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Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

With the cost of seawater uranium extraction getting so low I'm really not convinced reprocessing will ever become economical. Doing process stuff at scale in hot cells with remote handling equipment is expensive. Melting down solid fuel into vats makes fission products harder to inventory and track. It's just a pain.

Check out all this seawater extraction progress [1].

[1] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4271

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you claim "with cost ... getting so low"

however, neither your link nor anything from a reputable site that i've found through google says anything about costs or current industrial production. do you have any data to back up your claim of low cost, or is that claim purely speculation on your part ?

unless there's data that i've missed, it doesn't sound like seawater extraction is currently economically viable

There is no industrial production; it's in the R&D stage. Current costs are estimated at about 6x uranium mining. Thus, it is not currently economically viable. With R&D, costs are expected to go down. If we go in on nuclear long term, uranium shortages in a few thousand years will make uranium more expensive.

We're comparing long term scenarios here: reprocessing vs. seawater extraction. The reprocessing + hot refabrication process has been done and is extraordinarily expensive. If seawater extraction at scale is indeed viable, it's long term prospects in my view are way better than reprocessing.

https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...

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