Posted on 10/09/2020 10:38:41 AM PDT by grundle
People don’t like nuclear due to the vast amounts of “wastes” and that’s Jimmy the peanut idiot’s fault. Had the USA been allowed reprocessing tech 96% of nuclear waste is perfectly usable fuel for the next round of generation. The resulting fission products do not need millions of years of storage and their volume is only a tiny fraction of the total spent FUEL volume. But it’s political not a technical issue with spent fuel.
Even without reprocessing with a simple repackage into long-term storage forms the whole waste volume can and should be disposed of in platonic basement rocks that I can name at least 5 places in North America that have stable geology on the time line of 1 plus billion years. Even unprocessed wastes only needs a few million years of isolation.
I’m a geologist who drills wells of this type for salt water disposal at depths of 20,000 plus feet or 5500 plus meters in the Midland basin. PCR bits are more than up to the task as are a 3 or 4 string cases design. Look at the end of the report the feds have collected more than enough money in the disposal fund to cover deep borehole disposal even walking away from the boondoggle of yucca mtn.
Add in the rapid advances in seawater uranium recovery which guarantees a billion years worth of uranium supplies to all of humanity and nuclear is the ONLY truly renewable energy source with effectively unlimited growth and use potential. The costs of seawater uranium even today would only raise the LCOE a few CENTS per kilowatt hour. Uranium is such a dense and powerful energy source over 200 MEV per atom vs a few individual EV or electron volts per atom for a chemical reaction such as combustion it’s literally 200 million times more dense per atom and thus per KG of fuel. Currently the fuel in a reactor makes up 1 to 2 % of the total operating cost of the power plant. Doubling the source of the uranium in price per kilogram doesn’t double that amount as the raw fuel is only 35% of the total cost of fuel fabrication to begin with. Even at $500 kg of uranium at it’s natural isotopic ratio of 0.7% U235 as input into the enrichment and fabrication plants would add a few CENTS to the output power break even costs. $500 is the upper end of the current seawater uranium recovery costs, the Japanese have demonstrated on a prototype level costs of $250 kg and expect it to be $100 kg at commercial scale. The current cost of Australian yellow cake the cheapest in the world is $30 to $80 for comparison.
A geological scientist that is a conservative? Inconceivable!! Are you a minority in your field?
The stigma of nuclear power needs to be removed. Of course the only way to do that is if the MSM would help remove that stigma. And I don’t see that happening any time soon. But with all the technological advances there should be a safe and cheaper way to produce nuclear energy. And it sounds like you and some of the other scientists are close.
From the article:
Verdolini emphasized this merely describes the past — not necessarily the future. That’s a critical distinction, because the study also notes that if we reach a time when fast-responding energy storage is prevalent — when, say, large-scale grid batteries store solar or wind-generated energy and can discharge it instantaneously when there’s a need — then the reliance on gas may no longer be so prevalent.
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