Nuclear startup Oklo gets thumbs-down from regulators

Re:Nuclear startup Oklo gets thumbs-down from regulators by pfdietz on Friday January 14, 2022 @10:59PM (#29943398)

Reprocessing only makes sense if you're going to put that separated plutonium into a fast reactor. MOX fuel's value for LWRs is so marginal that it's not worth reprocessing spent fuel to make it.

Seawater uranium extraction would have to be scaled up by a factor approaching a trillion if nuclear w. LWRs is going to fuel the world (to in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year), and it would only last a few thousand years.

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Re:Nuclear startup Oklo gets thumbs-down from regulators by adrianN on Saturday January 15, 2022 @01:07AM (#29944006)

A few thousand years is plenty of time to come up with alternatives.

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Re:Nuclear startup Oklo gets thumbs-down from regulators by pfdietz on Saturday January 15, 2022 @08:18AM (#29946105)

It's illustrative of the scale of U extraction that would be needed. A single 1 GW(e) burner reactor would require a field of U absorbers covering 170 km^2 of continental shelf (and to supply 18 TW of primary thermal energy would need about 6000 such reactors). The power/area would be considerably worse than solar (with solar capacity factor taken into account).

Anyway, I don't believe France (or anyone else) has any major program to bring seawater uranium extraction to market either.

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