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The opening sentence is rather inaccurate: "The 93 currently active nuclear-power reactors in the United States burn about 2,000 tonnes of uranium fuel each yea

The opening sentence is rather inaccurate: "The 93 currently active nuclear-power reactors in the United States burn about 2,000 tonnes of uranium fuel each year." Isn't not 'burnt' by any reasonable interpretation of the word, what happens is that the fuel becomes too hot to handle in any of today's working reactors because of the buildup of radioactive fission products as well as transuranic species. If the fuel rods were left in the reactor, they'd probably swell and eventually block circulation of the primary coolant, and the high radioactive flux would have other negative effects on the reactor core material itself (as well as on any workers that had to fix the mess). This is well known and many proposals have been made to recover this energy from the 'spent' 'burnt' fuel rods, but it's mostly been an expensive mess. Reprocessing to recover the transuranics for use in MOX (plutonium-based fuel, basically) is really expensive as well as generating large amounts of highly toxic waste as well as raising the plutonium-nuclear-weapon proliferation issue. Instead, this 2000 tons per year represents an ever-increasing long-term headache that generally has to be stored onsight for about a decade at the nuclear power plant before it can be transferred to long-term dry cask storage, all at considerable expense and with high security costs. With costs for solar/wind/storage dropping every year, isn't it time to give up on this pipe dream?

prpl 3y ago
IAEA even used the word burn to denote a nuclear process. Just because it doesn’t meet your definition doesn’t mean it’s not colloquially used within the field
HPsquared 3y ago
2000 tons per year for the whole country though. 20 tons per reactor per year doesn't sound too bad. Compare to the approx 1 billion tons of oil consumption per year, or 4 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year that the rest of the economy burns through, to get a sense of relative scale.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  > 20 tons per reactor per year doesn't sound too bad. Not great, not terrible :) It is super radioactive for centuries though. We really really need to get the long-term storage worked out.
  - peter422 3y ago
    The CO2 released by fossil fuels also can have century spanning impacts.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    > We really really need to get the long-term storage worked out. We did. And there's $52+ billion in the Nuclear Waste Fund. Nevada is just really good at complaining.
    - acidburnNSA 3y ago
      Exactly. We have the money and technology to build and operate repositories that responsibly handle all our nuclear waste. We just need the willpower to go out and do it.
      - eru 3y ago
        Or just give some other country money to do it for you? Finland might do it? (They are also sophisticated and stable enough, that you don't need to worry about the fuel being mishandled. At least not any more than for the US.)
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Yeah just put it in your own back yard then and see how you feel about it :)
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    Radioactive, yes. "Super" radioactive, no. Longer half-life -> less radioactive, by definition. Infinite half-life -> not radioactive at all.
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  And you didn't compare that to the costs of maintaining a solar/wind/storage system, for some odd reason... these PR lines are getting pretty stale.
M3L0NM4N 3y ago
Are you saying nuclear is a pipe dream or reprocessing?
gustavus 3y ago
> With costs for solar/wind/storage dropping every year, isn't it time to give up on this pipe dream? When will we give up the pipedream that it's always going to be sunny and windy, especially as climate change continues to exacerbate destructive weather patterns. And when will we give up the pipedream that everywhere in the world is sunny and windy all the time to.
- rgmerk 3y ago
  The question is whether one or more of the seasonal storage technologies on the horizon, when combined with the seasonal storage we already have (conventional hydropower with big honking dams) turns out to give a cheaper electricity system cost than nuclear in a given location. Also worth pointing out that a large fraction of the world’s population lives in places where seasonal storage is not nearly as much of a problem. Seasonal storage is much more of an issue for cool temperate and subarctic zones in the northern hemisphere, where maximum energy demand and minimum solar energy supply occur at the same time. Several billion people across South Asia, south-east Asia, most of South America, Oceania, and most of Africa don’t have this unfortunate misalignment.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    People dont deem to realize that dams are super expensive, dont last forever and can cause cataclismic failures when they break. Stuff that is much worse that nuclear failures. And lets not talk about the destruction of human and animal habitat to make dams in the first place...
    - rgmerk 3y ago
      True, but we already have quite a lot of them, and we’re not going to remove them all immediately.
      - lazide 3y ago
        Most places already have built dams where there is any significant economic value. The only big new ones tend to be in newly developing areas. So not much opportunity to expand there.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Manuel_D 3y ago
"burnt" is a pretty intuitive way of saying the usable energy in the fuel is released. It's a nuclear reaction, not a chemical reaction like combustion, but it's a pretty descriptive term that's also used inside of the nuclear industry itself (I heard a talk from a nuclear engineer about rotating fuel rods to achieve an "even burn", in his own words). Storage remains a big barrier to wide-scale deployment of intermittent power sources in a manner truly independent of a fossil fuel grid. While costs may be dropping, scale and competition with electric vehicles means grid storage isn't growing all that quickly. Many solar plants that are employing storage are only installing 2-4 hours worth of storage, which isn't sufficient to even out the duck curve let alone seasonal variations. Wind also has big swings in seasonal production. Even with significant overproduction, most grids are still looking at several days worth of storage to account for a string a cloudy or less-windy days. Another factor is that wind and solar have significantly different output depending on geography and weather. Nuclear's only geographic requirement is a source of water for cooling - and that doesn't have to be potable water, it can be salt water or wastewater. And since human beings need water, too, this is rarely an impediment to deploying nuclear power plants near the population centers that use the most power. By contrast, wind and solar often need to be produced hundreds of miles away from population centers. This tends to overload the transmission capacity of rural power infrastructure [1], sometimes halting wind and solar projects. 1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-energy-high-voltage-transmission-lines https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  I'd go with 'transmutation' - 'burn' is simply used to imply that using uranium is no different than using wood/oil/coal/gas as a fuel, but that's completely unscientific. Burning implies an redox process at the very least, involving an electron acceptor like oxygen mixed with an electron donor like a hydrocarbon and resulting in the destruction of some molecules and the creation of other molecules (e.g. CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O). It's just yet another example of how the nuclear industry tries to spin its activies as safe and harmless. They probably spend as much money on PR these days as they do on R & D.
  - 3y ago
irfwashere 3y ago
I highly recommend Doomberg's substack for energy related analysis. His article "Angels on a Pin" explains how storing nuclear waste is not as scary as people make it out to be. Direct link here: https://doomberg.substack.com/p/angels-on-a-pin https://doomberg.substack.com/p/angels-on-a-pin
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Congress (verbally) fried GM because stories like that hurt the car industry unless people believe they are being dealt with, not because 100 deaths is a large number.
cyberax 3y ago
> Isn't not 'burnt' by any reasonable interpretation of the word It actually is. Spent nuclear fuel goes from 3-5% of U-235 at the start to 0.3% at the end of the fuel campaign. There will also be some fissile plutonium, but not much. Having just 1/10-th of initial fuel left definitely qualifies as "burnt". That's also why reprocessing isn't economical right now. You just won't get that much new fuel. > If the fuel rods were left in the reactor, they'd probably swell That can't physically happen. Nuclear fuel is made of tablets of sintered oxide powders, and they are permeable to gases (helium is the main one produced as a result of fission).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
necheffa 3y ago
> Isn't not 'burnt' by any reasonable interpretation of the word FYI, this is a pretty typical industry term. Even to the point where "burn up" is a unit of measure tracked at operation and within model predictions.
ekianjo 3y ago
> With costs for solar/wind/storage dropping every year, isn't it time to give up on this pipe dream? There is no beating the energy density of uranium.
- eru 3y ago
  Well, but the power plant you need to unlock that energy is pretty big.
Moldoteck 3y ago
Didn't France have a plant specifically for this? And real waste was vitrified to store with less headaches? Anyway, too bad we have too few breeding reactors

prpl 3y ago

IAEA even used the word burn to denote a nuclear process. Just because it doesn’t meet your definition doesn’t mean it’s not colloquially used within the field

HPsquared 3y ago

2000 tons per year for the whole country though. 20 tons per reactor per year doesn't sound too bad. Compare to the approx 1 billion tons of oil consumption per year, or 4 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year that the rest of the economy burns through, to get a sense of relative scale.

wkat4242 3y ago
> 20 tons per reactor per year doesn't sound too bad. Not great, not terrible :) It is super radioactive for centuries though. We really really need to get the long-term storage worked out.
- peter422 3y ago
  The CO2 released by fossil fuels also can have century spanning impacts.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  > We really really need to get the long-term storage worked out. We did. And there's $52+ billion in the Nuclear Waste Fund. Nevada is just really good at complaining.
  - acidburnNSA 3y ago
    Exactly. We have the money and technology to build and operate repositories that responsibly handle all our nuclear waste. We just need the willpower to go out and do it.
    - eru 3y ago
      Or just give some other country money to do it for you? Finland might do it? (They are also sophisticated and stable enough, that you don't need to worry about the fuel being mishandled. At least not any more than for the US.)
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Yeah just put it in your own back yard then and see how you feel about it :)
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  Radioactive, yes. "Super" radioactive, no. Longer half-life -> less radioactive, by definition. Infinite half-life -> not radioactive at all.
photochemsyn 3y ago
And you didn't compare that to the costs of maintaining a solar/wind/storage system, for some odd reason... these PR lines are getting pretty stale.

M3L0NM4N 3y ago

Are you saying nuclear is a pipe dream or reprocessing?

gustavus 3y ago

> With costs for solar/wind/storage dropping every year, isn't it time to give up on this pipe dream? When will we give up the pipedream that it's always going to be sunny and windy, especially as climate change continues to exacerbate destructive weather patterns. And when will we give up the pipedream that everywhere in the world is sunny and windy all the time to.

rgmerk 3y ago
The question is whether one or more of the seasonal storage technologies on the horizon, when combined with the seasonal storage we already have (conventional hydropower with big honking dams) turns out to give a cheaper electricity system cost than nuclear in a given location. Also worth pointing out that a large fraction of the world’s population lives in places where seasonal storage is not nearly as much of a problem. Seasonal storage is much more of an issue for cool temperate and subarctic zones in the northern hemisphere, where maximum energy demand and minimum solar energy supply occur at the same time. Several billion people across South Asia, south-east Asia, most of South America, Oceania, and most of Africa don’t have this unfortunate misalignment.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  People dont deem to realize that dams are super expensive, dont last forever and can cause cataclismic failures when they break. Stuff that is much worse that nuclear failures. And lets not talk about the destruction of human and animal habitat to make dams in the first place...
  - rgmerk 3y ago
    True, but we already have quite a lot of them, and we’re not going to remove them all immediately.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Most places already have built dams where there is any significant economic value. The only big new ones tend to be in newly developing areas. So not much opportunity to expand there.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Manuel_D 3y ago

"burnt" is a pretty intuitive way of saying the usable energy in the fuel is released. It's a nuclear reaction, not a chemical reaction like combustion, but it's a pretty descriptive term that's also used inside of the nuclear industry itself (I heard a talk from a nuclear engineer about rotating fuel rods to achieve an "even burn", in his own words). Storage remains a big barrier to wide-scale deployment of intermittent power sources in a manner truly independent of a fossil fuel grid. While costs may be dropping, scale and competition with electric vehicles means grid storage isn't growing all that quickly. Many solar plants that are employing storage are only installing 2-4 hours worth of storage, which isn't sufficient to even out the duck curve let alone seasonal variations. Wind also has big swings in seasonal production. Even with significant overproduction, most grids are still looking at several days worth of storage to account for a string a cloudy or less-windy days. Another factor is that wind and solar have significantly different output depending on geography and weather. Nuclear's only geographic requirement is a source of water for cooling - and that doesn't have to be potable water, it can be salt water or wastewater. And since human beings need water, too, this is rarely an impediment to deploying nuclear power plants near the population centers that use the most power. By contrast, wind and solar often need to be produced hundreds of miles away from population centers. This tends to overload the transmission capacity of rural power infrastructure [1], sometimes halting wind and solar projects. 1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-energy-high-voltage-transmission-lines https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...

photochemsyn 3y ago
I'd go with 'transmutation' - 'burn' is simply used to imply that using uranium is no different than using wood/oil/coal/gas as a fuel, but that's completely unscientific. Burning implies an redox process at the very least, involving an electron acceptor like oxygen mixed with an electron donor like a hydrocarbon and resulting in the destruction of some molecules and the creation of other molecules (e.g. CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O). It's just yet another example of how the nuclear industry tries to spin its activies as safe and harmless. They probably spend as much money on PR these days as they do on R & D.
- 3y ago

irfwashere 3y ago

I highly recommend Doomberg's substack for energy related analysis. His article "Angels on a Pin" explains how storing nuclear waste is not as scary as people make it out to be. Direct link here: https://doomberg.substack.com/p/angels-on-a-pin https://doomberg.substack.com/p/angels-on-a-pin

whatshisface 3y ago
Congress (verbally) fried GM because stories like that hurt the car industry unless people believe they are being dealt with, not because 100 deaths is a large number.

cyberax 3y ago

> Isn't not 'burnt' by any reasonable interpretation of the word It actually is. Spent nuclear fuel goes from 3-5% of U-235 at the start to 0.3% at the end of the fuel campaign. There will also be some fissile plutonium, but not much. Having just 1/10-th of initial fuel left definitely qualifies as "burnt". That's also why reprocessing isn't economical right now. You just won't get that much new fuel. > If the fuel rods were left in the reactor, they'd probably swell That can't physically happen. Nuclear fuel is made of tablets of sintered oxide powders, and they are permeable to gases (helium is the main one produced as a result of fission).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

necheffa 3y ago

> Isn't not 'burnt' by any reasonable interpretation of the word FYI, this is a pretty typical industry term. Even to the point where "burn up" is a unit of measure tracked at operation and within model predictions.

ekianjo 3y ago

> With costs for solar/wind/storage dropping every year, isn't it time to give up on this pipe dream? There is no beating the energy density of uranium.

eru 3y ago
Well, but the power plant you need to unlock that energy is pretty big.

Moldoteck 3y ago

Didn't France have a plant specifically for this? And real waste was vitrified to store with less headaches? Anyway, too bad we have too few breeding reactors