3 ms·

> In every other turbine? You were presenting it as necessary. It's neither necessary nor particularly prevalent for onshore wind. Enercon use none, Vestas' sm

> In every other turbine? You were presenting it as necessary. It's neither necessary nor particularly prevalent for onshore wind. Enercon use none, Vestas' smaller turbines use none. Other DFIG and EESG turbines use none. Smaller offshore turbines overlapwith onshore ones. The larger offshore turbines are experimenting with iron nitride which is better but unproven. Some designs (like the e126 and family) already use negligible copper. The rest of the industry is reducing it. > Don't worry we're running out of the sand to make glass too, and it's also an environmental nightmare. [2] That's the kind of sand you need in much larger quantities for the concrete in a nuclear reactor. It doesn't matter if glass sand is smooth so you can get it from a desert. For Uranium leaching of low grade ore (the only kind available in a mass expansion scenario) you need 40-200kg of sulfuric acid mixed with >3000kg of ore per kg of Uranium https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/mining-of-uranium/in-situ-leach-mining-of-uranium.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu... 1kg of natural uranium produces about 1kW for 3-6 years. 1kg of PV including glass but not the frame produces about 5W net for 30-50 years. The sulfuric acid quantity is larger in an ISL mine, and the crushed ore slurry quantity is orders of magnitude larger. > It's not my sea mining, I was responding to your false statement that we're anywhere close to running out of uranium. There's plenty on shore for hundreds of years, and by then I'm sure we'll have a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem, either removing it from the sea, or moving to breeder reactors, or the thorium cycle. Put on your problem solving hat my friend. It's your scifi scenario. There is only enough for the current fleet (about 2% of world primary energy) for 100 or so years. Expanding it enough to make a difference reduces this to a couple of decades. Sea mining for a burner reactor is a ridiculous proposition if you look at the actual numbers. Breeder reactors don't exist. No power generating reactor has ever run on fissile fuel bred using an equal or smaller amount of fissile fuel. Even if a commercial design is made, most of the world will never be allowed to operate one, and it won't be developed on any timescale to make a difference. The problem solving hat is on, and the solution doesn't involve nuclear. It can't solve more than a tiny fraction of the problem, and it can't even do that well or quickly. There's no reason to deal with the downsides.

arcticbull 4y ago
> You were presenting it as necessary. A lie is defined as an intentionally false statement. You were accusing me of intentionally misleading. I was doing no such thing. You taught me something, which I found interesting but ultimately not super relevant. Consider alternatives to avoid inflammatory language. > It's your scifi scenario. There is only enough for the current fleet (about 2% of world primary energy) for 100 or so years. One hundred years is more than enough time to figure out how to extract it practically from sea water, which is recognized as a viable solution [0]. In fact it's already only 2x as expensive as mining - and the cost of uranium is today is $0.0015/kWh. The reason we haven't done it is because we don't need to. > Breeder reactors don't exist. Yes they do. However, we didn't pursue commercialization because we don't need to - because there's a ton of fissile material for conventional reactors. To quote wikipedia "interest declined after the 1960s as more uranium reserves were found." And further, thorium is also super abundant (2 million tons of reserves as of 2011, and the USA has the largest) and again, CANDU reactors can already operate on natural uranium, thorium - or on plutonium - without enrichment, mitigating the proliferation risk you identified earlier. [1] Note that thorium is about 3X as abundant as uranium, and spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed and used as fuel for other reactors, albeit in a process with its own trade-offs. There is no shortage of fissile material. Objectively. Move on. > The problem solving hat is on, and the solution doesn't involve nuclear. Agree to disagree. I'm ending this conversation here. [0] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extract-uranium-seawater-nuclear-power https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  You're conflating fissile and fertile again. A CANDU cannot run on thorium as thorium doesn't fission. It can run on U233 or U235 or plutonium at low concentration, and it can theoretically breed U233 over unity, but noone has tried. Just as noone has run a breeder reactor on fuel bred in a breeder reactor and extracted. Neither can be done without reprocessing capable of at least temporarily extracting weapons grade material. Expansion of nuclear power to more than an insignificant amount will reduce those 100 years to a decade or two. Nuclear is irrelevant to decarbonization on a world scale, any effort spent building burner reactors is a waste of resources that could do twice as much elsewhere.

arcticbull 4y ago

> You were presenting it as necessary. A lie is defined as an intentionally false statement. You were accusing me of intentionally misleading. I was doing no such thing. You taught me something, which I found interesting but ultimately not super relevant. Consider alternatives to avoid inflammatory language. > It's your scifi scenario. There is only enough for the current fleet (about 2% of world primary energy) for 100 or so years. One hundred years is more than enough time to figure out how to extract it practically from sea water, which is recognized as a viable solution [0]. In fact it's already only 2x as expensive as mining - and the cost of uranium is today is $0.0015/kWh. The reason we haven't done it is because we don't need to. > Breeder reactors don't exist. Yes they do. However, we didn't pursue commercialization because we don't need to - because there's a ton of fissile material for conventional reactors. To quote wikipedia "interest declined after the 1960s as more uranium reserves were found." And further, thorium is also super abundant (2 million tons of reserves as of 2011, and the USA has the largest) and again, CANDU reactors can already operate on natural uranium, thorium - or on plutonium - without enrichment, mitigating the proliferation risk you identified earlier. [1] Note that thorium is about 3X as abundant as uranium, and spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed and used as fuel for other reactors, albeit in a process with its own trade-offs. There is no shortage of fissile material. Objectively. Move on. > The problem solving hat is on, and the solution doesn't involve nuclear. Agree to disagree. I'm ending this conversation here. [0] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extract-uranium-seawater-nuclear-power https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

Schroedingersat 4y ago
You're conflating fissile and fertile again. A CANDU cannot run on thorium as thorium doesn't fission. It can run on U233 or U235 or plutonium at low concentration, and it can theoretically breed U233 over unity, but noone has tried. Just as noone has run a breeder reactor on fuel bred in a breeder reactor and extracted. Neither can be done without reprocessing capable of at least temporarily extracting weapons grade material. Expansion of nuclear power to more than an insignificant amount will reduce those 100 years to a decade or two. Nuclear is irrelevant to decarbonization on a world scale, any effort spent building burner reactors is a waste of resources that could do twice as much elsewhere.