As China Option Fades, Bill Gates Urges US To Take the Lead in Nuclear Power, For the Good of the Planet (geekwire.com) 257
In his year-end letter, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says his to-do list for 2019 includes persuading U.S. leaders to regain America's leading role in nuclear energy research and embrace advanced nuclear technologies such as the concept being advanced by his own TerraPower venture. From a report: "The world needs to be working on lots of solutions to stop climate change," Gates wrote in the wide-ranging letter, released Saturday night. "Advanced nuclear is one, and I hope to persuade U.S. leaders to get into the game." Gates acknowledged that tighter U.S. export restrictions, put in place by the Trump administration, have virtually ruled out TerraPower's grand plan to test its traveling-wave nuclear technology in China. "We had hoped to build a pilot project in China, but recent policy changes here in the U.S. have made that unlikely," Gates wrote. He said "we may be able to build it in the United States" if regulations are updated and the investment climate for nuclear power improves.
But if you take out the Lead (Score:5, Funny)
Then what do you use for shielding?
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Use steel reinforced concrete for shielding just like all existing production plants. The bigger issue is that Bill Gates is not taking the lead and using it as the coolant [wikipedia.org] with the designs promoted by Terrapower [terrapower.com].
Terrapower has 2 designs: 1) an old school LWR style reactor with a different method of managing the fuel rods and 2) a DMSR using a chloride salt as a coolant. I don't particularity like either design. I don't think Chlorine is a great replacement for Florine and we know less about how a chloride salt works in a nuclear reactor. I'm glad he is funding investment into nuclear though and the more we know about the technology, the more safely we can utilize it.
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Unless Gates is going to fund not just the prototype reactor but also the commercial ones for their entire lifetimes, including full insurance which appears to be impossible since no insurance company can afford it, then none of this changes the fact that nuclear is stupidly expensive and uneconomical.
Also putting the word "terra" in the name of your nuclear project is... Unwise.
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Personally, I think the government should stay out of it, but nuclear is hardly uneconomical, especially if it isn’t handicapped or crippled due to regulations designed to make it that way.
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>"Funny how for some people big government is a solution to any problem unless itâ(TM)s a solution they donâ(TM)t want at all."
Indeed.
And in this case, it would more realistic and acceptable with one easy change. STOP focusing on "climate change". Hence:
"The world needs to be working on lots of solutions to stop climate change" (-Bill Gates)
How about:
The world needs cheap power. The world needs energy independence. The economy will boon with cheap/plentiful/safe energy. The world will hav
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And it doesn't have to be just nuclear.
Ok, I'll bite. What would it be? Unless you have some huge battery tech advancement that nobody knows about, then you simply haven't worked out the numbers. Cheap, CO2 free energy is currently only available from nuclear. Everything else either releases lots of CO2 or Methane, produces power intermittently, isn't available in enough places or with enough energy created, or isn't yet possible.
Instead, the public wants to continuously argue over climate change. We don't know for sure how big a problem climate change is, but wouldn't it be wonderful if the cure was a SIDE EFFECT of doing the right things for a myriad of OTHER good reasons?
Yea, but that has nothing to do with power production. That's about human psychology and its need for external c
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Nuclear can't be the basis of widespread cheap energy because not every country can be trusted with it. In fact even the ones that have it already can barely be trusted, and occasionally screw up.
The solution is renewables + storage, because they can be deployed almost anywhere cheaply and with minimal risk.
Re: But if you take out the Lead (Score:5, Insightful)
"Some want government to solely fund the entirety of healthcare costs."
You post would be more interesting if it didn't include off-topic comments that give away your game. You might also consider including actual content in the analysis.
Furthermore, regarding your off-topic content, the government "solely funding" healthcare costs is grossly misleading. The people solely fund healthcare costs one way or the other, the issue is the most effective way to accomplish it. It would be helpful for you to understand what's to be accomplished and how best to accomplish it, not merely how one piece looks based on your world view.
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Exactly, even the simplest look shows how bad that comparison is. Healthcare is best when risk is spread across the largest population. It's a problem uniquely well suited to government participation. Nuclear energy is nothing like that.
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The market would choose nuclear if carbon emitters had to pay the environmental cost of their carbon production. But they don't. So fossil fuel power plants can get away with offloading this externality onto other people, decreasing the effective cost of the plants. "Privatized profits, socialized costs" as they say.
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Re: But if you take out the Lead (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with obtaining insurance is not due to nuclear being unsafe. It's due to a quirk of statistics. The more times you throw the dice (the more individual items you insure), the tighter the distribution gets [wikipedia.org]. The bell curve becomes narrower, and you're more likely to get a result close to the predicted average. So it's easier for the insurance company to figure out what to charge (or for the casino to guarantee a profit) if they're insuring tens of thousands or millions of items. If they want to be 99.9% sure their collected premiums exceed their payouts, they only have to charge a few percent more than their expected payout based on the average (middle of the bell curve).
But there are only 100 nuclear plants in the U.S. With a sample that small, the bell curve ends up very broad. If an insurance company trying to insure them wants to be 99.9% sure they've collected enough money, the premium they have to charge ends up being several hundred or thousand times higher than the average expected payout, instead of just a few percent higher.
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Because who doesn't want more Chernobyl's or Fukushima's?
It's almost as if you don't know how much radiation, mercury, etc. is released into the air by coal fired plants.
(or how many coal miners die every year due to their work)
Re: But if you take out the Lead (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear reactors provide one of the cheapest sources of energy besides natural hydro plants.
The problem is regulation. If you have to pay people for 5-10 years to do nothing with a new plant and then another 5-10 years to replace the rods when the fuel is only 10% spent, you're artificially inflating the price and even with all that, if you can get a plant built you're still cheaper than solar and wind.
The problem with nuclear is not the technology, a reactor can theoretically run for a decade without needing refueling, the US Navy is building them to last the lifetime of a ship (75 years) without any refueling . A modern reactor can take up the size of a small shed in your backyard (if you have a cooling pool nearby). But we're not building those because someone may steal a rod of "weapons grade" fuel.
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If you think nuclear power is too expensive now, then you wouldn't want to know how expensive it will be with fuel enriched to the same level the naval reactors need. This is the main reason there are no civilian nuclear powered ships except a couple of Russian ice breakers.
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If you think nuclear power is too expensive now, then you wouldn't want to know how expensive it will be with fuel enriched to the same level the naval reactors need. This is the main reason there are no civilian nuclear powered ships except a couple of Russian ice breakers.
You don't need fuel enriched to that level. For civilian power, you don't even want that level of enrichment. You enrich to change the types of byproducts that are produced in the reactor and so you can have less volume in the reactor. This only really matters on a military ship. For a civilian reactor, it doesn't matter as the difference in size is dwarfed by the other safety systems a civilian reactor requires. Also, anti-proliferation methods often involve intentionally making nasty byproducts like
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Nuclear reactors provide one of the cheapest sources of energy besides natural hydro plants.
What's a "natural hydro plant"? Beavers wind the generators?
The problem with nuclear is not the technology, a reactor can theoretically run for a decade without needing refueling, the US Navy is building them to last the lifetime of a ship (75 years) without any refueling.
Yes, and constant oversight by a highly-trained crew.
A modern reactor can take up the size of a small shed in your backyard (if you have a cooling pool nearby).
So a small shed, plus a large pond?
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Natural hydro plant is where the difference in water levels (and thus the primary method of energy generation) does not have to be artificially constructed. There are hydro plants where you basically pump water up into a reservoir or you artificially create or enlarge a difference or construct a dam which can only be used intermittently due to a shortage of water. Those kinds of things are hard and costly and generally not worth it.
Solar plants and wind turbines also need oversight, maintenance etc by a hig
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As much as a $2.5 million Bugatti is a cheap car for a person working at McDonalds, sure. You have tens of billions in upfront construction costs with nuclear power, and will have to deal with the waste for thousands of years. Cost, not hippies, is what's killing your extraordinarily expensive & dangerous way to heat water.
We don't want to heat water with nuclear. That's a bad idea for a bunch of reasons including: 1) steam explosions (Chernobyl) 2) H2 production and explosions (Fuchishima and 3mi island), 3) lower energy carrying capacity, and 4) water is a natural moderator. We want to heat molten salt which is the same stuff in a solar plant (or perhaps liquid metal). We also want to reprocess nuclear waste and store it responsibly. Hippies have blocked all of these efforts in the courts. Where do you think all the e
Re: But if you take out the Lead (Score:4, Insightful)
700MW of peak wind only produces 280MW on average, not the same as a continuous 700MW from a reactor. Also, your 700MW wind farm is a pile of rust in as little as 5 years with most farms only lasting 10 years and shreds close to 10,000 birds per year including endangered species of eagles and owls. Meanwhile most reactors are operating 50-70 years, well over their planned 40 years lifespan.
So really, you're comparing $60M + operating cost over 5-10 years (and not counting disposal, which few defunct sites have been disposed of) with a $240M investment over 7 times as long.
Chernobyl is pretty much the worst that could've happened (which was partially due to Russian weapons testing and untrained operators), but only a few decades later, wildlife has fully recovered in the area and some people have continued to live there.
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No, the problem is insurance.
No there is no one problem. There are multiple. Insurance is one, regulation is the other. Having experienced first hand the burden of regulation on a nuclear project ... lets just say we did the same project that took us 4 years in the nuclear industry in 5 months in the chemical industry. Let's also just say that a nuclear contract was the only one where working for a contract company we were showered in champagne at lavish and extravagant parties on boats. For companies that get paid by the hour a nuclea
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Solar and wind produce power when they can, yes. So they don't work by themselves without storage, which is why we need better batteries, though pump storage has existed for a long time.
But nukes produce power whether they need it or not -- they don't start and stop on demand. So they are only good for baseline power, or you have to start throwing away their output. It takes days to start and stop a nuke, vs. hours for coal (bad fuel for other reasons) and minutes for gas.
So a balanced power system require
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But nukes produce power whether they need it or not -- they don't start and stop on demand. So they are only good for baseline power, or you have to start throwing away their output.
MSRs can load follow as can many of the more modern nuclear designs. The alternative I like for existing nuclear (and other baseload power) is methane extraction to produce synthetic natural gas which can be sold (at which point the rest of the efficiency issues are someone else's problem). But that's wouldn't make a good or efficient chemical battery because you would only get 16-40% of the power back after burning the natural gas. Most conversions between different forms of energy are less than 50% eff
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Then here is a thought. Who will insure wind and solar for not providing power 24x7? Will that be you? Will you pay us for not providing power? What about when a volcano erupts for months on end? How will you provide lots of power? Will you pay the insurance bill for the citizens that die because you could not provide the electricity? Or are you going to further destroy the planet with natural gas?
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Here's another thought: when your precious nuclear power plant goes down for planned (or worse, unplanned) maintenance - sometimes for years at a time - who's going to pay for another one to take its place? Will that be you? Who's going to insure the sudden gap of a few gigawatts in the power grid? Will that be you?
All the FUD thrown against wind and solar by nuke
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Here's another thought: when your precious nuclear power plant goes down for planned (or worse, unplanned) maintenance - sometimes for years at a time - who's going to pay for another one to take its place? Will that be you? Who's going to insure the sudden gap of a few gigawatts in the power grid? Will that be you?
All the FUD thrown against wind and solar by nuke fanboys applies more to your favored method of heating water than it it does for wind and solar.
Nuclear has far and away the highest capacity factor of any power source. Just because you read about 1 of 100 reactors having an issue that took 5 years to fix (probably due to all the paperwork) doesn't mean that the rest of the fleet wasn't producing power the entire time. Also, who is going to build and pay for the giant batteries it would require for wind and solar to work. Right, nobody cause they will never exist. BTW, a natural gas plant has a capacity factor in the ~40%. For nuclear its closer
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A gas plant doesn't take decades to build or contaminate half the world when it fails. It's also cheaper and more reliable. Capacity factor gas, 40% LOL
No instead natural gas poisons entire neighborhoods like Porter Ranch [psmag.com]. Can every single natural gas plant in California has a capacity factor between 40%-45% according to CalISO.
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Even with battery backup wind is cheaper. Even offshore wind.
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Even with battery backup wind is cheaper. Even offshore wind.
False, by every measure wind is the most expensive power source [wikipedia.org]. And offshore wind is even more expensive than onshore wind.
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{Citation needed}
Compared to what? Continuing to dig coal out of the ground? Pump petroleum out of the ground? Burn that shit, shit up our planet that much more?
'Renewables' won't cover everything and you damned well know it.
Plug-in electrics are going to take over from ICEs and you damned well know it. There'll have to be power to recharge them.
People have to get over their boogeyman fear of nuclear power, once and for all, unless they want to go back to
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Compared to renewables, which will cover everything just fine thanks. Renewables + storage will cover 100% of our needs eventually, it's just a question of how soon.
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Re: But if you take out the Lead (Score:5, Insightful)
...none of this changes the fact that nuclear is stupidly expensive and uneconomical.
It's expensive because we make it expensive. The whole point of the current research efforts is to show we can make inexpensive and reliable nuclear power plants which are as safe or safer than conventional fossil fuel plants. The safety part isn't that hard since no one has ever died from a nuclear power plant (exceht Chernobyl), which you can't say about any fossil fuel.
The problem is we're so frightened of nuclear power we're unwilling to dispassionately listen to plausible arguments. I'm not saying they're right, just that they ought to get a fair hearing.
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You mean how France, along with Obama, turned the country with the highest standard of living on the African continent into a third world jihadist hell hole with open-air slave markets? Heck of a job, Brownie!
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The planet doesn't care about nuclear waste. If we dig holes deep enough, then it will have no impact on any planetary processes, and no impact on life. The planet doesn't care if we irradiate rocks deep underground.
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It can be, if cost is irrelevant to you.
They said grid scale batteries wouldn't work. They have now been demonstrated to work. We don't need to wait, we need to get on with this.
Citation required that we can see from orbit
limit more Chernobyl's and Fukushima's (Score:3)
Regulations exist for a reason.
Gross corporatist propaganda to limit liability for negligence, incompetence and criminal actions.
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Regulations exist for a reason.
Gross corporatist propaganda to limit liability for negligence, incompetence and criminal actions.
Yea, but which greedy corporatists are you discussing, the engineers and scientists which are pushing for nuclear, or the folks pushing for natural gas? You might think we should do 100% solar and wind. In California (where I live) and Germany who have both pushed hard for solar and wind have caused two trends: 1) CO2 emissions are increasing, 2) prices are going up. This is because we can't store the energy generated intermittently and a huge innovation in battery tech would be needed. Its unlikely tha
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And why do you have regulation, Sherlock? To prevent the incompetent and corrupt from fucking everyone else over.
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And why do you have regulation, Sherlock? To prevent the incompetent and corrupt from fucking everyone else over.
And to prevent competition. And to ensure someone doesn't do something you're scared of, regardless of facts. Regulations, regulators, lobbyists, and activists aren't always (*cough*never*cough*) good, honest, wise, and noble, searching for nothing but the optimal public good.
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More proof that dihydrogen monoxide [dhmo.org] is a dangerous substance!
Sounds like an interesting possible technology (Score:2)
mired in bureaucracy and political bs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
small scale reactors (Score:4, Informative)
THere are a number of new intrisically safe (relatively speaking) self contained nuclear vessels. For example the Hyperion reactor. You bury in you backyard and it makes power till the fuel runs down. Then you can did it back up. In the meantime it minds it's own business and the type of nuclear fuel can't run away. Same with the Thorium reactors. Sure you could cut them open and spill the contents but that's actually pretty easy to clean up since unlike chemical spills radioactive materials are easy to find to clean up. Also things like uranium and thorium with long half lives just are not that "hot" to begin with.
The idea is that once you foreclose all possibility of a meltdown or steam explosion then nuclear power can done more safely and with less emissions than any other on-demand power source even when the operators are incompetent.
Hyperion now called Gen4 Energy (Score:5, Interesting)
Thorium reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There is much less nuclear waste— two orders of magnitude less with thorium. It's abundant so it's more accessible. And it's prohibitively difficult to use as a nuclear weapon so it's safe to let developing countries without mature or stable state apparatuses develop these. The reactor designs use a lithium floride container that will melt, draining out the fuel in the even of an over temperature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Uranium Nitride safety: http://www.ans.org/pubs/magazi... [ans.org]
They can be built small, they do NOT produce weapons-grade uranium as a by-product, and they can’t melt down due to an uncontrolled “chain reaction.”
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How many actually running, delivering power to the grid, thorium reactors can you name?
We have tried these here in Germany, turns out they are nice on paper, but not so nice in reality. Matter of fact, one of these is the highest contaminated reactor site in the world if measured by beta radiation. And thanks to the 14C half life of almost 6000 years it will stay this way for a very long time.
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How many actually running, delivering power to the grid, thorium reactors can you name? We have tried these here in Germany, turns out they are nice on paper, but not so nice in reality. Matter of fact, one of these is the highest contaminated reactor site in the world if measured by beta radiation. And thanks to the 14C half life of almost 6000 years it will stay this way for a very long time.
You tried solid fueled Thorium reactors with a manual breeding and reprocessing strategy. Thorium works much better in molten salt reactors where you use a nice aspect of Thorium's chemistry to separate out the newly breed material from the material that is still Thorium. Also, Thorium isn't water soluble like Uranium and Plutonium. Why does that matter? Well U and Pu are poisonous in addition to be radioactive. Thorium isn't poisonous and gives off 1/10th the radioactivity in its natural state. Also,
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My first sentence stands even more now.
How many actually running, delivering power to the grid, molten salt thorium reactors can you name?
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My first sentence stands even more now. How many actually running, delivering power to the grid, molten salt thorium reactors can you name?
There has only been 1, the MSRE at Oak Ridge in the late 60's and early 70's. Only Canada has recently begun licensing MSRs so there is a limited amount of operation experience. However, the results from the MSRE were so good that its hard to believe we didn't pursue it further. Nixon wanted Fast Breeders instead (because they were in CA) of the MSRs (because they were in TN). Also, the existing nuclear industry didn't want to switch to Th-U as investments had already been made and they wanted to see th
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If you behave like on the Wikipedia, I'll just send you there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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That Wiki article discusses the ATR high-temperature pebble bed reactor, whose solid fuel mixed U-235 with Thorium. It created too much Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 waste, and the prototype cracked, probably from the high temperature. Not a success.
The LFTR design, liquid fluoride breeding U-233 from seeded thorium, is totally different. It doesn't run at that high a temperature. And it doesn't create much waste. It does have some engineering challenges, mostly because it requires gaseous fluorine injected i
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It also only exists on paper and when chosing between two non-existent designs one might as well go directly for fusion as the more promising option. At least ITER is already in construction.
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It also only exists on paper and when chosing between two non-existent designs one might as well go directly for fusion as the more promising option. At least ITER is already in construction.
Even the most optimistic estimate puts fusion at 20-50 years out. Several problems, 1) the easiest form of fusion (D-T) creates radiation, 2) the D-He3 fusion, easiest that makes no radiation requires He3 which can be gotten from the moon, or from letting this nasty gas called Tritium decay which is very hard and a bit dangerous, 3) how do you harness 1,000,000C heat as the most we usually do is 3000C and under 300C is far more common? Once we actually can do fusion in a way that makes power, then we can
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THTR was much newer and still didn't work.
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You can't easily turn the thorium fuel for a power plant into a nuclear weapon, you can easily turn thorium into a nuclear weapon if you have a big fast neutron source ... such as a nuclear power plant (thorium or not).
By giving a nation nuclear power plants and reprocessing technologies you are giving them everything they need to breed pure U233.
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You can't easily turn the thorium fuel for a power plant into a nuclear weapon, you can easily turn thorium into a nuclear weapon if you have a big fast neutron source ... such as a nuclear power plant (thorium or not).
By giving a nation nuclear power plants and reprocessing technologies you are giving them everything they need to breed pure U233.
False, you have that exactly backwards. U-233 has a much more even and controllable neutron economy. U-235 and Pu-239 are more energetic and can produce a much faster and more violent chain reaction which is better for bombs. That's why Pu-239 is used in most bombs. One bomb from U-233 was made back in the early 50's but it didn't explode with the desired power. The Th-232 breeds into U-233 but also produces U-232 which must be separated from the U-233 to make a bomb. Also, the U-232 is a terrifyingly
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The Protactinium produces U232 if it decays while still mixed with the Thorium.
The same reactor concept LFTR lovers promote to reprocess fuel, ie. LFTR49, was meant produce near pure U233 for use in different reactors. In which case you also don't want it contaminated with significant amounts U232, it has to be processed, stored and transported after all. So as long as I'm going to entertain promises of LFTR in the first place I'm just going to take their word for the fact that processing the Protactinium w
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The Protactinium produces U232 if it decays while still mixed with the Thorium.
The same reactor concept LFTR lovers promote to reprocess fuel, ie. LFTR49, was meant produce near pure U233 for use in different reactors. In which case you also don't want it contaminated with significant amounts U232, it has to be processed, stored and transported after all. So as long as I'm going to entertain promises of LFTR in the first place I'm just going to take their word for the fact that processing the Protactinium with sufficient purity is possible as well.
You can still control the isotopic mixture of Th-232 vs Th-230 in the Thorium fuel. This ratio controls the amount of U-232 vs U-233 the reactor produces. We don't live in a world where we can have Thorium reactors without U-232 in them. I really hope that not too much time and resources when into trying to reduce the U-232 produced from normal breeding operations of the LFTR because it wasn't time well spent.
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THere are a number of new intrisically safe (relatively speaking) self contained nuclear vessels.
Where? Companies keep claiming to have something, and then nobody ever buys any and they never build any.
Same with the Thorium reactors.
Yes, same with those. We never see one.
What I don't get is that renewables+battery are already cheaper than nuclear, and getting cheaper still, yet people keep believing in nuclear. It's already obsolete technology. It delivered on none of its promises in the consumer space, and there's no practical reason to use it for anything but a carrier. I would have also said icebreaker, but we won't be needing th
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You really don't want to bury something like this, because then you can't inspect the whole thing for leaks. Like pretty much all gas stations' underground tanks have a plume coming off of them. I think we should use the technology, but it should be possible to regularly inspect all sides of the containment vessel.
Gasoline plumes are chemical and somewhat hard to trace to an origin. Monitoring nuclear leaks is easy. Moreover "tanks" undergrount have an indeterminate amount of liquid in them and are constantly being drained and filled, so accounting for leaks is impossible. Self contained nuclear systems are a closed system and so loss of any mass is detectable. Leaks of radioactive material are detectable even in trace amounts with simple sensors that don't even need to be in contact with the material. And if y
Another pipe dream (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuclear pipe dreams:
LFTR: We're looking at an investment of about $40 billion and at least a 10 year Manhattan Project style gathering of the greatest physicists in the world to catch up to where the last research team left off in building a molten salt reactor. On top of that, we have to drill through the whole Thorium cycle to prove it out. Theoretically, it is very promising on paper. We'll have to see how well it proves out in reality. It has all the added benefits of being less toxic than the current Uranium cycle, with little to none of its byproducts that can be weaponized, and the end result material after the cycle is complete is only radioactive for a few hundred years, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of years in the Uranium cycle.
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Nuclear pipe dreams:
LFTR: We're looking at an investment of about $40 billion and at least a 10 year Manhattan Project style gathering of the greatest physicists in the world to catch up to where the last research team left off in building a molten salt reactor. On top of that, we have to drill through the whole Thorium cycle to prove it out. Theoretically, it is very promising on paper. We'll have to see how well it proves out in reality. It has all the added benefits of being less toxic than the current Uranium cycle, with little to none of its byproducts that can be weaponized, and the end result material after the cycle is complete is only radioactive for a few hundred years, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of years in the Uranium cycle.
Nobody is asking for $40b to commercialize LFTR. The real problem is developing the commercial infrastructure to move it around. LEU (low enriched uranium) is cheap and has a commercial infrastructure (which is aging and crumbling), a spot market, and a set of regulations. Thorium has none of these things but also much less technical risk and problems. Moving LEU around is dangerous. Moving Thorium around is safe (its not water soluble or toxic to people) but the regulations don't make this distinction
The Real Obstacles To Be Overcome (Score:5, Interesting)
Gates's focus on new, un-proven, and frankly more complex fission reactor designs is hopelessly misguided. A much better idea was the Gen III+ approach of standardized units that are improved lower cost versions of proven PWR technology, like the Westinghouse AP1000.
And no, it is not "opposition to nuclear power" holding it back in the U.S.
The primary problem is and has been the high capital cost of the plants. Without regulation guaranteeing sufficient stable returns over a long time to recover the investment it is a difficult pitch, and even then the long pay-back time makes it less desirable than natural gas plants if that is an available option. How to make capitalists and investors want to sink their money into these plants in large enough numbers to be helpful?
And this problem has led to the second - so few plants built that the industry to do it has become moribund, thin and the supply chain brittle.Westinghouse, the developer and backer of the AP1000 plant went bankrupt two years ago.
The U.S. has had a stream-lined licensing process for a few decades now, and since 2008 seven new units were licensed - all of the AP1000 design. Investors/utilities have dropped out of five of these, and the projects are dead. None of these projects were killed by "opposition", it was due to the projects going over budget and becoming uneconomical, and Westinghouse going bankrupt, not problems an untried new technology is likely to fix.
Only the two Vogtle units are still being built and have gone massively over budget. How far over budget? The original estimate for the two units was $4.4 billion and is now expected to be $25 billion. In large part this is has been due to difficulties in getting the major parts manufactured, and errors in construction, requiring rework, and delaying the schedule. And this is due to the brittleness of the industry supporting it at this point.
An AP1000 is running in China right now (started up in June of this year) and three more are under construction, but these units have also been delayed by years due to supply problems
The nations that have either a) built a mostly nuclear electricity grid (France); b) are actively building many nuclear power plants (China); or c) have a well-proven track record for building plants on-time and budget (South Korea) have one key thing in common. All of the companies doing this are majority government owned. That is to say, they are socialist enterprises.
The capitalistic model of the U.S. for nuclear power has failed. It has not maintained economies of scale, has been shown robustness to overcome "teething" problems, and is unable to "take a bath" on early units to perfect the supply system and overcome the learning curve.
It you want to see nuclear power making a come back in the U.S. the only option, on the evidence, would be creating a government run corporation to build them. If you don't support that, then you don't support nuclear power. And complaining about NIMBYism, or environmentalists, as if they were stopping nuclear power is simply beating a convenient whipping boy. Makes you feel good inside to bash people you don't like, but accomplishes nothing.
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I'm not opposed to nuclear power - especially modern nuclear power. I really don't understand our (the USA) resistance to fuel reprocessing, or funding a "permanent" disposal process and location.
But the industry really hasn't convinced me that building large nuclear baseload generation plants is the best path forward for the next 100 years. Distributed and utility-scale Solar seem to be on a remarkable cost curve, which if it continues suggests that daytime power needs can be easily covered - in which ca
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Reprocessing is only useful for one thing, getting plutonium for weapons. To reduce waste it's not very useful, because it's a once through process ... MOX fuel waste is almost impossible to reprocess. So all it really does is waste a colossal amount of money and increase the risks of pollution.
To reduce waste, you need fast reactors.
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Reprocessing is only useful for one thing, getting plutonium for weapons. To reduce waste it's not very useful, because it's a once through process ... MOX fuel waste is almost impossible to reprocess. So all it really does is waste a colossal amount of money and increase the risks of pollution.
To reduce waste, you need fast reactors.
False on all counts. Its true that you do do reprocessing when extracting plutonium (specifically Pu-239) and its true that fast reactors are better at breeding U-238 to Pu-239. But you can also reprocess and ignore the Pu or simply choose a fuel cycle that doesn't involve Pu. Why on earth do you want to breed U-238 in the first place? Its rare and produces pretty nasty actinides under neutron flux which means worse waste that can last for 10,000 years.
There is no reason you can't burn waste in a ther
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The theoretical waste processing in some LFTR isn't the reprocessing the US government called a proliferation risk ... that's purely about producing MOX fuel.
Although reprocessing in a LFTR is a massive proliferation risk in it's own right of course. The LFTR49 concept would intentionally breed pure U233 to feed LFTR33s down the line.
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Although reprocessing in a LFTR is a massive proliferation risk in it's own right of course. The LFTR49 concept would intentionally breed pure U233 to feed LFTR33s down the line.
I'm assuming you are talking about a specific company's proposed line of reactors. Yea, those LFTR49s will never get licensed duh. You are not going to get a license for a new reactor that mostly makes enriched nuclear material (especially a shitty bomb material). But you don't really need them in the first place. The first round of reactors can be kick-started with something already enriched like old Pu weapons material or old reprocessed spent fuel (LEU probably isn't potent enough). The second gener
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Modern windmills are actually rather elegant; you're just not used to them.
If the world were covered with nothing but grass, and genetic engineering created the first tree, I'm sure lots of people would consider it grotesque and ugly.
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Because the waste will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years, that's why. So it's not a matter of one & done on constructing a facility to hold it - it's an ongoing cost that you're assigning to hundreds of future generations.
Imagine if the Neanderthals had developed nuclear power 50,000 years ago and built a storage facility that was now leaking through Italy, str
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The big radioactive elements on a human timescale are strontium 90, and cesium 137. They each have a half life of about 30 years. After about 300 years, their radioactivity is down by a factor of 1,000. Next is Americium-241, which emits alpha particles, and has a half life of ~400 years.
So, after guarding the spent fuel for several hundred years. I'd then consider it not so dangerous, and dump it in some out of the way place, like Antarctica, and not worry to much about leaks.
Americium-241 is also fissile so can be put back into a reactor to make more energy. Also, I like dry deserts more than Antarctica for long term disposal. Uranium is water soluble. I also like storing the Uranium as a salt (either a fluoride or a chloride) which is a crystal instead of oxidized as it will become a powder more easily when oxidized.
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/t... [cbsnews.com]
https://www.bna.com/26-environ... [bna.com]
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It's retarded to call the US nuclear environment capitalistic. Insurance for nuclear plants is explicitly socialist, which means that there is no economic pressure to invest in safer technology. In a free market, insurance companies would have stopped putting up with light water reactors thirty years ago.
Here's the problem with taking the lead. (Score:3, Insightful)
The biggest problems with nuclear power come decades down the road. Any "lead" endorsed by the political establishment won't focus much further than two presidential election cycles.
What we should do is do a crash program in nuclear waste management and plant decommissioning; once we lick that problem there's not much serious objection to proceeding with even third gen reactors, to say nothing of fourth gen designs with better inherent safety.
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The solution is one big landfill in a place few people would ever want to build. Nevada was ideal; opposition came from troublemakers and dupes.
Many small nuclear landfills is a bad idea. Some will be sited badly. Over time, some may be forgotten. Political pressure from developers will cause politicians in a couple of hundred years to allow construction in the buried waste. Most of the problems are minimized by having only one site, and that on federally owned land.
Now why would we waste our time with nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
Jokes aside the reason nuclear is a nonstarter in America is Americans don't trust their government and private institutions to keep it safe. Given the levels of corruption we routinely see [wikipedia.org] that's not unreasonable.
Now, I personally think if we could convince Americans that government regulation works it wouldn't be an issue. But sooner or later somebody comes in with talk of "Job Killing Regulations" and an anti-gov't ad blitz and gets 51% of the voters to put somebody in power that'll gut safety regs for short term profit.
Look at Fukushima. 3 70 year old executives more or less destroyed a city for a quick buck and they _might_ finish out a life of opulence and splendor in prison. Or they might tie it up in court until they die of old age. See the problem?
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Advanced Small Modular reactors that use physics to avoid meltdown are perfect. With NuScale, shy of a nuclear explosion on top of it, it will not meltdown. It requires NO ACTIVE intervention.
If you are going to compare Fukushima, then are you also going to compare hindenberg to today's H2 vehicles and the Pinto to today's electric cars (both are cars)?
Fact is, that your apple/orange comparison is no different than the 2 I just posted.
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That's nice - but at the end of the day, no nuclear vaporware is going to be more cost effective than wind and solar. So lets just go on skipping dangerous & expensive ways to heat water, and go with tech that poses no security or long term storage issues.
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Right. NuScale's small U-235 light water reactors, essentially a scaled-down version of an old design, are probably safer than the big old reactors. But they still use the same 5% U-235, with its high price, very low cycle efficiency and thus high amount of high-level waste production. And they cost a fortune, probably about $5/watt, based on the Wiki. Not that nukes always come in "on budget".
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That's nice - but at the end of the day, no nuclear vaporware is going to be more cost effective than wind and solar. So lets just go on skipping dangerous & expensive ways to heat water, and go with tech that poses no security or long term storage issues.
And the batteries necessary to store the power generated from wind and solar are going to come from where? If we made them with existing technology they could be seen from orbit. There is no known way of making that many batteries to cover all that wind and solar. So we back your solar and wind with natural gas which is 33x more potent a GHG than CO2 (luckily it only staying the in atmosphere about 1/10th as long but still does more damage while its here). Also, all of our calculations around natural ga
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And the batteries necessary to store the power generated from wind and solar are going to come from where? If we made them with existing technology they could be seen from orbit.
What kind of metric is that? A meaningless one, that's what.
There is no known way of making that many batteries to cover all that wind and solar.
The more you build, the less battery you need, because you have more insolated solar panels, and more wind turbines currently being spun.
So we back your solar and wind with natural gas which is 33x more potent a GHG than CO2
Way to torpedo your own argument there, sport. If we burn the natgas it turns into CO2, and then it's less potent, as you say.
Also, all of our calculations around natural gas pretty much assume no leaking of methane which you can bet isn't true.
There's definitely leakage. That's definitely a problem which should be fixed. Also, let's face it, natgas isn't that great in general. Current production levels are dependent on fracking.
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There is no known way of making that many batteries to cover all that wind and solar.
The more you build, the less battery you need, because you have more insolated solar panels, and more wind turbines currently being spun.
Exactly backwards. The more you deploy wind and solar, the more batteries you need. Think about it, as wind and solar make larger and larger amounts of power, when that power supply drops out you need a larger and larger amount of backup to prevent blackouts. Which is why as you deploy more solar and wind, you burn more natural gas. And the more intermittent you make the grid's supply, the less efficient the burning of natural gas will be as more and more are burned when the plant is warming up as it wi
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It's not about trust, as the US is an oligarchy and not responsive to the will of the people. It's about nuclear power being far to expensive to justify, even for the country that threw hundreds of billions in the F-35 dumpster and set it on fire.
Cost is what is killing nuclear power, as no plant has been or will be constructed that wasn't done so without billions of
The hook: (Score:2, Informative)
... such as the concept being advanced by his own TerraPower venture.
Not even trying to hide it.
Bill Gates is a software guy, (Score:2)
so that makes him a nuclear engineer and stuff.
Re:Bill Gates is a software guy, (Score:4, Funny)
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Wait. Hadn't thought of that.
Shit.
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I'm 73 years old, OK?
Don't tell me about Bill Gates. I was there.
Feds support nukes, but not enough (Score:2)
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You have to reduce the cost of nuclear energy by about two orders of magnitude for it to be viable in 10 years; nuclear energy must be economical at a capacity factor of around 35-50% when compared to the alternatives.
While I like the NuScale concept, it only really addresses about 30% of the cost issues as I understand it.
Because Gates has been such a visionary (not) (Score:2)
Let's see, when he published his book The Road Ahead in 1994, he barely mentioned the Internet.
And pretty much every "innovation" from Microsoft under his leadership was stolen or purchased from someone else.
Not to mention the great technologies that they crushed out of existence (e.g., the Go corporation's PenPoint OS [amazon.com].
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What exactly do you think that Uranium is doing constantly? Where do you think that GEO-THERMAL ENERGY comes from? U think that the sun is warming our planet? Nope. A big part of that heat is from radioactive decay.
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Nuclear power is simply the release of energy stored over a very long time. As such it is simply adding heat to the environment. Solar power and wind power simply use heat that would be here anyway. Thus it is far better at preserving the environment than operating a nuke.
Wrong. It was stored when the supernova exploded pretty much instantaneously. Its just been stored for a very long time. And Solar and wind require batteries big enough to be seen from orbit. When you back solar and wind, you are also backing natural gas and pretty much embracing climate change. If you believe otherwise, you simply haven't done the math or understand how power is used. Both CA and German CO2 releases have gone up during the same period when wind and solar were being deployed in great
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Not before long i am afraid.
Molten salt reactors are a very interesting concept (You can do molten salt reactors with uranium too). But there are several technical hurdles to overcome. They are not necessarily nuclear. Some have to do with sustaining higher pressures and solving metallurgy challenges.
Nothing that seems scientifically undoable but huge investments would be required and private companies are simply not going to invest the billions needed. And industrialists will focus their efforts on the tec
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For a quick overview of what can be done with reprocessing you can google " breeder reactors"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Russian BN600 and BN800 do work already.Breeders would be a neat solution if nuclear energy was used more widely. But since the sector stagnates, there is no shortage of fuel to be spent in the classical way so not enough incentives to build such devices.
One of the well known by-products of reprocessing is plutonium, which has civilian uses. Right now, as i write this comment, a spac