Re:A tale of two particles: Not all radioactivity is risky o...
by Schroedingersat on Thursday December 08, 2022 @08:05AM
(#33907443)
You're conflating fissile and fertile again. A CANDU cannot run on thorium as thorium doesn't fission. It can run on U233 or U235 or plutonium at low concentration, and it can theoretically breed U233 over unity, but noone has tried. Just as noone has run a breeder reactor on fuel bred in a breeder reactor and extracted. Neither can be done without reprocessing capable of at least temporarily extracting weapons grade material.
Expansion of nuclear power to more than an insignificant amount will reduce those 100 years to a decade or two.
Nuclear is irrelevant to decarbonization on a world scale, any effort spent building burner reactors is a waste of resources that could do twice as much elsewhere.
A lie is defined as an intentionally false statement. You were accusing me of intentionally misleading. I was doing no such thing. You taught me something, which I found interesting but ultimately not super relevant. Consider alternatives to avoid inflammatory language.
> It's your scifi scenario. There is only enough for the current fleet (about 2% of world primary energy) for 100 or so years.
One hundred years is more than enough time to figure out how to extract it practically from sea water, which is recognized as a viable solution [0]. In fact it's already only 2x as expensive as mining - and the cost of uranium is today is $0.0015/kWh. The reason we haven't done it is because we don't need to.
> Breeder reactors don't exist.
Yes they do. However, we didn't pursue commercialization because we don't need to - because there's a ton of fissile material for conventional reactors. To quote wikipedia "interest declined after the 1960s as more uranium reserves were found."
And further, thorium is also super abundant (2 million tons of reserves as of 2011, and the USA has the largest) and again, CANDU reactors can already operate on natural uranium, thorium - or on plutonium - without enrichment, mitigating the proliferation risk you identified earlier. [1] Note that thorium is about 3X as abundant as uranium, and spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed and used as fuel for other reactors, albeit in a process with its own trade-offs.
There is no shortage of fissile material. Objectively. Move on.
> The problem solving hat is on, and the solution doesn't involve nuclear.
Agree to disagree. I'm ending this conversation here.
[0] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor