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Could you point to a source claiming there's not enough uranium ? As far as i can find uranium is not considered rare https://world-nuclear.org/information-libr

Could you point to a source claiming there's not enough uranium ? As far as i can find uranium is not considered rare https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/mining-of-uranium/uranium-mining-overview.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... Also could you point me to any meaningful and scalable storage implemented or being implemented anywhere in the world? Also what about materials used for solar and wind? Both requires insane amounts of material where a very significant part of that is rare earth. As far as I've seen the best bet for wind so far is power to x . X because we haven't figured out of it should be hydrogen, ammonia or something else, both of which would be very impractical as we've got no infrastructure to support it and it's also very inefficient in reality you'd loose like 80% of the energy generated so you'd have to build so much more capacity.

pfdietz 4y ago
That page lists uranium resources at 6,147,000 tonnes. Operating a 3 GW(th) LWR requires about 200 tonnes/year of natural uranium. 6000 such reactors (needed to produce the 18 TW of primary energy currently used by the global economy) would therefore consume 1.2 million tonnes of U per year. The resource listed on that page would last five years. So, either much larger uranium resource would be needed, or breeding would be needed, or both. As for your other questions: The first skates close to the position that no storage solution can ever be built unless it has already been built. This sort of reactionary attitude is just mindlessly obstructive, and does not reflect an attitude of constructive discussion. One can look at various storage technologies and see they scale very well. As for materials in solar/wind systems: they are materials that are used in general society at much larger scale. The world makes 2 billion tonnes/year of steel, for example. If global industrial society can produce these materials, it can produce them for the renewable energy systems needed to power it. If it can't, then not even nuclear can save it.
- Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
  Of course we need new types of reactors, we already have reactors that can use the waste from old reactors types like CANDU. Most reactors in use today are ancient and inefficient using only 4% or so of the potential in the fuel. Your back of a napkin calculation is disingenuous and misleading, for example it's estimated that sea water contains 4.5 billion tons tons of uranium. At the very least we have plenty of uranium to last until thorium reactors are ready. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    We do not have breeder reactors in a commercialized form. Rejecting solar/wind because technologies are not yet in widespread use, but accepting breeders with nuclear, is hypocritical. Recycling fuel from LWRs to make MOX is not the same thing. It would only extend that 5 years by a couple of additional years. Seawater uranium extraction has been demonstrated at the gram scale. It would have to be scaled up by something close to a factor of a trillion to power the world. Also, powering a single 1 GW(e) reactor would require a collector field on 170 square kilometers of continental shelf, in an area with good ocean currents. The levelized power/area would be considerably worse than PV. I will add that running a reactor on bred isotopes (233U, various Pu isotopes) presents an additional problem. All of these have considerably lower delayed neutron fraction than 235U. This means the reactors will be operating much closer to prompt criticality. One could resort to subcritical reactors, but that means adding a 100 MW (or so) 1 GeV linac to each to add the needed extra neutrons. And of course no such accelerator driven reactors have ever been built.

pfdietz 4y ago

That page lists uranium resources at 6,147,000 tonnes. Operating a 3 GW(th) LWR requires about 200 tonnes/year of natural uranium. 6000 such reactors (needed to produce the 18 TW of primary energy currently used by the global economy) would therefore consume 1.2 million tonnes of U per year. The resource listed on that page would last five years. So, either much larger uranium resource would be needed, or breeding would be needed, or both. As for your other questions: The first skates close to the position that no storage solution can ever be built unless it has already been built. This sort of reactionary attitude is just mindlessly obstructive, and does not reflect an attitude of constructive discussion. One can look at various storage technologies and see they scale very well. As for materials in solar/wind systems: they are materials that are used in general society at much larger scale. The world makes 2 billion tonnes/year of steel, for example. If global industrial society can produce these materials, it can produce them for the renewable energy systems needed to power it. If it can't, then not even nuclear can save it.

Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
Of course we need new types of reactors, we already have reactors that can use the waste from old reactors types like CANDU. Most reactors in use today are ancient and inefficient using only 4% or so of the potential in the fuel. Your back of a napkin calculation is disingenuous and misleading, for example it's estimated that sea water contains 4.5 billion tons tons of uranium. At the very least we have plenty of uranium to last until thorium reactors are ready. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium
- pfdietz 4y ago
  We do not have breeder reactors in a commercialized form. Rejecting solar/wind because technologies are not yet in widespread use, but accepting breeders with nuclear, is hypocritical. Recycling fuel from LWRs to make MOX is not the same thing. It would only extend that 5 years by a couple of additional years. Seawater uranium extraction has been demonstrated at the gram scale. It would have to be scaled up by something close to a factor of a trillion to power the world. Also, powering a single 1 GW(e) reactor would require a collector field on 170 square kilometers of continental shelf, in an area with good ocean currents. The levelized power/area would be considerably worse than PV. I will add that running a reactor on bred isotopes (233U, various Pu isotopes) presents an additional problem. All of these have considerably lower delayed neutron fraction than 235U. This means the reactors will be operating much closer to prompt criticality. One could resort to subcritical reactors, but that means adding a 100 MW (or so) 1 GeV linac to each to add the needed extra neutrons. And of course no such accelerator driven reactors have ever been built.