Re:Britain has gone two months without burning coal to gener...
by Ma8ee on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @05:40AM
(#23475388)
No, it is not a red herring. It doesn't matter that it in theory has a lot of energy remaining if there isn't any cost-efficient and safe way to extract it. And the reason we aren't building them is because other forms of energy, including wind, water and sun, are cheaper.
Re:Britain has gone two months without burning coal to gener...
by pfdietz on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @09:37PM
(#23472942)
> Only, we're not building them. Because coal is better or whatever.
No, we're not building them because they are more expensive than ordinary LWRs, uranium is cheap, and separated plutonium from spent fuel has negative value.
Re:Britain has gone two months without burning coal to gener...
by alex_young on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @06:18PM
(#23471579)
> That's a red herring. The "waste" has a lot of energy remaining (otherwise, it would not be radioactive [1]). There are reactor designs that can use "waste" from current reactors as fuel.
Don't these reactors produce nuclear weapons products? Seems like that may be a reason we don't want a lot of them around.
Re:Britain has gone two months without burning coal to gener...
by dodobirdlord on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @11:46PM
(#23473699)
Rather, their fuel is plutonium. There's lots of plutonium in spent reactor fuel that can be extracted into more pure plutonium and used as fuel, but also to build nuclear weapons.
That's a red herring. The "waste" has a lot of energy remaining (otherwise, it would not be radioactive [1]). There are reactor designs that can use "waste" from current reactors as fuel.
Only, we're not building them. Because coal is better or whatever.
[1]: that's bit of a shortcut, but elements that undergo radioactive decay on timescales that make them dangerous are unstable enough, you can put them in a reactor and poke them to undergo that decay faster and get you electricity.