4 ms·

Thank you for the detailed responce, am I correct in understanding this is for once-through fuel cycle? I was not able to find figures for total burnup once fue

Thank you for the detailed responce, am I correct in understanding this is for once-through fuel cycle? I was not able to find figures for total burnup once fuel reprocessing is taken into account. I think analysing large-scale transition to nuclear only makes sence with reprosessing. > The typical ore mined in a mass expansion scenario (0.01-0.03%) would have an energy density between that of coal and crude oil. This is really interesting, because I have seen a lot of hand-wringing about lithium mining, describing it as physically impossible. We seem to be mining 8.5 billion tons of coal a year, and 100k tons of lithium a year. Assuming 2% for lithium, that puts us at 4 million tons of ore. So we need 2000 times less earthmoving equipment to achieve the quantity of lithium we currently consume? I am assuming here that 'Coal' is the name for stuff that's dug out of the ground, so comparing 'coal' and 'ore' is correct for estimating earthmoving required. > Diurnal lithium battery storage is irrelevant where good pumped hydro is available To me the entire point of this scenario is, what do I do if my country doesn't have it. That's going to be the dilemma facing half the world.

defrost 4y ago
> I have seen a lot of hand-wringing about lithium mining, describing it as physically impossible. While cost remains to be seen, it is clear the amount we need to mine is much lower than that of coal. Very little mining or extraction is actually physically impossible, just as safes are rated not as "impossible to crack" but "takes an expert with best tools 16 hours to open", known measured resources are ranked by economic feasibility .. how much effort will it take to produce the end product (and is that cost worth it). Lithium | Uranium | Copper | etc .. there are pros, cons, issues and problems all the way through any mineral extraction process - the one solution not proposed nearly enough is for populations to just consume less. Re: Lithium specifically: > Let us consider, for example, electric cars. To give an idea of this effect, producing a battery weighing 1,100 pounds emits over 70% more carbon dioxide than producing a conventional car in Germany, according to research by the automotive consultancy Berylls Strategy Advisors. > Furthermore, lithium mining requires a lot of water. To extract one ton of lithium requires about 500,000 liters of water, and can result in the poisoning of reservoirs and related health problems. These are our trade offs. [1] https://phys.org/news/2023-01-paradox-lithium-net-zero-emissions.html https://phys.org/news/2023-01-paradox-lithium-net-zero-emiss...
- lazide 4y ago
  No safes I’m aware of are rated to ‘16 hours with tools’, though I imagine some engineer somewhere promised a particular customer that. Best normal ratings are TL-60 (aka tools for an hour), or TR-60 (tools and a torch for an hour). A big, big difference.
  - defrost 4y ago
    If you lean back and look up there's a chance you might see the point that you missed. Assume I said "X hours" if that makes you more comfortable.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
> So we need 2000 times less earthmoving equipment to achieve the quantity of lithium we currently consume? Both metals have a variety of mining methods including extraction in liquid form, and both need a leaching step in large amounts of chemicals if dug up whole (with the exception of canadian ore which is high purity) but that's the general gist of it. The Lithium requires between 1 and 3 orders of magnitude less space/industry/chemicals and a bit less energy for the same target use. Nickel, manganese, copper and phosphorus also have significant impact but still about the same total impact as the Uranium for a 90-95% grid decarbonization use case up front (but longer lived and recyclable for the battery ingredients). Building a mix of solar and onshore wind to cycle the battery requires a subset of the ingredients of a reactor like an EPR (with maybe a bit more concrete, zinc and steel depending on wind capacity factor, but much less chromium and a number of other higher impact materials). Offshore wind is about the only renewable technology with significantly larger mining impact. It is better than fossil fuels or delay but does need to come down (Iron Nitride should help here, but there is still a lot of steel and copper -- although an order of magnitude less than the nuclear and fossil fuel interests will tell you). > Thank you for the detailed responce, am I correct in understanding this is for once-through fuel cycle? I was not able to find figures for total burnup once fuel reprocessing is taken into account. I think analysing large-scale transition to nuclear only makes sence with reprosessing. Reprocessing does very little without a positive breeding ratio. Unless you create more Pu239 than you consume U235 it's just a small boost in U235 efficiency. You can verify this by looking at the isotope mix of waste for your reactor of choice and the isotope mix and burnup of MOX. An APR has a breeding ratio around 0.6 and consumes 60% of the bred Pu without reprocessing. A PHWR has the advantage of (in principle) being able to extract the last 5-15% of energy without plutonium extraction (which is incredibly polluting and expensive), but it doesn't result in much of an increase in net output, nor does it reduce the amount of Pu240, Pu241, Am242 and Am241 (the very bad high level long lived alpha emitters) that must be dealt with by more than 20%. Breeders have a host of technical barriers, and a breeder-heavy strategy is actually impaired by spending money and the fairly finite easily accessed startup fissile material on PWRs. The net result of most proposals is about 10x the burnup (as fertile material is notnplannednto be recovered and multiple roundsnof breeding and reprocessing result in problems that don't have proposed solutions), but there is no plutonium separation process that is either affordable or environmentally sustainable if scaled to the TW level. > To me the entire point of this scenario is, what do I do if my country doesn't have it. That's going to be the dilemma facing half the world. Sodium ion batteries are a commercial technology now at the 1-5GWh level with a massive scale up being completed in June (100s of GWh/yr), and use all abundant materials (Iron, sodium, carbon, water, aluminium). Pumped hydro is also far less limited. Other chemistries that are in scale up include Zinc Bromide (there is a process that can retrofit existing lead acid production being scaled among others), Iron, and Vanadium (often available as a side product of Uranium in greater quantities at about 1-3hrs of storage per year of uranium fuel), but generally not valuable enough to extract). The main geopolitical danger is access to silver, and building a local industry. Also buying lithium on the open market has far fewer opportunities for geopolitical domination than systems dependent on fossil fuels or U235 as there are many low quality deposits and the bottleneck is largely extraction. Your country could spend $3-10k per US-citizen-of-primary-energy on imported batteries or $300-1k on imported lithium once then develop domestic recycling and manufacturing and then you are done for decades (maybe replacing 5% of it per year once the kWh per kg of Li stops improving).
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Also thank you for maintaining civility and expressing genuine curiosity. It's easy to forget that not everyone who is a fan of nuclear is just using it as a tool to attack anything that threatens fossil fuels just hecause those ones are the loudest my distaste towards some of the other commenters caught you in the crossfire and I apologise.

defrost 4y ago

> I have seen a lot of hand-wringing about lithium mining, describing it as physically impossible. While cost remains to be seen, it is clear the amount we need to mine is much lower than that of coal. Very little mining or extraction is actually physically impossible, just as safes are rated not as "impossible to crack" but "takes an expert with best tools 16 hours to open", known measured resources are ranked by economic feasibility .. how much effort will it take to produce the end product (and is that cost worth it). Lithium | Uranium | Copper | etc .. there are pros, cons, issues and problems all the way through any mineral extraction process - the one solution not proposed nearly enough is for populations to just consume less. Re: Lithium specifically: > Let us consider, for example, electric cars. To give an idea of this effect, producing a battery weighing 1,100 pounds emits over 70% more carbon dioxide than producing a conventional car in Germany, according to research by the automotive consultancy Berylls Strategy Advisors. > Furthermore, lithium mining requires a lot of water. To extract one ton of lithium requires about 500,000 liters of water, and can result in the poisoning of reservoirs and related health problems. These are our trade offs. [1] https://phys.org/news/2023-01-paradox-lithium-net-zero-emissions.html https://phys.org/news/2023-01-paradox-lithium-net-zero-emiss...

lazide 4y ago
No safes I’m aware of are rated to ‘16 hours with tools’, though I imagine some engineer somewhere promised a particular customer that. Best normal ratings are TL-60 (aka tools for an hour), or TR-60 (tools and a torch for an hour). A big, big difference.
- defrost 4y ago
  If you lean back and look up there's a chance you might see the point that you missed. Assume I said "X hours" if that makes you more comfortable.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

> So we need 2000 times less earthmoving equipment to achieve the quantity of lithium we currently consume? Both metals have a variety of mining methods including extraction in liquid form, and both need a leaching step in large amounts of chemicals if dug up whole (with the exception of canadian ore which is high purity) but that's the general gist of it. The Lithium requires between 1 and 3 orders of magnitude less space/industry/chemicals and a bit less energy for the same target use. Nickel, manganese, copper and phosphorus also have significant impact but still about the same total impact as the Uranium for a 90-95% grid decarbonization use case up front (but longer lived and recyclable for the battery ingredients). Building a mix of solar and onshore wind to cycle the battery requires a subset of the ingredients of a reactor like an EPR (with maybe a bit more concrete, zinc and steel depending on wind capacity factor, but much less chromium and a number of other higher impact materials). Offshore wind is about the only renewable technology with significantly larger mining impact. It is better than fossil fuels or delay but does need to come down (Iron Nitride should help here, but there is still a lot of steel and copper -- although an order of magnitude less than the nuclear and fossil fuel interests will tell you). > Thank you for the detailed responce, am I correct in understanding this is for once-through fuel cycle? I was not able to find figures for total burnup once fuel reprocessing is taken into account. I think analysing large-scale transition to nuclear only makes sence with reprosessing. Reprocessing does very little without a positive breeding ratio. Unless you create more Pu239 than you consume U235 it's just a small boost in U235 efficiency. You can verify this by looking at the isotope mix of waste for your reactor of choice and the isotope mix and burnup of MOX. An APR has a breeding ratio around 0.6 and consumes 60% of the bred Pu without reprocessing. A PHWR has the advantage of (in principle) being able to extract the last 5-15% of energy without plutonium extraction (which is incredibly polluting and expensive), but it doesn't result in much of an increase in net output, nor does it reduce the amount of Pu240, Pu241, Am242 and Am241 (the very bad high level long lived alpha emitters) that must be dealt with by more than 20%. Breeders have a host of technical barriers, and a breeder-heavy strategy is actually impaired by spending money and the fairly finite easily accessed startup fissile material on PWRs. The net result of most proposals is about 10x the burnup (as fertile material is notnplannednto be recovered and multiple roundsnof breeding and reprocessing result in problems that don't have proposed solutions), but there is no plutonium separation process that is either affordable or environmentally sustainable if scaled to the TW level. > To me the entire point of this scenario is, what do I do if my country doesn't have it. That's going to be the dilemma facing half the world. Sodium ion batteries are a commercial technology now at the 1-5GWh level with a massive scale up being completed in June (100s of GWh/yr), and use all abundant materials (Iron, sodium, carbon, water, aluminium). Pumped hydro is also far less limited. Other chemistries that are in scale up include Zinc Bromide (there is a process that can retrofit existing lead acid production being scaled among others), Iron, and Vanadium (often available as a side product of Uranium in greater quantities at about 1-3hrs of storage per year of uranium fuel), but generally not valuable enough to extract). The main geopolitical danger is access to silver, and building a local industry. Also buying lithium on the open market has far fewer opportunities for geopolitical domination than systems dependent on fossil fuels or U235 as there are many low quality deposits and the bottleneck is largely extraction. Your country could spend $3-10k per US-citizen-of-primary-energy on imported batteries or $300-1k on imported lithium once then develop domestic recycling and manufacturing and then you are done for decades (maybe replacing 5% of it per year once the kWh per kg of Li stops improving).

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Also thank you for maintaining civility and expressing genuine curiosity. It's easy to forget that not everyone who is a fan of nuclear is just using it as a tool to attack anything that threatens fossil fuels just hecause those ones are the loudest my distaste towards some of the other commenters caught you in the crossfire and I apologise.