4 ms·

> A few reasons: The amount of fissile materials on Earth isn't infinite. As far as I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong... this is not my professional

> A few reasons: The amount of fissile materials on Earth isn't infinite. As far as I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong... this is not my professional background), there are only ~230 years of uranium available. The idea of natural resources running out is always pushed about everything and is always wrong. However, in this case its wrong on an even more fundamental level. There is a gigantic amount of fertile (i.e. you need to hit it with one neutron to make it fissile) nuclear material around. Literally enough for 1000s of years. And volcanic activity is bringing up new such material from deeper in the earth. Any non insane nuclear strategy will eventually switch to breeder reactors and if you do, the amount of fissile material is essentially infinite. We already have gigantic amounts of fissile material in the form of spent fuel that we can use to start breeder reactors. This video goes threw how you can do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkZ0ZBAVDu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkZ0ZBAVDu4 > other fissile material to use (thorium?) There is both a huge amount of fertile material, both in the form of thorium (T-232) and what is usually called natural uranium (U-238). The things consider limited is Uranium-235 if I'm not mistaken. This is the only surviving naturally fissile material. But should it get down to it, I'm sure we could extend the amount of known reserves, just as we did for almost everything else. There is a pretty interesting story here about 3 different strains of nuclear that exists and of these the naturally fissile material of 2 of them is 'extinct'. Only U-235 is still sticking around. If not for that, it would have been much harder to start nuclear age. In the beginning there was a lot of effort put into breeder reactors because the amount of known U-235 was considered really small. So breeders had to be developed however as usually happens more U-235 was discovered once people started looking. And this sadly lead to way less emphasis being put on breeders. > there's still the constant need of water for cooling This is wrong. Almost any GenIV reactor is perfectly fine with being air cooled. In fact most reactors are perfectly fine in the icy tundra and the hottest desert on the planet. Consider that for a reactor that runs on 600C even a desert feels like being in an ice bath. As with everything nuclear, the real problem is that we stopped progressing in the early 1970s and are still using blown up submarine reactors. The real problem is not nuclear, but technology stagnation because of societal issues. > nuclear proliferation An over estimate problem. Depending on the design you can make it practically impossible to do anything. And if you can do anything it would be about 100x more effort then just developing the bomb the same way everybody else has. There are absolutely nuclear designs that you can deploy in most places in the world. > the small risk of malfunctions While true, the same can be said for wind and solar. Even current nuclear doesn't kill people. Future GenIV reactors potential for harm is very local. You could potentially imagine some accident that kills some people inside of the power plant. But unless you combine the story of 3 evil bond villains its hard to see how with such reactors you could seriously harm people outside of the plant boundary. So I would say in terms of risk, building 1000s of large towers to harness the wind, this is much less dangerous. > or maybe deploy fusion if we ever finally crack that egg Practically it makes no sense and will not be cheaper then fission for a whole host of reasons. Also, it still has proliferation concerns and still has the potential of accidents that could leak radiation. Fusion might make sense for a few space application, but practically for earth is mostly irrelevant.

meisanother 4y ago
>>> As with everything nuclear, the real problem is that we stopped progressing in the early 1970s and are still using blown up submarine reactors. The real problem is not nuclear, but technology stagnation because of societal issues. <<< About this, I wonder if the number of new works mean that we are getting over the bump of stagnation. Do you think enough is getting done on that end? Also, I wonder what type of work can have the most impact on this side. My Government (Quebec, Canada) closed our last nuclear reactor years ago, but there's still some knowledge base around smaller reactors in Universities. There's also plan to expand investment into private-held reactor development (https://www.cnl.ca/clean-energy/canadian-nuclear-research-initiative-cnri/ https://www.cnl.ca/clean-energy/canadian-nuclear-research-in...). Is this an avenue, considering the legislative/regulation overhead, that will ever be sustainable or it should be spearheaded by governments like it was in the 50s?
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Canada is actually the globally leading country in terms of commercial GenIV nuclear. Many nuclear companies are moving to Canada from the US and Britain because Canada has a sane legislator, utilities that want nuclear. Ontario is really at the core of global nuclear innovation. The CNSC is at the very lead in terms of GenIV (hate that term) reactor designs. They created an innovate new way of going threw licensing. See: https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-licensing-vendor-design-review/ https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li... Canada is also finally investing some amount of money into next generation fuel reprocessing. Canada might actually be the first country to really solve fuel reprocessing. Together with Moltex Energy they have a real plan of turning their CANDU fuel waste in fuel for next generation reactors. This kind of reprocessing is much better then the process used in France for example. It could be a model for the world. All that said, Canada is simple not the market that is big enough. Its not the US, India or China. So for real impact this technology has to move from Canada to the US. The US really did a horrible thing regulation, NRC is a terrible agency in a number of ways, specially when it comes to next generation reactors. The AEC had been far more active, since the NRC took over, almost nothing has been done. Thankfully the US DoE finally started to realize how bad they were doing in some aspects. They made some fantastic changes like the GAIN program. https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx However turning the DoE is like turning a ship 100x the size of the titanic. So the real hope is that the DoE will look into the process of the CNSC and do a co-licensing. Meaning that if a plant gets a license in Canada. It will be very easy to do the same in the US. That would be the best outcome. Nuclear safety should have one globally process, at least for the west. There are also some interesting things happening in the US. NuScale is a interesting company and their efforts while still being focused on PWRs does actually have number of things in its license that other companies will be able to use and build on. In addition to that, Kairos Power is doing some pretty interesting things trying to 'hack' the traditional licensing process. They are trying to do fast iteration with nuclear the same way SpaceX does in space. And have the regulator follow along so when they are ready to build a full plant, the regulator already knows a huge amount about the design. There is also some hope that some countries in Eastern Europe (Poland, Estonia ...) might start buying advanced nuclear plants, giving these plants more of a market. Since these countries don't have the very high level regulators, they might just mostly reuse the Canadian process. So a single GenIV plant built in Canada could be globally transformative. So yeah good things are finally happening again. A lot of credit goes to ground up nuclear movements kicked of partly by Kirk Soronson. He rediscovered a lot of the molten salt work and published. And many of the nuclear companies, like Terrestrial Power, actually met at these early events about molten salt and thorium. He himself has Flibe Energy, their vision is somewhat more complex and longer term but very interesting and fundamental. Its hard to see what happening in China. India has every intensive to do nuclear and they have some of the right ideas, but India is pretty slow moving. Europe is just highly divided and every country is cooking its own soup. So its hard for Europe to serve as market. That is why the US is so fundamental. Its the only market driven state where you don't necessarily need focused central government driven push for next generation nuclear. You will never have some Canadian startup building plants in France. So France did great with nuclear but also their technology stagnated and they are somewhat of an island. They threw away promising reactors like Superphonex, a GenIV reactor that was 3GW thermal and actually connected to the grid. But of course it was killed by left/green alliance and never revived. So lots of stuff happening, finally also some actual button up support that politicians can point to. I still believe in 2100 people will use mostly nuclear power and will look back on these times thinking we were idiots. "They discovered all the technology in the 60s, why are they not using it".

meisanother 4y ago

>>> As with everything nuclear, the real problem is that we stopped progressing in the early 1970s and are still using blown up submarine reactors. The real problem is not nuclear, but technology stagnation because of societal issues. <<< About this, I wonder if the number of new works mean that we are getting over the bump of stagnation. Do you think enough is getting done on that end? Also, I wonder what type of work can have the most impact on this side. My Government (Quebec, Canada) closed our last nuclear reactor years ago, but there's still some knowledge base around smaller reactors in Universities. There's also plan to expand investment into private-held reactor development (https://www.cnl.ca/clean-energy/canadian-nuclear-research-initiative-cnri/ https://www.cnl.ca/clean-energy/canadian-nuclear-research-in...). Is this an avenue, considering the legislative/regulation overhead, that will ever be sustainable or it should be spearheaded by governments like it was in the 50s?

panick21_ 4y ago
Canada is actually the globally leading country in terms of commercial GenIV nuclear. Many nuclear companies are moving to Canada from the US and Britain because Canada has a sane legislator, utilities that want nuclear. Ontario is really at the core of global nuclear innovation. The CNSC is at the very lead in terms of GenIV (hate that term) reactor designs. They created an innovate new way of going threw licensing. See: https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-licensing-vendor-design-review/ https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-plants/pre-li... Canada is also finally investing some amount of money into next generation fuel reprocessing. Canada might actually be the first country to really solve fuel reprocessing. Together with Moltex Energy they have a real plan of turning their CANDU fuel waste in fuel for next generation reactors. This kind of reprocessing is much better then the process used in France for example. It could be a model for the world. All that said, Canada is simple not the market that is big enough. Its not the US, India or China. So for real impact this technology has to move from Canada to the US. The US really did a horrible thing regulation, NRC is a terrible agency in a number of ways, specially when it comes to next generation reactors. The AEC had been far more active, since the NRC took over, almost nothing has been done. Thankfully the US DoE finally started to realize how bad they were doing in some aspects. They made some fantastic changes like the GAIN program. https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx However turning the DoE is like turning a ship 100x the size of the titanic. So the real hope is that the DoE will look into the process of the CNSC and do a co-licensing. Meaning that if a plant gets a license in Canada. It will be very easy to do the same in the US. That would be the best outcome. Nuclear safety should have one globally process, at least for the west. There are also some interesting things happening in the US. NuScale is a interesting company and their efforts while still being focused on PWRs does actually have number of things in its license that other companies will be able to use and build on. In addition to that, Kairos Power is doing some pretty interesting things trying to 'hack' the traditional licensing process. They are trying to do fast iteration with nuclear the same way SpaceX does in space. And have the regulator follow along so when they are ready to build a full plant, the regulator already knows a huge amount about the design. There is also some hope that some countries in Eastern Europe (Poland, Estonia ...) might start buying advanced nuclear plants, giving these plants more of a market. Since these countries don't have the very high level regulators, they might just mostly reuse the Canadian process. So a single GenIV plant built in Canada could be globally transformative. So yeah good things are finally happening again. A lot of credit goes to ground up nuclear movements kicked of partly by Kirk Soronson. He rediscovered a lot of the molten salt work and published. And many of the nuclear companies, like Terrestrial Power, actually met at these early events about molten salt and thorium. He himself has Flibe Energy, their vision is somewhat more complex and longer term but very interesting and fundamental. Its hard to see what happening in China. India has every intensive to do nuclear and they have some of the right ideas, but India is pretty slow moving. Europe is just highly divided and every country is cooking its own soup. So its hard for Europe to serve as market. That is why the US is so fundamental. Its the only market driven state where you don't necessarily need focused central government driven push for next generation nuclear. You will never have some Canadian startup building plants in France. So France did great with nuclear but also their technology stagnated and they are somewhat of an island. They threw away promising reactors like Superphonex, a GenIV reactor that was 3GW thermal and actually connected to the grid. But of course it was killed by left/green alliance and never revived. So lots of stuff happening, finally also some actual button up support that politicians can point to. I still believe in 2100 people will use mostly nuclear power and will look back on these times thinking we were idiots. "They discovered all the technology in the 60s, why are they not using it".