Hacker News Reader

Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Fast breeders are not new. But they are even more difficult than plain nuclear reactors. France built some, but gave up on the technology.

View on HN

Yeah. The UK tried too, with a prototype reactor at Dounreay. We had all kinds of operational problems and gave up when it became apparent that the falling level of new nuclear installations meant that we weren't going to be short of uranium as a primary fuel. The economics, without a fuel shortage, were awful.

You could also reprocess the fuel, and use normal reactors.

At even greater expense. But even at best they are not competitive.

Not competitive with mining fuel, yes. But if people are worries about waste, it represents more than an order of magnitude reduction in produced waste.

We have an overwhelmingly better way to reduce the amount of waste produced: not make it.

Cheaper, too.

Nuclear remains the only carbon-free dispatchable source of energy, besides geographically limited options like hydroelectricity and geothermal power. Any realistic plan to decarbonize energy grids has large proportions of nuclear power. The ones that don't assume some some form of extremely efficient form of storage will come along and make storage costs negligible.

The real plans recognize numerous cheap forms of storage are already well known, and will be built out after there is something to charge them from other than burning carbon.

Efficiency has become much less important than capital cost because solar and wind have become so cheap.

Curiously, despite being "already well known" and "numerous" you neglect to actually mention any such storage system. Because then you'd actually have to defend the claims of such miraculously cheap storage. We've been down this road plenty of times before: we have no known way of storing energy at the required scales, your plan essentially amounts to "hope compressed air, hydrogen, or some other exotic form of storage becomes nearly-free".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com