When asked about the federal government’s role, 41% of Americans say it should encourage the production of nuclear power.
Let’s get those new construction contracts signed!
Cool, now we just need to convince Americans 50 years ago of that and we might manage to save the planet yet.
You’re probably right, we’re fucked. May as well go harpoon some right whales.
Now if only they can get the NIMBYs in Nevada to support yucca mountain so we have a safe place to store the waste.
“What do they do with these after we seal them?”
“I hear they dump 'em in an abandoned chalk mine and cover them with cement.”
“I hear they’re sending them to one of those southern states where the governor’s a crook.”
“Either way, I’m sleeping good tonight!”
Will only happend if Las Vegas runs out of water and lose population. Then they’ll want the related jobs, income, and tax revenue. Until LV dies, it’ll never happen.
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Those rods still contain something like 90% potential energy that we’re discarding.
10%
U238 is not fissile and no closed breeding fuel cycle has ever been demonstrated to the point of running even a single full fuel load.
Why is it on Nevada to deal with your shit (and the costs of cleanup when you fuck up like WIPP or the German repository)?
If it’s a solved issue, then execute the solution where you make the mess.
If it’s any consolation, Nevada and a lot of the landlocked states are probably gonna get teabagged by climate change anyways, haha. Arizona is running out of water. My city in Montana nearly ran out of water a handful years ago, the largest one in the state. Like, out out. The river was only six feet deep and very narrow.
We nearly ran out of water again this past year when all the snow melted at once due to an early heatwave and cause the river to jump over 16 feet, which destroyed the water treatment facility and destroyed entire towns and national parks along with it. I moved to a different state after that. Somewhere less volatile.
I don’t mind more nuclear if it’s done in a modern and safe fashion. The US has a tendency to build old fashioned water cooled reactors that output nuclear waste that we have to find a place for. And we do stupid things like building them on fault lines and flood zones.
Why not build a pebble reactor? Or molten salt?
The current gen nuclear reactors are the only ones that have a chance of being built with all the known drawbacks. And even if we started building them like crazy, it would still not be enough to meaningfully contribute to mitigating climate change. All the other designs, like Thorium or SMRs are just pure science fiction and at best decades away from being viable.
We went to the moon in 8 years.
And it was just dumb luck that all the guys made it back safely.
At least that’s what they want you to think
If this magical reliable, cheap, abundant, fast to deploy molten salt handling technology existed, the people with it would be dominating the storage industry with carnot batteries on every abandoned (and active) coal plant as well as the solar industry with 2c/kWh CSP.
The reason not to build those things is we don’t know how yet? Not well, for power production.
There is a clear path forward. The only place where nuclear fits in the puzzle is specific locations where wind and solar are non-viable.
They are funding modern reactor research/development. One example is x energy.
Well its not really a choice with climate change about to wreck most things.
Yeah cooling them with river water won’t work in the summer pretty soon and since it takes almost 10 years to build it really isn’t a reasonable choice if you see how many renewables you can rollout in that time with that money
Good! We need more nuclear now more than ever.
Cool nuclear power is in again.
Some good news for once. All it took was the hottest year on record and a global plague that wiped out a bunch of the elderly anti-science crowd.
Maybe we can build a few more before we all fucking die
Nuclear is also effectively ‘fossil fuel’ in the way that there are limited supplies if we can’t magically make new reactor types work. But if the whole world switched to nuclear tomorrow we have like a few years of uranium.
if the whole world switched to nuclear tomorrow we have like a few years of uranium
I didn’t know that! Where’d you come across that nugget?
In the context of burner reactors (the only fuel cycle that has ever been demonstrated for a full fuel load and the only cycle with any serious proposal for a new reactor).
The amount of uranium the industry thinks they might be able to find (not the stuff already found) before the fuel alone costs more than renewable energy is about 10 million tonnes. Bear in mind the ore for the lower end if this holds so little uranium that you get less energy per kg of material processed than you do by digging up coal.
Each kg of natural uranium produces about 140GJ of electricity in the current fleet or 80-120GJ in an SMR (which is the main proposal for expanding generation).
Current world primary energy is about 550EJ/yr. Electrifying could reduce this to 300EJ, but demand is also increasing.
If you dug up all the known and inferred uranium reserves today and put it in SMRs like a nuscale or last energy one to produce 10TW (the average annual energy goal for renewables), it would run out halfway through 2025. It wouldn’t even be enough for a full initial fuel load.
If it were all EPRs and AP1000s (which have an amazing construction track record) and no demand growth was provided to offset efficiency gains if electrification, you might squeeze a decade out of it.
Check my math? I must have missed something. I’ve got 5000 years if nuclear continues to make up 10% of global energy production with no overall growth in production, 500 years if we go full nuclear, no growth in production.
For ease of math, I’ve assumed production rates will not change. This is a bad guess, but it’ll put the real answer between 500 and 5000 years.
This is quite the mental gymnastics routine. I’m going to give you a benefit of the doubt and assume you fell for it and are suffering cognitive dissonance rather than assuming you are lying on purpose.
You are conflating electricity and primary energy several times in a way that boosts the answer by around an order of magnitude each time.
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/WorldTrendinElectricalProduction.aspx
2680TWh is 9.6EJ, not 61EJ.
https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review
2680TWh is 9% of 29165TWh of electricity, not 10% of energy (either primary or final). Primary energy being around 600EJ by the same source. Final energy being harder to calculate because fossil fuels make a lot of waste heat (and you can choose to draw the boundary at the electrical power to the heat pump vs. the output), but usually estimated between 150EJ and 300EJ.
You could have very simply observed that 6 million is about 90 times 65,000, not 5000.
90 * 0.09 = 8.
There are 8 years of fuel for current electricity demand calculated from 11x (1/0.09) the current nuclear prodiction consuming 65,000t of NatU being ~700,000t with the known reserves you listed (there is more economically accessible uranium available than this, but not orders of magnitude).
Additionally 10-100MW scale SMRs being developed are much less efficient than large LWRs because the neutrons are largely wasted rather than making and fissioning Pu239.
This where you either apologise and stop pushing climate denial propaganda, or alternatively start a gish gallop about EBR, reprocessing, and Phenix confirming you made your mistakes in bad faith.
I dunno if I’m right but here’s what I did:
- I googled “total global yearly energy production” for the 617 EJ
- I googled “what percentage of energy comes from nuclear globally” for the 10%.
- The “67,500 tons/year” and “6 million tons recoverable” came from the article you provided.
The rest is arithmetic.
Your screenshot literally says electricity in the url, not energy.
You’re now actively pretending to not understand the distinction rather than reading your own sources. Why double down when it’s already very obvious what you’re doing?
Yes, that’s where I got the 10% from. Do you think I should use a different percentage?
Good call let’s just burn oil instead.
No just don’t vote stupid people into governments who don’t have a plan and are just saying “turn it off at that point I am not responsible anymore so I don’t care if there is not enough renewables”
Actually we are able to reuse spent fuel. I know it’s not the same comparison, but we have enough spent nuclear fuel to power the entire US for 100 years.
Thinking that a closed fuel cycle is probably possible in spite of spending 30 years and billions of dollars trying and failing isn’t the same thing as being able to do it.
Sign me the fuck up for nuclear, especially sodium reactors. I want it in my backyard, especially if it means I get a fucking excellent deal on a house. I hate the smoke every summer and the extreme weather and the lack of snow for our glaciers.
Naturally. It’s hard for Tesla owners to pat themselves on the back for being good people if the electric their car is running off of, was generated by fossil fuels, lol.
However, regardless of climate change and its effects on the planet, our government isn’t going to choose nuclear unless they can be assured that they will make the same amount of money off of it, if not more.
Pretty much everything boils down to money, regardless of what kind of BS they feed you.
It’s less-than-optimal, but internal combustion engines are so horrifically inefficient than even a coal-powered Tesla creates fewer emissions than a gasoline car.
I completely agree
Could just pull a play out of the playbook-> Pass regulation to make it prohibitively expensive and time consuming to build anything other than nuclear.
All cars are awful, but an EV consuming 140Wh of electricity from you hypothetical all-coal grid from 60g of coal is still far better than an ICE burning 160g of petrol in their brodozer which required burning another 30g of gas and oil to refine after being pumped from a low-yield shale patch using 140Wh of electricity using that same 60g of coal.
Damn, those are some fine looking swimming pools
They’re heated (and cooled) swimming pools
Let’s fucken do it, and if you disagree, maybe give this a quick gander
A tad too late. Those nuclear power plants won’t mean much by the time they are built
Ah, the Americans, who don’t understand that nuclear power in the US needs massive subsidies (23 billions) to keep from going bankrupt. That the old power plants are falling apart and prone to drought and that new ones will be too late when built and just come right to replace an old one and so won’t add to the grid.
While the $6 billion in the Infrastructure law is helpful to stem a potential flood of closures, it is still not enough, King said. In their modeling, the Rhodium Group pairs the $6 billion with the proposed existing nuclear production tax credit that’s part of the Build Back Better Act, which the Joint Committee on Taxation score estimates to be $23 billion.
Imagine that money being spent on research into better energy storage, while renewable energy sources are built, quickly, reliably and without subsidies, AND they are local sources of power that make money for local communities and give them independence from big energy producers - oh wait, America can’t have that much freedom.
