Re:Nuclear lighthouses built by the Soviets in the Arctic [v...
by donarb on Thursday January 07, 2021 @05:43PM
(#25678701)
Coal plants also create nuclear waste. Trace amounts of uranium and thorium in coal become concentrated after the coal is burned away, leaving high concentrations of nuclear waste.
Re:Nuclear lighthouses built by the Soviets in the Arctic [v...
by oddmiral on Friday January 08, 2021 @01:30AM
(#25682145)
So, you say, coal waste can be source of uranium for nuclear plants, right? How many tonnes of Uranium we can extract from coal ashes?
Re:Nuclear lighthouses built by the Soviets in the Arctic [v...
by mnw21cam on Friday January 08, 2021 @07:31AM
(#25683980)
Unfortunately, a lot of it just gets released into the atmosphere. Capturing it all would be the obvious next step, but it costs money.
Re:Nuclear lighthouses built by the Soviets in the Arctic [v...
by drran on Friday January 08, 2021 @08:03AM
(#25684231)
Just about 1% of fly ash is released into the atmosphere.
Re:Nuclear lighthouses built by the Soviets in the Arctic [v...
by bob29 on Friday January 08, 2021 @12:08AM
(#25681713)
How much does it cost to handle and transport these tiny pellets? How much energy goes into the materials needed to manufacture the containments? How much energy goes into mining and refining the ore and bringing it to the reactor?
Re:Nuclear lighthouses built by the Soviets in the Arctic [v...
by akho on Friday January 08, 2021 @05:36AM
(#25683352)
Mining and transporting coal is not free, and more expensive per MWh than nuclear fuel. Simply because of the volumes involved.
How much will it cost to re-capture an contain the CO2 generated by coal and gas?
https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html#howmuch
> If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here [https://whatisnuclear.com/assets/waste_per_person.pdf]. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data [https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/ghg_report/ghg_car...]).
> If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make this waste.
> For comparison, in 2007 alone the US burned 948,000,000 metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years! Granted, coal made a higher fraction of the country’s electricity, but the numbers are still crazy impressive for nuclear.
> The astoundingly low amount of nuclear waste is thanks to the near magical energy density of the atom.
More: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
Edit: replaced “containable” in second sentence with numbers