> the opportunity cost of reusing the spent fuel is not a major issue
Uranium mining is extremely destructive to the environment, not to mention using a lot of energy, so this isn't just opportunity cost, it's externality cost.
Uranium mining is extremely destructive to the environment, not to mention using a lot of energy, so this isn't just opportunity cost, it's externality cost.
I'll assume that you are a proponent of Solar/Wind/Hydro. Which also have externalities, including human death, but let's ignore that.
But I am onboard with all of those. My problem is that I think solar, wind and hydro are not enough. We don't have a way to store energy in massive ways, so in order to account for cloudy days, non-windy days and nights, we need something else.
I see uranium filing that niche. If not uranium, what else? All the options I see mentioned are along the lines of "let's continue burning stuff, then, and keep adding solar/wind/hydro".
But that is what we are doing now already. And the temperature and CO2 concentration graphs keep going up. So, what is the alternative?
So we can build either energy storage or nuclear plants. Storage must surely be the better choice!
It seems quite obvious to me that it will be cheaper, faster, simpler and more reliable, not least because it will be distributed and we can engage many more people to the task of building storage than we can to the task of building nuclear plants.
Heat storage, pressure storage, gravity storage, hydrogen, methane, batteries, all so easy to make (compared to nuclear plants) that you can have thousands of "small town scale" projects going at the same time.
With few notable mega-projects, solar has still grown in capacity equivalent to several nuclear reactors per year the past few years. I think a similar thing will happen with energy storage.
It's kind of happening already (several storage projects are underway and some are online) but the results are good and it's early days.
The New Zealand government estimates that a gravity storage scheme with a capacity of 5TWh would cost 14 billion NZ dollars to construct.
https://www.mbie.govt.nz/building-and-energy/energy-and-natu...
We need all of it. ASAP.
It's "yes and", not "either-or".
I enthusiastically support any and all nuclear options. Especially traveling wave and SMRs.
Unfortunately, nuclear won't arrive in time to keep us under 2C. Fortunately, we'll still need it to help with going net-negative.
Is it solely regulatory red tape? Do we not have off-the-shelf designs (i. e. from when the French built scores of plants), or are they dependent on a catalog of no-longer-available parts?
I was hoping for modular reactors that were neighbourhood-scale-- the size of a a small shipping container, and able to be delivered rather than site built. Maybe RTG instead of steam-turbine for mechanical simplicity.
The difference is a fusion's byproduct is helium, and if the core "melts down," it implodes rather than explodes. Fission creates waste who's half life is 4.5bil years (which is demonstratedly toxic to humans, hence where I imagine the apprehension for bringing reactors online is coming from)
My current belief is that it just comes down to lack of investment.
Compare the current outlooks of biofuels, "next generation" nuclear, and now green H2.
The IRA is building a H2 economy, from scratch. Soon, the govt will pay anyone anywhere a stupid amount of money to make "green" H2 (details are still being hashed out). It's stupid to not get in on the action. So that govt investment begat a torrent of private investment. And now we're off to the races.
Just like how the Obama administration bootstrapped PV solar and lithium ion batteries, in 20 years we'll look back at the passing of the IRA as the genesis of our H2 economy.
In their times, both biofuels and nuclear were supposed to be the next big thing.
But instead of forging industrial policy and committing to moonshot level investments, our neoliberals predecessors had faith these nascent industries would magically emerge from the "free market".
How so? Any pointers for more info - I'm somewhat ignorant on this topic.
First you don’t actually reduce the number of atoms of highly radioactive waste products. You’re simply chemically separating material not transmuting it to something non radioactive. Which doesn’t really make the nasty stuff easier to deal with.
Second, you end up contaminating a great deal of additional material which then becomes a high volume of low level radioactive waste. At the same time you need an input stream of various chemicals, steel, rubber, etc to replace what’s been contaminated/used which then causes environmental harm when you’re extracting them.
Finally plutonium is useful as fuel, but the ratio of u235:u238 changes so you still need enrichment. Which means at the end of this process you’re spent a great deal of effort only to throw away most of the uranium recovered.
There are reactor designs that don’t need enrichment such as CANDU, but they need far less raw uranium mined in the first place.
TLDR; What you’re recovering is u235 which is a small percentage of spent fuel and it takes a huge amount of resources to get at it.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
[1] https://www.nrdc.org/bio/nrdc/epa-tries-sign-away-authority-...
Nuclear fission based on uranium is a lot of things, but definitely not "clean" or "green" even on the raw material sourcing side like the pro-nuclear crowd keeps blathering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
Making human lives better means that you have to do dirty, destructive work like mining, drilling, and manufacturing. To some degree, we're trading pristineness of nature for increased living standards for people. As technology improves, there is potential for our footprint to get smaller, but that's almost always balanced out (or more) by an increase in population.
It's easy to make the whole country a nature preserve. You then either import things that were produced in a dirty manner overseas, or your living standards drop to that of our Aboriginal ancestors.
Depending on your criteria, no human industrial activity is green. Digging up precious metals for solar panels? Pouring tons of concrete in mountain valleys to make dams? Building forests of windmills?
At the end of the day, the question becomes “does this enable us to reduce our carbon emissions whilst keeping a reasonable quality of life”. And to that question nuclear is without a doubt a good thing
Solar and wind don't leave a ton of radioactive material behind.
But they are not a plausible global replacement at this point, and - without radical storage technology changes - for the foreseeable future.
So really what you should be asking is, is nuclear cleaner than fossil.
Do they need to be? Cut back on crap (i.e. advertising billboards, city lights), invest into decentralized storage for households (let's be real, even the demand of a home with two teenagers with gaming rigs can easily be met with a standard Powerwall), and get as many industrial processes shifted to shift operations to save on nighttime base load. The remainder can be, at least in Continental Europe and America, caught by a well-built continental grid (China manages thousands of km long lines!) and biogas/hydrogen peakers.
The power usage of these is pretty small.
> Invest into decentralized storage for households (let's be real, even the demand of a home with two teenagers with gaming rigs can easily be met with a standard Powerwall)
For those of us who are upper middle class or beyond, this is no big deal, but the additional apartment cost for someone living paycheck to paycheck could be quite noticeable (or the cost to taxpayers to subsidize this).
Further, increased electrification of loads that are nighttime-centric (EV charging, heating, industrial loads) makes this less tenable. Base load is going to go up.
> and get as many industrial processes shifted to shift operations to save on nighttime base load
This might mean tripling the amount of capital equipment, which has its own costs and impacts. Electrification of industrial loads is more capital-intensive; tripling the cost of this is even worse.
It sure seems like it? Any proposal the implies a rapid attenuation of capacity or consumption is no small thing to consider. The technical and political barriers to achieving them are likely orders of magnitude worse than those involved in taking up some of the capacity with nuclear.
OK buddy
Everything has externalities, even the "renewables" (which are not, by definition, because nothing is renewable) - if you want to have an adult conversation you need to talk in terms of pros and cons across multiple dimensions.
This is an obviously silly structure and yet it persists.
In reality, Uranium is mostly mined by leaching which is the least destructive form of mining. Not to mention the quantity actually mined is several orders of magnitude less than other things we mine in much more destructive fashions like Copper, nickel, zinc etc
EDIT: if you're downvoting this, do you expect that we can create and maintain a technological life without building blocks like metals and energy minerals? Did that M1 CPU just appear out of thin air and started powering itself?
And if we do need minerals to create a good life for the 7 billion people we have, do these simply materialize?
We have to dig for it. Holes are ugly and messy. But the alternative is living in one.
We have massive numbers of people who are still really poor. Making quality infrastructure and products for these people involves lots of brand-new metals.
In the meantime, increasing quality and recycling is merely a multiplier increasing the efficiency of our system. You can't recycle your way to economic greatness.
And in fact, a major part of uranium is in-situ leaching, which is less enviromentally damaging than most other mining.
Zoom right in on Olympic Dam on Google maps.
This is the largest known single deposit of uranium in the world.
Now zoom out. Keep zooming out. Now zoom out further. Australia is big.
Uranium mining causes approximately zero damage.