There are 400,000 tons of over 1000 nuclear radioisotopes created by 450+ power reactors that have never and WILL NEVER be dealt with. These 'spent' fuel rods need constant grid power to cool and staff to tend them even after the reactors are shut down and not making any money. Else wise they will burn unquenchably and be released into the atmosphere. A Pentagon study has found that this will obliterate any remaining Stratospheric ozone, and then the Earth's atmosphere will be blown into space by the solar wind. The 8th (or 9th) mass extinction (the human caused one) will assure Earth NEVER HARBORS LIFE EVER AGAIN!
I think in every Presidential debate this coming year, every candidate should be asked, “if elected, what specifically are you going to do to promote, fund, and support the develop of nuclear energy and to make this a priority for your Dept of Energy?”
The momentum,sadly, is building about as fast as the University of Queensland pitch drop experiment.
No amount of youthful excitement can overcome the political as well as the practical barriers to US new nuclear. The deplorable and unaccountable, performance of Southern Company and its contractors in building Vogtle is testament to the lack of skills, supply chain, technological prowess and management oversight capability in the US and will prevent any private company from investing in this technology in the next 30 years. Without freebies like wind and solar have gotten, its a non starter.
Nuclear looks to be the safest and most stable of the “green” options. If the government would spend their efforts toward nuclear as they are with wind/solar, we could have a safe and dependable grid. Wind/solar are not going to meet the reliability test for base load electrical power. China is racing to build a huge power grid using coal, gas and nuclear. They care less about renewables, except selling the US on renewables, such as batteries, solar panels and wind turbines.
Everybody deserves electricity, and nuclear power is the cleanest reliable energy source we've got. I guess I'll start calling myself "anti-blackout" from now on.
The obstacle is a Luciferian cabal intent on wiping out most of humanity, leaving what remains in the dark and in chains (virtual or otherwise), excluding themselves of course!
They own ALL the infrastructure, manufacturing. real estate and supply chains. They also control the courts, the banks, the legislatures, law-enforcement, the MSM, hospitals, schools and the minds of millions and millions of people.
This is no ordinary obstacle, no ordinary political battle as told to us on the local or national news. This is a spiritual battle coming to a massive crescendo.
"....We knew before the 2016 Election that the Clintons made a lot of money in the sale of US uranium, owned by Uranium One, to Russia.
As previously reported, the FBI had evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were involved in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering in order to benefit Vladimir Putin prior to Obama admin handing over 20% of America’s Uranium to Russia, according to a devastating report by John Solomon via The Hill.
Who was right in the middle of it all? HILLARY CLINTON. MILLIONS of dollars flowed to the Clinton Foundation as our Uranium rights were sold to Russia while she was Secretary of State...."
Forget NUCLEAR power plants... except nuclear bombs! These could do the trick.
Because the MATH (for those that still know that 2+2=4) is very simple to do:
Start date: October 1, 2019 - In order to reach the goals of a CARBON NEUTRAL (doesn't mean carbon free!) CIVILIZATION by 2050 (keeping the current level - 2019 - of energy consumption/waste), we are today (15SET23) already behind with: 2168 carbon neutral nuclear power stations. We need to build 3 each 2 days! Is this INSANITY ENOUGH for you?
Build 3 each 2 days, that's sounds like how the USA built Liberty ships in the WW2. I would go with build 20 each day. Factory built Molten Salt reactors ~100MWth ea so 2GWth/day, 732GW each year. So 25yrs to replace all the World's Energy Supply. Should be no problem. Except our Malthusian Psychopath Parasite Overlords would fly into a vile rage at the mere mention of such a plan.
Today no "country" has the capacity to do such task by itself! And since the propaganda "Climate Change" requires the entire Planet to "stop" pumping CO2 (why just CO2 beats me!) into the atmosphere there is no way in Earth to do that.
And to end with a FUN reality: "Molten salt reactors are a bad idea. The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment’s history is riddled with extensive problems, both during its operational lifetime and the half century thereafter. These problems were not accidental but a result of the many material challenges faced by the reactor itself.
Any other molten salt reactor will encounter these problems too. France’s Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, the Nuclear Innovation and Research Office in the United Kingdom, and other research laboratories have all drawn this conclusion. According to the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, “numerous technological challenges remain to be overcome before the construction of an MSR can be considered.”
Should molten salt reactors ever be constructed, they are unlikely to operate reliably. And if they are deployed, they would likely result in various safety and security risks. And they would produce several different waste streams, all of which would require extensive processing and would face disposal related challenges. Investing in molten salt reactors is not worth the cost or the effort."
I don’t think any of the challenges they faced with the MSRE were considered insurmountable. And the small reactors of the early days lost out to the big PWRs we use today for a variety of reasons. The biggest being Rickover had established PWRs as a naval propulsion source as early as 1955. That first mover advantage was overwhelming at that time.
Why would one country do it by themselves, this is for the whole world? Not much different than building any large machine. It's not rocket science you know. No matter that stooges keep telling you that it is.
Your fun reality is propaganda from the goofs who are trying to find suckers to buy their EPR, the Edsel of NPPs, the most expensive NPP on Earth. Only people building them are those who got ordered to by corrupt politicians. >3X the cost and 3X the build time of the APR1400.
They ran the MSRE at Oak Ridge for 4yrs, very successfully, shutdown for political reasons. China finished building their 2MWth TMSR in 2021, took 3yrs to build and are planning a 373MWth TMSR to be built by 2030.
And the 442MWth IMSR is now at stage 3 CNSC licensing. As for your fable: "....unlikely to operate reliably. And if they are deployed, they would likely result in various safety and security risks...". Oh sure CNSC the most stringent Nuclear regulator on Earth is going to take that to stage 3 and say "well hopefully you might work those problems out before it's built". If they had any of those problems you mentioned their plan would be in the wastebasket within 2 months of stage 1 review.
Copenhagen Atomics are the World's molten salt experts, they manufacture the complete apparatus and sell them globally, pumps, instrumentation, design software. They are planning on building modular 40MWe MSRs, factory built.
It ain't about CO2 and it ain't about Climate Change. The real problem is the legitimate aspirations of Developing Nations to reach a modern standard of living, with a functioning Industrial Economy, will require a 5X increase in World Primary Energy supply. There is no way fossil is capable of that economically. Or is renewables capable, not even close. Not even fossil + renewables. The only energy source capable of supply that level of energy economically is Nuclear. Just the resources of thorium and uranium on the accessible portion of the Earth's land mass would power that level of energy consumption for at least a 100Myrs. Fusion resources would supply that much energy past when the Sun dies.
Well, it's neither me or you that decide what gets done in this lovely Civilization of "ours"! So that 2nd paragraph just reflects your blindness to Reality.
China... They started that project in 2011, reducing the thing to just the 3 years of building is just another dishonest way of using data! We just need to wait and see the operational efficiency of China's TMSR.
As for the rest you either miss reading all the words I write by distraction or you do it on purpose. That's not my fable.
And WTF are talking about "operational efficiency"? They determine the plant efficiency during the design process. That is basic engineering.
Normally with a project the time is stated in time to build the project not from when it was first conceptualized, which could be decades earlier. Could be a team of 3 people working on establishing a new R&D program. So I already debunked everything you wrote, which makes your tale nothing but a fable.
Yes, I've already noticed that you do enjoy to manipulate data to fit your creed.
So for you the only time that matters is the actual time for construction... All the rest is meaningless. Wonderful planning. Clearly Chinese don't think that way.
Software modelling (design process) can easily be put aside by real operations. But I guess this doesn't matter also!
No better fable was written than "I would go with build 20 each day. Factory built Molten Salt reactors ~100MWth ea so 2GWth/day, 732GW each year. So 25yrs to replace all the World's Energy Supply. Should be no problem."
I've... Only showed the math for NUKES since this a NUKE post!
But for wind/solar, even worse indeed (using sq miles as measure of insanity):
For those greeners that don't like nuclear reactors to boil water to generate electricity - NOT AOC and ex-ER and fans - ...
433,500 square miles (1.122.765 Km² - The Plantation I slave on has a total land area of 92.226 km2 so imagine that!) of brand new carbon neutral WIND FARMS should be already built (just the farms, add the space for battery farms and so on, and you'll get the picture if the Green Religion isn't blocking your Thought process!)
The solution is quite obvious but none of us is willing to engage in it.
I agree that we should go big on nuclear, and not do more wind and solar! Also, battery storage is just way too expensive. Unfortunately the current culture in the media, and most everyone else is against us.
Mining and refining uranium(235) within the USA simply is not going to happen. Too many voters still have a colonialist meentality, "let all the dirty work be done by somebody else, somewhere else".
But Canada is close enough. Check out my substack blog or look into Cameco Corp(CCJ) yourself. Its been the largest uranium supplier in the wester world since the USSR collapsed.
The fuel issue underscores the concern from the 1960s that led to the development of exactly one tiny breeder reactor, EBR-II, 20 MWe, which Nobel Physics Laureate Hans Bethe described "the best research reactor ever built." Then the short-sighted Democrat party and President Cliton canceled the research program, destroyed the reactor, and filled its cavity in the containment building with concrete, in 1994. The fuel cycle facility is still operating, processing spent fuel from EBR-II.
Plutonium from breeder reactors can be used in place of HALEU, especially in PRISM reactors (the core of the Terrapower Natrium system), which are based on EBR-II. PRISM reactors can be configured to be plutonium breeders, break-even on plutonium, or net plutonium burners. How will the Kemmerer plant be set up?
The United States is producing about 1,800 tonnes of spent fuel per year. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 was supposed to "so something" about spent fuel, but the proposal was to try to hide it for 300,000 years. How daft can you get? In another stroke of genius, the act, now standing at $43 billion, explicitly forbids using any funds for reprocessing. That needs to change.
Argonne National Laboratory and Merrick & Company, with funding from the Landmark Foundation, developed a conceptual design of a 100 tonnes per year pilot pyroelectric reprocessing plant, and included estimates for scale-up to 400 tonnes per year: $900 million capital, $93 million/yr operations. The plant would occupy 52 acres. Compare that to La Hague's 470 acres to process 1,600 tonnes/yr. Processing cost would be 0.085¢/kWh, about half of La Hague. We need at least five of them, or better, twenty, because we already have 86,000 tonnes of spent fuel.
Unlike PUREX, pyroelectric processing separates all the actinides from fission products, not just uranium and plutonium. So the waste stream consists only of fission products, and needs custody for only 300 years, not 300,000. Raffinates from PUREX include long-lived TRU, so both sides need long-term custody. PUREX is only useful to recover fuel. It doesn't do much to address spent fuel custody. The pyroelectric method is the only one that makes sense.
Write to your congresscritter to urge revision of nuclear waste (spent fuel) policy to allow spending the Nuclear Waste Fund on processing -- which by the way reduces the storage cost by far more than the processing cost.
I just had some correspondence with Eric Loewen, the GE engineer in charge of PRISM. He said that plutonium was the nail in the coffin for the Versatile Test Reactor, a DoE project to replace EBR-II, so Terrapower isn't even going to try to fuel the Kemmerer plant with plutonium. That's why there's no fuel cycle facility planned.
Is there any recycling technology on the horizon that can process the used fuel without the need to extract the plutonium? In other words, the reprocessed fuel remains a non-proliferation risk throughout the process? Of course France has recycled used nuclear fuel for 30 years without incidence, but it’s too risky for the US to do.
So they won't let Gates build in China "for national security", lying creeps, and won't let him build in the USA either. These sleazoid, lying cretins should all be fired and their pensions taken away. And all their investments.
The caption in the "Global 'Clean Energy' Spending" graphic is inconsistent with the text. The graphic says $millions, but the text says $billions. I suspect the latter is correct.
Will there really be a lot of new capital invested in nuclear? Most of the supply contracts between electric utilities and wind and solar developers require that the utility purchase ALL of the power generated by renewables even though it is intermittent. But nuclear power can not be simply turned up and down with a switch , such as natural gas. Nuclear requires almost continuous output. So when solar and wind are producing near maximum. there will be surplus nuclear! Where will it go? (Batteries are too expensive) Who will invest in nuclear under such circumstances?
Just don't build the intermittent, unreliable wind and solar in the first place. It is a net cost on the grid. If it already exists, wait a bit. It will wear out in less than 20 years.
Nuclear can be made to load follow, they do it all the time in France, it is just a matter of what the market entails. Logically Nuclear and supercritical coal should always be run in baseload mode to keep their levelized capital cost low. And rationally baseload demand should be 60-80% of maximum demand to that should be no problem.
Dumping heavily subsidized and mandated wind & solar on the grid completely screws up grid economics. If you had enough nuclear to supply all baseload then logically you would be an idiot to want any wind whatsoever, you could only justify solar/batteries to supply daytime/eve shoulder & peak load. But most likely it still would not compete with nuclear/batteries or nuclear/molten salt storage. And it especially would not compete on emissions, both GHG and toxic emissions. Not even close.
This illustrates that the priority mandates need to go.
The reason for the molten salt store at Kemmerer is precisely so that it CAN be turned up and down. Absent that, an OCGT can be used, but sized for the variability, not the base load size that is needed to go with wind and solar plants.
There are 400,000 tons of over 1000 nuclear radioisotopes created by 450+ power reactors that have never and WILL NEVER be dealt with. These 'spent' fuel rods need constant grid power to cool and staff to tend them even after the reactors are shut down and not making any money. Else wise they will burn unquenchably and be released into the atmosphere. A Pentagon study has found that this will obliterate any remaining Stratospheric ozone, and then the Earth's atmosphere will be blown into space by the solar wind. The 8th (or 9th) mass extinction (the human caused one) will assure Earth NEVER HARBORS LIFE EVER AGAIN!
I think in every Presidential debate this coming year, every candidate should be asked, “if elected, what specifically are you going to do to promote, fund, and support the develop of nuclear energy and to make this a priority for your Dept of Energy?”
The momentum,sadly, is building about as fast as the University of Queensland pitch drop experiment.
No amount of youthful excitement can overcome the political as well as the practical barriers to US new nuclear. The deplorable and unaccountable, performance of Southern Company and its contractors in building Vogtle is testament to the lack of skills, supply chain, technological prowess and management oversight capability in the US and will prevent any private company from investing in this technology in the next 30 years. Without freebies like wind and solar have gotten, its a non starter.
biden admin seems to love slave labor mfg Chinese Solar panels and brags how it is financing $900 million of them in Angola? biden removed all tariffs and is using DPA to import more Solar + removing bans on Chinese transformers, switches and Grid equip. Nuclear's Hope is Mfg in China and imported to usa. Look at CHINA#1 AP1000 reactors--complete supply chain and IP of bankrupt Westinghouse. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s#xj4y7vzkg
Nuclear looks to be the safest and most stable of the “green” options. If the government would spend their efforts toward nuclear as they are with wind/solar, we could have a safe and dependable grid. Wind/solar are not going to meet the reliability test for base load electrical power. China is racing to build a huge power grid using coal, gas and nuclear. They care less about renewables, except selling the US on renewables, such as batteries, solar panels and wind turbines.
Everybody deserves electricity, and nuclear power is the cleanest reliable energy source we've got. I guess I'll start calling myself "anti-blackout" from now on.
Sorry, I just got a later version and I see you fixed it.
Typo in your first graph has the global spending on renewables versus nuclear in millions of dollars while your text says billions.
The obstacle is a Luciferian cabal intent on wiping out most of humanity, leaving what remains in the dark and in chains (virtual or otherwise), excluding themselves of course!
They own ALL the infrastructure, manufacturing. real estate and supply chains. They also control the courts, the banks, the legislatures, law-enforcement, the MSM, hospitals, schools and the minds of millions and millions of people.
This is no ordinary obstacle, no ordinary political battle as told to us on the local or national news. This is a spiritual battle coming to a massive crescendo.
Didn't Hillary Clinton sell a lot of US-based uranium to Russia?
She did, and got a lot of cash for doing it.
I'm all for nuclear energy and don't support "green" intermittent power sources, but your comment makes you sound like the village idiot.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/exclusive-russia-sold-stake-uranium-one-shortly-invading-ukraine-company-clintons-helped-russia-buy/
"....We knew before the 2016 Election that the Clintons made a lot of money in the sale of US uranium, owned by Uranium One, to Russia.
As previously reported, the FBI had evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were involved in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering in order to benefit Vladimir Putin prior to Obama admin handing over 20% of America’s Uranium to Russia, according to a devastating report by John Solomon via The Hill.
Who was right in the middle of it all? HILLARY CLINTON. MILLIONS of dollars flowed to the Clinton Foundation as our Uranium rights were sold to Russia while she was Secretary of State...."
QED.
Why use this questionable source to support your argument when you can go right to the Justice Department Investigation results.
The Biden DOJ is about the most questionable source on the planet right now. If Garland's mouth is moving, you know he's lying.
So this is one (among many) reason why the USofT wants to CONQUER RUSSIA! Poor dumb Ukrainistanians!
Forget NUCLEAR power plants... except nuclear bombs! These could do the trick.
Because the MATH (for those that still know that 2+2=4) is very simple to do:
Start date: October 1, 2019 - In order to reach the goals of a CARBON NEUTRAL (doesn't mean carbon free!) CIVILIZATION by 2050 (keeping the current level - 2019 - of energy consumption/waste), we are today (15SET23) already behind with: 2168 carbon neutral nuclear power stations. We need to build 3 each 2 days! Is this INSANITY ENOUGH for you?
Build 3 each 2 days, that's sounds like how the USA built Liberty ships in the WW2. I would go with build 20 each day. Factory built Molten Salt reactors ~100MWth ea so 2GWth/day, 732GW each year. So 25yrs to replace all the World's Energy Supply. Should be no problem. Except our Malthusian Psychopath Parasite Overlords would fly into a vile rage at the mere mention of such a plan.
Today no "country" has the capacity to do such task by itself! And since the propaganda "Climate Change" requires the entire Planet to "stop" pumping CO2 (why just CO2 beats me!) into the atmosphere there is no way in Earth to do that.
And to end with a FUN reality: "Molten salt reactors are a bad idea. The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment’s history is riddled with extensive problems, both during its operational lifetime and the half century thereafter. These problems were not accidental but a result of the many material challenges faced by the reactor itself.
Any other molten salt reactor will encounter these problems too. France’s Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, the Nuclear Innovation and Research Office in the United Kingdom, and other research laboratories have all drawn this conclusion. According to the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, “numerous technological challenges remain to be overcome before the construction of an MSR can be considered.”
Should molten salt reactors ever be constructed, they are unlikely to operate reliably. And if they are deployed, they would likely result in various safety and security risks. And they would produce several different waste streams, all of which would require extensive processing and would face disposal related challenges. Investing in molten salt reactors is not worth the cost or the effort."
I don’t think any of the challenges they faced with the MSRE were considered insurmountable. And the small reactors of the early days lost out to the big PWRs we use today for a variety of reasons. The biggest being Rickover had established PWRs as a naval propulsion source as early as 1955. That first mover advantage was overwhelming at that time.
,
We still don't use them, so this might reveal something.
Why would one country do it by themselves, this is for the whole world? Not much different than building any large machine. It's not rocket science you know. No matter that stooges keep telling you that it is.
Your fun reality is propaganda from the goofs who are trying to find suckers to buy their EPR, the Edsel of NPPs, the most expensive NPP on Earth. Only people building them are those who got ordered to by corrupt politicians. >3X the cost and 3X the build time of the APR1400.
They ran the MSRE at Oak Ridge for 4yrs, very successfully, shutdown for political reasons. China finished building their 2MWth TMSR in 2021, took 3yrs to build and are planning a 373MWth TMSR to be built by 2030.
And the 442MWth IMSR is now at stage 3 CNSC licensing. As for your fable: "....unlikely to operate reliably. And if they are deployed, they would likely result in various safety and security risks...". Oh sure CNSC the most stringent Nuclear regulator on Earth is going to take that to stage 3 and say "well hopefully you might work those problems out before it's built". If they had any of those problems you mentioned their plan would be in the wastebasket within 2 months of stage 1 review.
Copenhagen Atomics are the World's molten salt experts, they manufacture the complete apparatus and sell them globally, pumps, instrumentation, design software. They are planning on building modular 40MWe MSRs, factory built.
It ain't about CO2 and it ain't about Climate Change. The real problem is the legitimate aspirations of Developing Nations to reach a modern standard of living, with a functioning Industrial Economy, will require a 5X increase in World Primary Energy supply. There is no way fossil is capable of that economically. Or is renewables capable, not even close. Not even fossil + renewables. The only energy source capable of supply that level of energy economically is Nuclear. Just the resources of thorium and uranium on the accessible portion of the Earth's land mass would power that level of energy consumption for at least a 100Myrs. Fusion resources would supply that much energy past when the Sun dies.
Well, it's neither me or you that decide what gets done in this lovely Civilization of "ours"! So that 2nd paragraph just reflects your blindness to Reality.
China... They started that project in 2011, reducing the thing to just the 3 years of building is just another dishonest way of using data! We just need to wait and see the operational efficiency of China's TMSR.
As for the rest you either miss reading all the words I write by distraction or you do it on purpose. That's not my fable.
And WTF are talking about "operational efficiency"? They determine the plant efficiency during the design process. That is basic engineering.
Normally with a project the time is stated in time to build the project not from when it was first conceptualized, which could be decades earlier. Could be a team of 3 people working on establishing a new R&D program. So I already debunked everything you wrote, which makes your tale nothing but a fable.
Yes, I've already noticed that you do enjoy to manipulate data to fit your creed.
So for you the only time that matters is the actual time for construction... All the rest is meaningless. Wonderful planning. Clearly Chinese don't think that way.
Software modelling (design process) can easily be put aside by real operations. But I guess this doesn't matter also!
No better fable was written than "I would go with build 20 each day. Factory built Molten Salt reactors ~100MWth ea so 2GWth/day, 732GW each year. So 25yrs to replace all the World's Energy Supply. Should be no problem."
So good luck with that!
Apply that math and reasoning to wind/solar generation and the results are worse.
So all it really proves is that hte so-called "energy transition" is a fraud.
I've... Only showed the math for NUKES since this a NUKE post!
But for wind/solar, even worse indeed (using sq miles as measure of insanity):
For those greeners that don't like nuclear reactors to boil water to generate electricity - NOT AOC and ex-ER and fans - ...
433,500 square miles (1.122.765 Km² - The Plantation I slave on has a total land area of 92.226 km2 so imagine that!) of brand new carbon neutral WIND FARMS should be already built (just the farms, add the space for battery farms and so on, and you'll get the picture if the Green Religion isn't blocking your Thought process!)
The solution is quite obvious but none of us is willing to engage in it.
I agree that we should go big on nuclear, and not do more wind and solar! Also, battery storage is just way too expensive. Unfortunately the current culture in the media, and most everyone else is against us.
Mining and refining uranium(235) within the USA simply is not going to happen. Too many voters still have a colonialist meentality, "let all the dirty work be done by somebody else, somewhere else".
But Canada is close enough. Check out my substack blog or look into Cameco Corp(CCJ) yourself. Its been the largest uranium supplier in the wester world since the USSR collapsed.
The fuel issue underscores the concern from the 1960s that led to the development of exactly one tiny breeder reactor, EBR-II, 20 MWe, which Nobel Physics Laureate Hans Bethe described "the best research reactor ever built." Then the short-sighted Democrat party and President Cliton canceled the research program, destroyed the reactor, and filled its cavity in the containment building with concrete, in 1994. The fuel cycle facility is still operating, processing spent fuel from EBR-II.
Plutonium from breeder reactors can be used in place of HALEU, especially in PRISM reactors (the core of the Terrapower Natrium system), which are based on EBR-II. PRISM reactors can be configured to be plutonium breeders, break-even on plutonium, or net plutonium burners. How will the Kemmerer plant be set up?
The United States is producing about 1,800 tonnes of spent fuel per year. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 was supposed to "so something" about spent fuel, but the proposal was to try to hide it for 300,000 years. How daft can you get? In another stroke of genius, the act, now standing at $43 billion, explicitly forbids using any funds for reprocessing. That needs to change.
Argonne National Laboratory and Merrick & Company, with funding from the Landmark Foundation, developed a conceptual design of a 100 tonnes per year pilot pyroelectric reprocessing plant, and included estimates for scale-up to 400 tonnes per year: $900 million capital, $93 million/yr operations. The plant would occupy 52 acres. Compare that to La Hague's 470 acres to process 1,600 tonnes/yr. Processing cost would be 0.085¢/kWh, about half of La Hague. We need at least five of them, or better, twenty, because we already have 86,000 tonnes of spent fuel.
Unlike PUREX, pyroelectric processing separates all the actinides from fission products, not just uranium and plutonium. So the waste stream consists only of fission products, and needs custody for only 300 years, not 300,000. Raffinates from PUREX include long-lived TRU, so both sides need long-term custody. PUREX is only useful to recover fuel. It doesn't do much to address spent fuel custody. The pyroelectric method is the only one that makes sense.
Write to your congresscritter to urge revision of nuclear waste (spent fuel) policy to allow spending the Nuclear Waste Fund on processing -- which by the way reduces the storage cost by far more than the processing cost.
I just had some correspondence with Eric Loewen, the GE engineer in charge of PRISM. He said that plutonium was the nail in the coffin for the Versatile Test Reactor, a DoE project to replace EBR-II, so Terrapower isn't even going to try to fuel the Kemmerer plant with plutonium. That's why there's no fuel cycle facility planned.
Is there any recycling technology on the horizon that can process the used fuel without the need to extract the plutonium? In other words, the reprocessed fuel remains a non-proliferation risk throughout the process? Of course France has recycled used nuclear fuel for 30 years without incidence, but it’s too risky for the US to do.
So they won't let Gates build in China "for national security", lying creeps, and won't let him build in the USA either. These sleazoid, lying cretins should all be fired and their pensions taken away. And all their investments.
The caption in the "Global 'Clean Energy' Spending" graphic is inconsistent with the text. The graphic says $millions, but the text says $billions. I suspect the latter is correct.
Hi. You are correct. It's an obvious error. The graphic should have said US$Billions.
I corrected the mistake. Thanks. rb
Will there really be a lot of new capital invested in nuclear? Most of the supply contracts between electric utilities and wind and solar developers require that the utility purchase ALL of the power generated by renewables even though it is intermittent. But nuclear power can not be simply turned up and down with a switch , such as natural gas. Nuclear requires almost continuous output. So when solar and wind are producing near maximum. there will be surplus nuclear! Where will it go? (Batteries are too expensive) Who will invest in nuclear under such circumstances?
Just don't build the intermittent, unreliable wind and solar in the first place. It is a net cost on the grid. If it already exists, wait a bit. It will wear out in less than 20 years.
Nuclear can be made to load follow, they do it all the time in France, it is just a matter of what the market entails. Logically Nuclear and supercritical coal should always be run in baseload mode to keep their levelized capital cost low. And rationally baseload demand should be 60-80% of maximum demand to that should be no problem.
Dumping heavily subsidized and mandated wind & solar on the grid completely screws up grid economics. If you had enough nuclear to supply all baseload then logically you would be an idiot to want any wind whatsoever, you could only justify solar/batteries to supply daytime/eve shoulder & peak load. But most likely it still would not compete with nuclear/batteries or nuclear/molten salt storage. And it especially would not compete on emissions, both GHG and toxic emissions. Not even close.
This illustrates that the priority mandates need to go.
The reason for the molten salt store at Kemmerer is precisely so that it CAN be turned up and down. Absent that, an OCGT can be used, but sized for the variability, not the base load size that is needed to go with wind and solar plants.