New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD | Hacker News Reader

New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

theregister.co.uk

91 pointsxhrpost110 comments

"Since the Fukushima meltdown - as a result of which, not a single person is set to be measurably harmed by radiation - we know that nuclear power is safe."

It seems to me like the primary danger from radiation like that leaked from Fukushima would be an increase in cancer. I think it's a little early to be claiming that Fukushima will cause no increase harm to humans. There is already evidence that it caused harm to the surrounding environment, though butterflies are admittedly much more fragile than humans.

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/14/13274288-study...

One of the interesting things about the pale grass butterfly results is that until now scientists considered such insects to be fairly resistant to environmental radiation at a genetic level, notwithstanding their physical delicacy. There are some references to this in the Nature paper. Those findings must be very disturbing to prospective or recent parents that lived in the vicinity of the nuclear plant.

The article isn't very specific on the specific vectors at work here, but from what the scientists did, it sounds like those butterflies were very close indeed and literally ate radioactive materials. So it may not be relevant to local parents unless their kids eat a lot of dirt right outside power plants.

> ... unless their kids eat a lot of dirt ...

You don't have any kids yourself, I take. They are entropy machines! You never know what stupid (from adult perspective) thing they are going to do next.

Besides, it may be nitpicking, but kids eating dirt right outside power plants would die horrible deaths within days. It is the lesser doses in the rear by populated areas whose effects may not be so well understood.

> Besides, it may be nitpicking, but kids eating dirt right outside power plants would die horrible deaths within days. It is the lesser doses in the rear by populated areas whose effects may not be so well understood.

Nah, it's not nitpicking. It's just totally wrong.

The radiation that upon ingestion kills you is alpha/beta radiation, i.e. particle radiation. This radiation doesn't otherwise cause harm (except in very large doses,) because it's a particle radiation that can't penetrate solid matter.

Nuclear reactors handle their fuel carefully (well, that's the default assumption. I don't know if all do,) and so, only gamma-radiation actually escapes the power plant, except in emergencies, of course. Gamma-radiation permeates through solid matter without too much difficulty (well, depending on the (amount of) matter, but the human body is basically translucent to gamma radiation. This is why X-Rays actually work.) and therefore it really doesn't matter whether the kids do ingest it or not.

Now, coal power plants on the other hand are an entirely different thing. Fly Ash, which coal power plants exude in large quantities contains Thorium and Uranium in rather high concentrations. Ingesting that might indeed be hazardous, though I don't know if you'd die a "horrible death" from the amounts typically in the vicinity (around 1 mile or so) of coal power plants.

Fun fact: coal power plants actually cause more radiation pollution to their surroundings than nuclear power plants (during normal operation.)

EDIT: I was wrong, nuclear power plants also emit alpha and beta radiation, as well as gamma, neutron, neutrino and positron radiation and other stuff. But apparently in such small quantities that I really can't imagine anyone dying from eating the soil around a nuclear power plant. Proof: this is a German AKW (Atomkraftwerk, nuclear power plant) in Phillipsburg. Notice how it is entirely surrounded with fields where crops is grown? People and animals eat all this stuff. http://goo.gl/maps/jydz1 Actually, Biblis (another AKW) is even more impressive: http://goo.gl/maps/LP1Hi

That's great, but in this case we're discussing the environment around the Fukushima nuclear plant, where we have a distinctly abnormal radiological environment. The teratological damage we have observed in butterfly populations around that area is not necessarily going to show up in the human population or food chain, but I find it easy to see why people would lose sleep over the possibility: it is widely acknowledged that management of the nuclear plant and the Japanese government handled the situation poorly, so there is no reliable standard as yet by which to judge the safety of the affected population.

Now, I'm in full agreement about the filthiness of coal plants, and that many objections to nuclear power are the result of ignorance. However, nuclear advocates simply can't afford to be glib about the safety issues.

I'm not a nuclear advocate, though. And, I was responding to the GP, who distinctly mentioned nuclear power plants, plural, so not Fukushima in particular. I wouldn't want to eat anything that has been in a ten-mile radius around Fukushima. Not because it's likely going to cause me any harm, just… you know… to be safe.

Hah. The Register takes the IAEA statement, which says "To date no health effects have been reported in any person as a result of radiation exposure from the nuclear accident.", and turns it into the very different statement that no one WILL be harmed. I would give that a classification of Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.

Even though probably not very many people will get cancer that is traceable to the Fukushima disaster, it comes at a price -

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LdLr5QPqPgI/Tukyjp5ZdRI/AAAAAAAAOL...

- permanently abandoning several large towns.

I agree that the Register, and Lewis Page in particular, tend to roll some what fast and loose, but that is why I don't go to them for authoritative news, mostly for puns.

That said, this is inaccurate:

permanently abandoning several large towns.

As part of the process this risk is being evaluated, and while there are spots where some isotopes have concentrated (and will be cleaned up) the amount of radiation in all of the towns of Fukishima Prefecture is still less than the radiation the residents of Denver receive [1] [2]. So once the towns have been surveyed people will be allowed to move back. Reading the Economist the biggest challenge is that the Government would like to coalesce some towns to save money but that is causing complaints.

[1] http://www.epa.gov/radtown/cosmic.html

[2] http://isis-online.org/risk/tab7

Someone posted an article a while back that estimated that the levels people were exposed to would lead to about 194 extra cancers.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044477240457758...

Oddly enough that can sound good or bad but the wave directly caused ~15,000 deaths, so on that scale it's not really an issue.

I'm pro-nuclear, but I can't take this writer's hand-wavey dismissal of the risks seriously.

Honestly, I don't think it's that hand-wavey when nuclear has killed less people ever than coal does every year.

People are more frightened of things they don't understand, so effective advocacy of nuclear power requires making the effort to bridge the information gap. Also, people find concentrated acute harm more scary than dispersed chronic harm, which is why the idea of a plane crash is more disturbing than the larger number of people killed in road accidents.

If you've read Normal Accidents by Perrow, how would you respond to someone who said that a good reason is because of the extreme complexity of nuclear power coupled with our relatively new understanding of it? I think that's a pretty good criticism of nuclear power.

I haven't read that book, but I get the point about the critique. I think it's important to acknowledge the many errors that have resulted from both ignorance and negligence, but also to consider how scientific rigor and engineering methodologies like redundancy and planning for failure mean that we don't have to fly blind; also, the more we postpone implementation of alternative designs (such as those for thorium reactors), the greater the risks from maintaining outdated reactors become. There are many reactors that I'd like to see shut down for either design or geographic reasons, and the best argument for decommissioning them is that we can produce the same amount of power at lower cost and risk.

I would ask them if they feared computers, which are more complex, more recent, and used to control almost everything.

when computers break down, they don't kill people for the next hundred years.

i think that the biggest problem is the potential for making places on our planet unsuitable to live in forever (for all practical purposes). people look at chernobyl and see a place that will be dangerous to all life long after they're dead. they don't want that to happen again. fukushima is potentially the next such place, albeit on a lower scale.

the fact that radiation doesn't hurt doesn't help either. if our civilization ever falls, chernobyl will be a place cursed by gods.

I don't think there are any Chernobyl-like reactors in operation today. Even if the design of reactors like ones at the Fukushima plant may be considered horribly flawed (they should be able to cool themselves passively, with no external power input whatsoever, after someone hits the scram button) the magnitude of the disaster is much smaller.

An article posted here a couple days back mentions the hot zones around Fukushima are 3x less radioactive than downtown Denver. This is something to think about.

Also, we must consider what other options we have for power generation. Can solar, wind and hydro generate all the power we need? How long until we can build economically viable fusion plants?

> An article posted here a couple days back mentions the hot zones around Fukushima are 3x less radioactive than downtown Denver. This is something to think about.

Radiation is like cancer: one word to describe many different, related phenomenons. Denver radioactivity comes from radon, which is a relatively harmless gas as long as you allow it to disperse rapidly. OTOH pollution from nuclear accidents mainly comes from caesium which mimics calcium and get fixated on bones, thus provoking long, continuous, deep exposition to radiation.

True, but the decay products of radon are solid alpha-emitters that get lodged in people's lungs. And the comparisons to Fukushima are generally in terms of rem, which is already adjusted for biological effect.

The numbers quoted in the article were, IIRC, about cellular damage and aren't dependent of the isotope the person was exposed to. I agree some radioactive materials are much more dangerous than others and a noble gas has less chances of ending up in important molecules inside your body, but if the scale measures damage, not exposition, I assume they are equivalent.

solar can definitely fulfill any power requirements. the problem though isn't power generation but energy storage. if we had better batteries, we wouldn't be putting internal combustion engines in cars. gasoline is about two (or is it three? can't remember) orders of magnitude better at energy density than li-ion batteries.

i strongly suggest reading this blog http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/.

Why not check:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK

There have been extensive (safety oriented) modifications to the design since the Chernobyl incident:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf31.html

The second article says the modified reactors account for almost 50% of Russia's nuclear power generation.

That's the point - the retrofitted reactors are much safer than the original design. Even if 10 are still in operation, they are much safer (and better staffed).

I took "Chernobyl like" to mean "of the same design family".

Sorry. For me it means something that shares the design, the flaws and the criminally undertrained operators. While I wouldn't rate its current relatives as safe, at least they aren't disasters waiting to happen.

Don't forget about Centralia, Pennsylvania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania) where an underground coal fire in a coal mine has been burning since 1962, making the town uninhabitable.

And it turns out that radiation from coal plants is a problem - some claim it is more radioactive that nuclear waste! http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...

The risks of both nuclear and coal tend to be treated in hand-wavey ways. It's very unfortunate in either case.

Indeed - same boat.

I wondered if Lewis Page's infamous and uniquely biased ramblings, particularly on any issues of nuclear power, US military or IP but in general any topic, would ever grace HN's front page. Guess that day is today...

I actually stopped reading The Register, before discovering Hacker News, just to get away from that "journalist" whose daily prolificness on that site alone was disturbing.

Let's reverse the logic. Instead of talking about how much radioactive material we're pulling from the ocean, how much could we put in?

Am I mistaken in saying that we could put back in every bit of radioactive material we'd use until 5000AD and only double the natural background radiation amount?

I know the math isn't exact -- it's not a symmetry -- but on a rough-order-of-magnitude basis, is that a reasonable conclusion?

Probably makes sense, but you'd have hard time to pull this one off given the state of modern-day press and other media.

Suppose scientists calculate seawater contains, on average, N parts per million of Uranium and aim at inceasing it to just N+1 (assuming N >> 1).

Armchair `ecologists' -- think Greenpeace -- would go thermonuclear on you -- and mass media would give those `ecologists' much more print space and air time than to the scientists. Public opinion would be skewed from the get-go.

Essentially yes. The ocean is a fantastic dump for radioactive material. Also, it only takes 10 ft of water to block all radiation, alpha, beta and gamma.

However. Radioactive 'waste' is actually really useful. We can recycle it and use it. It's just a matter of regulations and cost. I'd much rather make our radioactive by products readily accessible for when we can use it as either fuel (only need a higher neutron flux) or extract elements for various uses.

No; the waste is far more radioactive than the fuel. Nuclear fuel rods are perfectly safe to touch when they're first made; they rapidly become more dangerous as they fission in the reactor. By the time they come out they are lethal. Then their lethality slowly dies off as the short-lived fission products decay. It would be a very bad idea to mix raw nuclear waste into the sea.

> but on a rough-order-of-magnitude basis, is that a reasonable conclusion?

No. Uranium is barely radioactive. In contrast the waste from a power plant is very radioactive.

Radioactivity is directly related to half life: The longer the half life, the less radioactive, and the reverse as well.

Uranium 235 has a half life of close to a billion years, and 238 (the much more common kind) of nearly 5 billion years. So it's barely radioactive.

Once you "cook" it in a reactor you generate all sorts of isotopes with much shorter half lives (so none exist naturally in any quantity). Those isotopes are also much more radioactive. The good thing is that the very powerful ones don't last long.

The "worst" isotopes are the medium lived ones. Short enough to be radioactive, long enough to last for centuries. Of those Strontium-90 and Caesium-137 are the main ones.

Now you also know why nuclear fuel reprocessing is a great idea. The uranium left behind after a pass through a reactor has not been changed (it's not any more radioactive than it was before it started) - you can isolate it chemically and use it again (only a small amount actually burns each time). You still need to deal with the dangerous stuff, but the quantity is massively reduced. (Technically you can burn that as well in a reactor to other shorter lived isotopes, and essentially destroy any hazard, but I don't believe anyone does that.)

Just to respond to your actual idea, there are proposals to bury waste in subduction zones. You can find more about it via google https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+subduction+zone

The DoE actually did extensive research into subduction encapsulation and while expensive (you are working at depths that crush most stuff we build up here) was technically quite acceptable (their design ended up essentially drilling what amounted to bore holes 5000' below the surface and dropping in waste from the top until its half full then covering it up and moving on. The advantage was that containment was expected to be lost but the material would diffuse into the mantle. In terms of cost though is was a couple of decimal orders of magnitude higher than Yucca Mt.

Why folks wont let engineers reprocess it and use a fast breeder to incinerate it is simply fear. (well and the fast that a fast breeder can also make stuff you don't want made)

So we'd essentially need a very tightly controlled fast breeder reactor or 20 that handle the world's less pleasant nuclear byproducts? It seems that if the breeder reactor is cohabitated with the reprocessing facility, most of the danger would be nullified (I imagine that transport is the riskiest part). Or perhaps people simply don't want those things to exist in concentrated form, ever, to eliminate the risk of someone getting their hands on it.

How many nuclear power plants of any sort has the US build in the last 4 decades? That's the reason why it's hard to get the concept of reprocessing nuclear fuel off the ground.

Agreed, I've always wondered how it would fair from a regulatory perspective if such a thing was positioned as a 'nuclear waste disposal system', probably not much better.

What I'd like to know is how come so many informed people, from all political sides, understand and want nuclear power, yet still we seem unable to endorse it?

This is simple math. Worried about energy? For the price of the stimulus you could give nuclear energy production a huge kick in the ass, make electricity cheaper for electric cars, and still get the stimulus you wanted.

Politics. Meh.

> yet still we seem unable to endorse it?

It's mostly financial. It's more expensive than alternatives. So unless you have someone "pushing" it, no one will install any.

I think reprocessing specifically is illegal, which means there's a pretty huge volume of high-grade waste to dispose of by sealing it in future-proof (expensive/limited) containment. If we repealed that ban and educated people about the realistic relative benefits of nuclear, I think it'd be a lot easier to sell the idea of a scale-up. I'm not really sure how we could educate everyone on the subject, though, without it getting drowned in noise.

Argonne National Laboratory tested a cohabited breeder called the Integral Fast Reactor. The reprocessing would happen on-site, using a process similar to electrolysis which never separates plutonium from the other transuranics. The material would never be in a form usable for bombs, and making it bomb-ready would be more difficult than just enriching uranium. But the fast neutrons in the reactor would easily burn up those transuranics.

What's more, they had very good passive safety. Fukushima had problems because it lost external power. Argonne shut off the power to their test reactor, and it just quietly shut down with no damage, simply due to the physics of the fuel and coolant.

They had it just shy of production ready when Clinton shut it down in 1994. But GE-Hitachi has a design derived from it, called the PRISM. The NRC has approved it for a demonstration reactor, and they're currently trying to sell it to the U.K. to destroy their plutonium stockpile.

Since the reactor can use U238, it's about a hundred times as efficient with uranium. Combining that with seawater extraction gives us fuel for a very long time: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/01/nuclear-options/

A pretty good book on all this was just put online for free, here: http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescription-for-the-planet...

There's also a new book by two lead researchers from the Argonne project, called Plentiful Energy, by Till and Chang. That one goes into quite a bit more technical detail. Another good online source is here: http://bravenewclimate.com/integral-fast-reactor-ifr-nuclear...

Steve Kirsch has a rather breathless but nonetheless informative summary here: http://skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifr.htm

Personally, I incline to the view that until we have a viable fusion option, it's worth building some IFRs.

Oh nice, thanks for all the info. Most of mine on the subject comes from the book form of this: http://www.withouthotair.com/

I was thinking that the bigger problem that would be bandied about about reprocessing would be with having the middle-lifetime contaminant isotopes concentrated in one place, for convenient pilfering and then manufacturing of a dirty bomb. Plutonium is obviously a worry as well, though.

Would it make sense to build those in conjunction with every nuclear reactor? (Would one reactor create enough waste for that other reactor to be worth building vs. dealing with shipping to a central location)

Not at all. Uranium-238 has a half-life of billions of years, and Uranium-235 has a half-life of about 2/3 of a billion years. This means that the natural decay rate, and thus the rate of generation of radioactivity is very low. However, if you pull that out of the ocean and put back things like Radium, I-131, Sr-90, etc. you will vastly increase that rate because such isotopes have a much lower half-life.

I really thought this was going to be about Thorium. Surprise - its about extracting Uranium from seawater.

Was thinking the same. "Not again", but pleasantly surprised.

Yeah, I'm actually pleasantly surprised that there are no caveats on HN yet either. Will wait and watch I guess.

I can not figure out why more effort is not put into thorium nuclear technology research. The only reason I have heard why thorium is not being considered is because it is not weaponizable. Are there any other reasons why thorium based nuclear fission is not being pursued as an energy source?

I was just about to ask the same question. I hadn't heard of Thorium-based nuclear power until now, so I just read a summary of it on Wikipedia [1]. It seems like a promising technology for further research, so I'm wondering what the source is for the "Thorium? Not again" reactions.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20034/what-practi...

From what I've heard, it's because we've now got decades of experience engineering uranium fission reactors, during which we've learned tons about the practical engineering challenges involved. While thorium looks great on paper, engineers expect we'll need decades of working with it before a similar body of expertise is available, during which accidents may occur that we know how to avoid with uranium, etc.

In other words, without uranium being scarce and expensive, and with thorium being lumped in the same "nuclear" bucket (with all the political hurdles that implies), it doesn't make much economic sense to start over with thorium.

The weaponizable argument was why research was shut down in the first place (also, pressurized water reactors were more useful for the US's naval fleet).

The technology has not been fully developed, there only have been research reactors. Developing reactors for it would require significant investments and apparently no government is willing to invest in it.

>there only have been research reactors

Well not exactly. They tried over here, but it eventually lead to nowhere. 2bn for 4 operational years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300

That was a solid-fuel reactor. The one people are excited about these days is liquid-fueled. Oak Ridge built a couple small reactors in the 50's and 60's.

Liquid fuel brings several advantages, like being able to extract fission products that poison the reaction, giving you very high fuel efficiency. And if it overheats, a frozen plug melts and drains all the fuel into a tank designed to passively cool it.

Uranium is cheap in most places, and we're already set up to use it. In order for thorium to be compelling, you need to either have problems with your uranium supply, or reactors that take advantage of its properties to be better in other ways.

That's why thorium is not a bigger priority. There is some R&D on it; for example, the Chinese pebble bed reactor program is working on using thorium.

I guess this is the natural outcome, when we expect the government to be the driver of scientific research. When the ones controlling the purse are also the ones we hold responsible for defense, then defense is bound to be a core focus of what gets researched.

> Are there any other reasons why thorium based nuclear fission is not being pursued as an energy source?

Mainly because we don't need it. It's got some advantages, sure, but not enough of them to make it worthwhile to spend on the money on it.

Its proponents seem to think that it would be significantly cheaper and safer [citation needed], which sounds worthwhile.

Could briefly expound upon your reasoning?

I agree - it probably would be significantly cheaper and safer.

But it will also cost a lot of money to develop, and even though it's safer, it's still nuclear, i.e. opposition to it will be unchanged. The worst is some people are demanding that they be installed with full containment domes, which wipes out any cost savings.

Anyone who wants to actually install one will probably be stymied, so no one wants to spend the money to develop something they can't use. And especially not if it costs the same as a regular reactor.

Instead people just stick with the tried and true since it minimizes risk of failure.

It can't melt down, it has relatively save spent fuel, its plentiful, reactors can be turned on and off with a switch, a Thorium reactor can be constructed at any size efficiently. Seems like a lot of advantages.

thorium reactors would make it a little bit harder to divert materials / technology / capabilities for weapons applications

I assume if you can extract Uranium from sea water, you are very close to extract Thorium. In any case, we are all set up to use Uranium and Thorium still require a lot of R&D, politics and safety regulation before we can start generating commercial power with it.

Thorium isn't soluble in water. (But there's enough thorium on land to last us for millennia, if we ran all of civilization on it at our present usage rate.)

Some salts are soluble in water:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solubility_table

But I agree - for sea water extraction to be practical, we would need to more or less exhaust the cheaper supplies. I suspect that, even if our consumption continues to grow at the present curve, if we don't figure out other ways to power civilization by the time we exhaust Uranium and Thorium, we really deserve to run our of fuel...

I thought that the Hacker News community was a lot more alert to avoiding upvoting linkbait articles like this.

First of all, the entire main story point of the article is based on PRESS RELEASES, not on peer-reviewed articles published in good-quality scientific journals.

Second, even if a statement like the premise of the article were published in a peer-reviewed article in a good-quality scientific journal, you would still want to check the methodology of the study described in the article for the "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" that Google's director of research, LISP hacker Peter Norvig, is always warning us about.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Third, the article is about a public policy proposal, so it's not just about physics, it's about economics and the psychology of the general public as well. As Thomas Sowell has written, "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." What the public wants is as much energy as can be humanly desired, with total safety, and at nil cost. The efforts of politicians to reconcile these contradictory desires may very well result in a regulatory pattern that doesn't let this new technology thrive. As a matter of economics, this technology should only thrive if it genuinely provides a better cost-benefit trade-off than other proposed energy technologies, which the article hand-waves away as an issue.

Discussions on Hacker News are better if they are launched by submission of better sources. This source, on this subject, is below general community standards. We can learn more about new possibilities in energy technology from (for example) Technology Review (several HN participants regularly submit articles from that source) or The Economist (I am one of several HN participants who submit articles from that source) or the better professionally edited mainstream newspapers or general news weeklies. We don't need to rush ahead to speculate about every new press release here.

The register can be good on tech issues, however it just goes completely mental if anyone mentions the words climate, nuclear, green or wikipedia anywhere within the editors earshot. Or if anyone shows Lewis a picture of some guns.

After a while I have decided that the most likely explanation for their behaviour is that they are mostly just trying to troll hippies and don't necessarily actually believe a lot of what they print. Trolling the readership is fairly common in the UK press anyway, the Mail having turned it into something of an art.

This idea only makes sense if the used-fuel disposal problem is resolved, and it is not at all resolved. It would be like claiming that the coal supply is unlimited, but without addressing the problem of emissions.

The used-fuel problem is already solved. The solution is just effectively permanently blocked by NIMBY-ism.

What is the permanent solution?

There are several.

One is to dump it in the Mariana trench, let nature push it back down into the crust.

If we're foresighted, we'll bombard a crater in the moon with it. It won't go anywhere, and if we need to get it back, there it is.

Space launch is risky, not just perceived as risky, actually risky. rocketry isn't one of those 5 9's of reliability activities.

Space launch is risky, not just perceived as risky, actually risky.

This is true now, it need not always be so.

Two words: rail gun.

Cooler: space elevator

Cooler, yes; sooner, no.

Shorter term (e.g. next century or so) there's also the easy option of just storing it somewhere safe and keeping an eye on it. There's so little of the waste, by volume, that it's not too hard to manage. The advantages of this scheme are:

1. It's easy. It's what we're doing right now.

2. It lets us recycle the slightly used fuel that comes out of our reactors.

Nuclear waste is not useless. Waste from conventional reactors is mostly usable as fuel, but mining it is cheap enough that this recycling isn't economically compelling yet. Our nuclear waste stockpile can be thought of as a strategic nuclear fuel reserve: a valuable resource set aside for the future.

'Someplace safe' would be the Trinity site. It's already irradiated, owned by the government, and no one is ever going to live there.

I now this, you know this ... preaching to the choir.

Bombarding the moon would have the side effect of kick-starting a space program, however.

I think I can answer that: here in australia, we have a lot of experience with all aspects of the nuclear industry, and decades of research and concerted policy development has finally led to a world class program to manage our small but significant legacy of radioactive wastes, that sets a standard : We're building a dirt track to a remote arid region, where the aboriginal traditional owners of the land are geographically isolated, politically underrepresented, and economically disadvantaged. Some fringe commentators try to make something out of the risk of transporting a range of materials (from contaminated soil to reprocessed fuel rods) through a jurisdiction that suffers an uncommon level of collisions and derailments, has minimal emergency service capacity and is the epicentre of the single greatest earthquake event in the southern hemisphere - but these concerns are effortlessly overrun by the brute application of raw political power. We're gonna build a shed at the end of the dirt road, and surround it with razor wire. What could go rong?

> The used-fuel problem is already solved. The solution is just effectively permanently blocked by NIMBY-ism.

Translation: "The used-fuel problem isn't solved." One mustn't dismiss the power of NIMBY. Now that Nevada voters have blocked any further development of Yucca Mountain, the U.S. has no repository at all, and waste continues to pile up at various locations near operating plants.

It is a very serious problem.

The journalist writes "we know that nuclear power is safe".

Some data in support of that (granted not from a neutral source):

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06app.html

That was addressed, though a bit off-handedly. The given time estimate assumes reprocessing. With sufficiently good reprocessing, there is no used fuel; there's just inert end-chain fission products that have had all the energy leached out of them.

The 5000AD date is admittedly just an estimate, but I am extremely sceptical of any such prediction. It just depends too much on what new uses for lots of energy we might come up with over the next thousand years. How many people will there be to use it? What standard of living will they demand? And that standard of living actually require more energy, or will other technological advances make us far more efficient with the power we generate?

The article even states that different groups estimates of how long Earth's uranium could last vary by more than a factor of 2.

I don't think it's an unfair way to express the estimate though. Sure, it might not really last until 5000 AD, but to me it simply implies 3000 "years of fuel", with a "year of fuel" being how we use fuel now. If energy consumption goes up or down it doesn't really matter - I still have a sense of how significant this energy source is.

Yes, but growth sucks. Assuming 3000 years in the article means what you think it means, consider exponential and linear growth:

If energy usage doubles every 30 years (pulled that out of my ass, it's not likely the trend but divides nice into 3000) then it will last us less than 200 years

If energy usage grows linearly increasing by the current amount every 30 years (so in 2042 we are using double, and 2072 we are using triple) it's lasts us a bit over 400 years.

And in any case, 3000 years is still finite. There will come a time, if we don't go extinct or experience the rapture, when nuclear fuel will run out, and we'll have to use renewables anyway. Fortunately, the sun puts out a rather large amount of power, and even 200 years is a pretty good amount of time for figuring out how to capture it better.

The question really is if going to something 'harder' now is worth while. We do something more expensive (and have large oppertunity cost) to avoid problem we will only really have in 200 years.

If you look at the change of technology in the last 100 years you can only assume how small this problem will be then.

The question really is if going to something 'harder' now is worth while. We do something more expensive (and have large oppertunity cost) to avoid problem we will only really have in 200 years.

If you look at the change of technology in the last 100 years you can only assume how small this problem will be then. I mean in 200 years using solar energy will possibly be cheaper then fossil fuel, and if it is not we will be better equiped to solve the problem then.

I do not want to say that we should not keep working in direction of renewable energy but I think it is a valid question.

The problem with nuclear power generation today is it's always way more expensive than promised, in often unpredictable and sometimes not-easily-quantifiable ways. Add the uninsurable nature, the constant risk of human error/decision making increasing the risk factor (eg. not decommissioning old plants), and waste problem, and it gets even less attractive. Meanwhile, renewable energy and power grid improvements continue to be underfunded, and everyone claims the only alternative is coal.

It's not inherently more expensive than promised; that's caused by a combination of first-of-a-kind construction and unpredictable political and regulatory situations. In places like South Korea, where they have a more reasonable regulatory situation and they build a bunch of each type of plant, they've had a better track record with completing nuclear plants on time and within an affordable budget.

"too cheap to meter" they promised.

In the article linked to from this article:

A preliminary report by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency has stated that the response to the Fukushima nuclear incident was "exemplary" and that nobody has been harmed by radiation exposure resulting from it.

That seems to contract what the Japanese government's own panel concluded:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18718057

The article on safety this article links to is a year older than the article itself (though same author). It doesn't seem responsible to me to leave out a year of analysis of the effect of Fukushima, and I don't think it's been a particularly positive year. In some ways if Fukushima was a result of human error (as that report indicates), then that's positive: it's resolvable. But if we scaled nuclear power up to 10x what it currently is I would worry about more human error, and introducing nuclear power to places that have even more problems with reliability, or cultural problems with creating reliable systems. A nuclear power plant in Nigeria? I'm sure there are very reliable people who could staff and monitor the plant, and that those people could be attracted to the jobs, but I don't trust the political infrastructure of the nation to ensure that all actually happens. That no one uses shoddy concrete, or pushes problems under the table instead of resolving them and opening oneself up to blame, or manipulates risk assessment to protect their personally acquired power in the working of the plant.

I think right now our biggest problem is not energy sources but energy storage.

If we had an amazing vessel for energy storage, the sourcing problem would become relatively moot - there's so much available passive renewable energy, all we need to do is collect it.

I decided to look up some of the authors previous articles and he has an pretty impressive range of alien conspiracy theory and climate change related articles including:

"NASA: WE'VE FOUND Four-toed NON-HUMAN FOOTPRINTS" "Martian lakes seen where NASA Curiosity rover WON'T BE GOING" "Using Facebook causes less eco damage than farting, figures show" "Climate was HOTTER in Roman, medieval times than now: Study" "Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show" "Amount of meat we eat will barely affect future climate change"

http://search.theregister.co.uk/?author=Lewis%20Page

as rauljara mentions, the claim that fukishima was victimless is a bit bloated.

nothing i've seen or heard leads me to believe that nuclear waste management is a sustainable thing.

this sounds like the oceanic equivelant of fracking.

nothing i've seen or heard leads me to believe that nuclear waste management is a sustainable thing

Keep reading.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf04.html

Disclosure: Former US Navy radiological controls MOS.

We seem to be discussing pros and cons of nuclear. But is this assertion of reasonably extractable uranium from sea water even true? Considering the source to be theregister, what I would like to know is whether the energy available as per the paper is really as big as claimed? or is it just clever math? Keeping aside the issue of waste disposal, are the costs really that low or is the cost cleverly buried elsewhere?

this is an old non-story. the energy required to extract the low levels of uranium from huge volumes of seawater outweigh the energy that uranium can produce as fuel for a nuclear power reactor.

Shouldn't we be conserving nuclear fuel for space flight and other operations where you require a very dense power source?

Why conserve it? There's tons of it.

5000AD estimate is complete bullshit. Our energy consumption doubles every ~20 years (15 to 35 by various sources).

In only 10 doublings (200 years) our energy consumption will increase 1,000 times.

After 20 doublings (400 years), it will increase 1,000,000 times.

I expect by then we will be using mostly fusion and/or the energy of the Sun (and/or some new energy source).

If you keep that extrapolation up, you are going to get an argument for starting construction on a Dyson sphere. That may be the correct goal, but we really are in no position yet to reason about the necessity or practicality of such energy expenditure.

Don't you think we might not stay on that curve forever?

At some point growth in access to western amenities (climate control, transportation, better food) will level off, and population growth will level off.

Also in 1000 years we'll have athletes who finish races before they begin.

> Don't you think we might not stay on that curve forever?

Not forever, but the exponential growth is inevitable while the resources are available and are used more and more efficiently.

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