for the risk of big cost overruns and/or market changes in the long period it takes to gain approval for and build nuclear plants, even under any reasonable assumption of streamlining that within the basic reality of the US political and legal system.
Wanted to address this bit of not-100%-correct info, but it appears that the Teapot MES shot in 1955 did indeed use U-233 and yielded 22kT. It did also contain plutonium, but I don’t know if that was required or just some intermediate design.
I’ve been reading pieces by tree-huggers for years now that say we’ll need nuclear to get to zero carbon emissions.
So this is baloney, unless you include ‘anti-nuke’ as part of your definition of ‘tree hugger.’
Yes, I’m sure there are plenty of ‘tree huggers’ who say no nukes, no way, nohow, but there are plenty of others who are saying that compared to global warming, it’s easily the lesser of evils.
Not at all like it. The sulfur is already isolated. If we run out of that, we can go back to melting underground deposits.
Show us your math wrt to whether it’s a significant enough amount to care about. Incidentally, you do realize that acid leaching isn’t the only option and doesn’t have to be used in rock formations with high carbonate content - right? It’s right there in the Wikipedia page. Don’t even need to use the chem PhD for that one.
I can go out and buy a PEM water electrolyzer tomorrow. Yes, it’s more expensive than SMR.
Obviously there are diminishing returns to decarbonizing the entire process. It’s mostly technically feasible, but likely not necessary given the current low carbon intensity of the process. Which will decrease as the grid becomes less carbon-intensive.
It wasn’t part of an intermediate design, it was quite literally the work of a small group of engineers working on this particular bomb that chose to substitute materials. Their superiors were not amused.
We don’t actually know the ratios of u-233 to plutonium used in the bomb, and we got virtually no useful data from the test, as it was so far outside of the parameters that were expected.
While I am aware of the test, I don’t really count it, as it did nothing to advance the viability of u-233 as a weapon. It doesn’t act as a proof of concept, it doesn’t give any useful information on how to build it ,and even if it had worked well and we had all the specs for it, it would still require plutonium to replicate the bomb that was built (which was probably necessary). It would require a fairly substantial nuclear development program to build a viable bomb with U-233. It’s really just a footnote.
Nuclear energy has no place in a safe, clean, sustainable future. Nuclear energy is both expensive and dangerous, and just because nuclear pollution is invisible doesn’t mean it’s clean. Renewable energy is better for the environment, the economy, and doesn’t come with the risk of a nuclear meltdown.*
Freinds of the Earth: Nuclear Archives
*For 40 years, Friends of the Earth has been a leading voice in the U.S. opposing nuclear reactors. We must move beyond this dangerous and dirty technology to the clean renewable energy and efficiency technologies of the 21st century.
Friends of the Earth’s nuclear campaign works to reduce risks for people and the environment by supporting efforts to close existing nuclear reactors and fighting proposals to design and build new ones.*
Of course, as RTFirefly said, he is sure that “there are plenty of ‘tree huggers’ who say no nukes, no way, nohow”.
Discussions like this always end the same, by conservative posters always ignoring that in positions of power most Democrats agree on federal support for nuclear power technologies.
Also, most do ignore that while there are many that oppose nuclear power from the left side of things, the reality is that when one sees huge majorities of Americans opposing nuclear power simple math should tell you that there is also a big number of conservatives that also oppose nuclear power.
Specially when one more observation is made: The best example of nuclear development is coming from France, and as soon one mentions that they built Nuclear power plants with so much government intervention in a way that it looked like a socialistic solution; then the other conservative knee jerks, that one that reacts with hate and disdain towards government solutions.
What are they doing again? Oh yeah…coal. They are building a bunch of other things, but coal is still the major part of their energy mix…and they are building lots of ‘new’ ones. They are currently, and will into the future, burn as much coal as the rest of the world combined…including the US. And, sadly, they are exporting their coal plants to other countries via their belt and road projects. So, not the best example. There is no doubt that coal is cheaper than nuclear, so you are right, it’s not NIMBY’ism in China. It’s economics and their don’t give a shit about others attitude at play. You are probably correct, that nuclear won’t be a major part of the future global mix…but that’s because we are collectively kicking the can down the road and have been for several decades now. Solar and wind will save us…some day! Fusion is right around the corner!
Sure, maybe in a few decades solar and wind will play major roles in the energy mix (by which I mean 40, 50 or more percent of our total energy production…and ‘our’ means world wide, not in some cherry picked small densely populated countries), and be able to displace coal (or even natural gas). Once we get large scale batteries and smart grids and more scalable solar and can tap all of the tier 2 and tier 3 wind areas and all that stuff, and they finally figure out fusion, we’ll be good, I’m sure…
I don’t see how that’s at odds with anything I originally said. China is building some nuclear plants, but it’s not the main thing they are doing.
And guess what, the daunting economics of drastically slowing CHG emissions at today’s technological level is why it’s just not gonna happen soon in China, the US or anywhere else on a really large scale. China doesn’t have benighted Fox News watchers claiming climate change is a hoax. It has technocrats without a direct profit motive (but rather a power motive, maintain a workable degree of legitimacy for the Chinese Communist Party with the Chinese public) judging what’s best of China, considering the science of climate change, existing technology and economics. And the answer is not radical reduction in CHG emissions now. Although it’s not accurate to say China is ignoring the issue*. It sees among other things opportunities to be leader in carbon free technologies globally.
But as my earlier post mentioned, what’s the point exactly of Americans or Westerners sitting around saying how ‘we’ shouldn’t have any more coal plants including China (and India, etc). ‘We’ are going to make that happen how exactly?
OTOH for what’s under the actual purview of the US ‘we’, collective US govt action, there are virtually no new coal fired plants being built in the US. So what’s the point of mentioning them v new nuclear plants? For new plants it’s gas and renewables v nuclear, nuclear is an utter loser economically in US conditions, gas and renewables are fairly close roughly speaking, but only as long as renewables are a fairly small % of total generation. Nor is it actually realistic to speak as if everything can economically be powered/heated by electricity, as opposed to oil for transport and oil/gas for heating. Eventually those things may change (renewables workable for a large % of total generation, and electricity replacing oil and heating gas), but time would be big money to make them change quickly. Money the public is not willing to burn once and if they are given the real cost (as opposed to answering vague poll questions that ask what ‘we’ should do under the implicit assumption somebody else foots the bill).
*Chinese coal consumption has been generally declining slightly in recent years.
Can you cite that last? I seem to recall that since 2013 it was up (though I might be thinking of the percentage of energy from coal going up…though that would presume more coal use as well I’d think). I also think it’s important to note that, even if you are right that Chinese coal consumption is down, China is in the process of assisting various countries with building more (Chinese designed and built) coal plants.
Now wait just a second. They actually built it. That proves Los Alamos had useful information on how to build it, even if you or I don’t possess the top secret plans for it. And didn’t they just swap out the cores? It’s not like it was a ground-up redesign, apparently just a last-minute substitution.
Didn’t work well? It was a 22kT yield. It may have ruined the military effects tests that were expecting more, but 22kT is… not small. I wouldn’t want one going off in my town.
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[li]The Soviet Union detonated its first hydrogen bomb the same year, the RDS-37, which contained a fissile core of U-235 and U-233.[/li][li]In 1998, as part of its Pokhran-II tests, India detonated an experimental U-233 device of low-yield (0.2 kt) called Shakti V[/li][/quote]
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Again I have no reason to pick on MSR, and I wouldn’t have even looked into it had you not dismissed my proliferation concerns by stating, unequivocally, that nobody has ever built a U-233 bomb. But it turns out that there have been three U-233 bombs (I guess it’s just those three, or if I keep looking, am I going to find more U-233 bomb tests that you were aware of but don’t count?)
This is… maybe not the most persuasive approach on the topic of nonproliferation risk of MSR.
While it’s true China sells coal plants also, that point is IMO doubly irrelevant to the US ‘we’ generally presumed in these discussions. China isn’t the only source of coal fired boilers, steam turbines, plant construction, etc. If other countries think it’s in their interest to build more coal plants that doesn’t rely exclusively on China’s willingness to sell them. Nor even if it did could the US do much about it.
Which showed that a last minute substitution was not very effective.
All we know is that what they did was not a very good bomb.
eh, it is on the smaller side of things. But sure, I wouldn’t want many things going off in my town, nuclear or not.
Actually I had not heard of those two. I did do some googling and searching, and can not find any other examples of anyone attempting to use u-233 in a bomb.
Though, one being an inistor on a fusion device, and still requiring u-235, means that it’s not really adding to proliferation there, and a .2kt is a pretty small bomb, once again, made by a country that can make thermonuclear weapons.
I don’t know. Out of all the money and development that many states have put into developing nuclear weapons, and we can only find 3 examples of them experimenting with U-233, with none of them being really successful, certainly not successful enough that any of those states have tried using it again?
Also, those were all made with U-233 made in a lab environment, which drastically reduced the amount of u-232 involved. Uranium taken out of an MSR is going to have much higher levels of u-232 than are going to be safe to work with. I don’t see any state that doesn’t already have a nuclear program messing with it. It’s not the low hanging fruit.
I just don’t see that the risk of increased proliferation is nearly enough to turn our backs on the technology that may be necessary to preserve our standard of living while not destroying the world we live in.
What? No, that is not something we know. 22kT was 33% lower than expected (I guess they wanted 30kT or so). There are many, many military applications that do swimmingly well around that range, most notably Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It does if you happen to have some U-235 and plenty of thorium to make U-233 to breed the fissile material for what you need. Or you want to trade with someone who does. We can’t just think about a single country’s program, we have to think of black market trade between actors who are simply missing parts that someone else has.
When we are talking about an initiator, .2kT is more than adequate. And it’s the end of that proliferative step. In itself it’s an adequate battlefield, demolition, or terrorist weapon. Beyond that, add more stages and you potentially have a variable yield nuclear weapon.
It seems wild that you again dismiss a step in the process as not being of concern, because it isn’t the entire process.
I guess that’s where we have to differ. To me it makes little sense saving humanity from climate disaster only to risk nuclear war in the future. I mean if I had to make that hard choice, I’d choose the latter. But I think that’s a false choice if we’re willing to put in the effort.
It seems to be in question, and my guess is because the data it rests on is in question. As is much of the data that comes out of China concerning just about everything. It’s hard to extrapolate what’s really going on in the country since there are systemic issues with giving good data about everything. Many times, not even the high ranking CCP officials in Beijing know the real answer, even if they are the head of the ministry in question.
I think what you are missing wrt China building coal plants in other countries is that they are both enabling it AND then selling them the design, materials and labor to put it in via their Belt and Road project. And in some cases they are selling them coal plants instead of better alternatives, and basically forcing those countries to buy it, since the money they are ‘loaning’ to those countries has strings attached. So, I think it is good to look at this as a further expansion of China’s coal production because, really, it is. China could be selling those countries solar or wind designs…they have plenty of designs they, um, acquired from western countries and have a very robust production industry along these lines…but they mostly aren’t.
There probably isn’t a lot the US can do about this stuff, you are right there. And it’s wandering away from the topic of the thread so I’ll leave it there, because regardless of what China wants to sell most of these countries it wouldn’t be nuclear, regardless.
