4 ms·
Because uranium is cheap, so why bother? The price of nuclear energy is dominated by the cost of building the reactor, not the fuel.
by neutronicus 15y ago
Because uranium is cheap, so why bother? The price of nuclear energy is dominated by the cost of building the reactor, not the fuel.
- regomodo 15y agoWaste disposal/processing isn't cheap and Thorium produces significantly less waste than Uranium.
- neutronicus 15y agoThorium waste will be indistinguishable from Uranium waste for the next 100 years, from a public policy perspective, unless we first build a reprocessing plant. (To be more specific, it's the absence of nuclides with mass number greater than 238 in Thorium waste that makes it less problematic than Uranium waste. These nuclides dominate the long-time, i.e. millenium, radiation profile of the waste. The short-time, i.e. decade/century, radiation profile of the waste is dominated by lower-mass-number fission products, abundant in both types of waste) Reprocessing plants are extraordinarily expensive to build and operate, more so even than reactors themselves.
- KeithMajhor 15y agoDid you watch the video? The reactors he presented appeared to be much simpler (so... they'd likely be cheaper).
- neutronicus 15y agoAs a nuclear engineer, I doubt it.
- ingeborgsjon 15y agoSorry to say this but you have probably been deceived by the nuclear industry. First of all thorium is much cheaper (about 160 times I think), secondly it's far more abundant and third LFTR has a much better design. The industry dismissed liquid reactors because of the problem extracting weapon grade material. Uranium based reactors where not as safe nor as cheap. During the cold war this made sense but not today. It has also been about people protection their jobs. The uranium based industry can't say that something else is better because then they might lose their jobs. And who do you think the politicians ask when they want advice?
- neutronicus 15y agoSorry to say this but you have probably been deceived by the nuclear industry. Or perhaps you've been swept up by the breathless prose of popular science articles? As far from peak uranium as we appear to be, there is simply no need to explore alternative fuel sources. Fuel is not scarce. The capital (political and financial) to build infrastructure - both power plants and reprocessing plants - is. In that climate, the (never-been-built-or-licensed) LFTR is only a game-changer if its construction (and licensing and R&D) costs are an order of magnitude lower than those of current-gen reactors. This I highly doubt.
- lloeki 15y agoAnd thorium is bound to be even cheaper, as it's readily available in massive quantities.
- neutronicus 15y agoLike I said, the cost of fuel doesn't matter. Fuel could be free, and a new reactor would still take forever to pay for itself.
- ingeborgsjon 15y agoBut if you look at the design you will see that it's much more simple than a PWR. All calculations I've seen puts the cost of construction well below the cost of modern PWRs. And the cost of fuel is still important, uranium isn't getting cheaper.
- neutronicus 15y ago> All calculations I've seen puts the cost of construction well below the cost of modern PWRs. And what calculations are those?