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You are right, but there is no realistic scenario in the next 100 years where it will be more economical for a power plant to reprocess spent fuel than to use f

You are right, but there is no realistic scenario in the next 100 years where it will be more economical for a power plant to reprocess spent fuel than to use freshly mined uranium.

bumby 3y ago
To put this in perspective, though, much of the problem being discussed is about the pitfalls of short-term thinking.
- credit_guy 3y ago
  Here's the long term thinking though: if you can't make nuclear power plants economical in the short term, there is no long term.
  - bumby 3y ago
    Nah. That’s just talking in circles to rationalize bad choices. The whole point of long term thinking is being able to acknowledge short term losses so that you arrive at a better position in the more distant future.
    - credit_guy 3y ago
      If you talk in general about bad choices, you are right. On the specific topic of reprocessing though. Reprocessing achieves 2 things: 1. it can extract usable fissile fuel from spent fuel, and 2. it can reduce the amount of long lived radioactive waste, by a factor of 30. Point 1 can be further split in 1.a. usable fuel for the current generation reactors and 1.b. usable fuel for future, fast reactors (U-238). 1.a. Per wikipedia [1] Reprocessing the plutonium into usable fuel increases the energy derived from the original uranium by some 12%, and if the uranium-235 is also recycled by re-enrichment, this becomes about 20% In other words, all this reprocessing can reduce overall the total volume of uranium mined and spent fuel by 20%. That's not a game changer, and it certainly does not come for free. 1.b. reprocessing in order to extract U-238 for fast reactors. That's a nice concept, but if we ever build fast reactors that can burn U-238 (fingers crossed), we already have a huge stockpile of depleted uranium. The US alone has more than half a million tons, and the rest of the world at least as much. That's enough to keep the lights on in the entire world for hundreds of years. 2. reprocessing in order to reduce the waste. That makes sense. But burying the waste is probably cheaper. We have already buried hundreds of thousands of tons of waste at WIPP. We know it works and it is safe. We know we will need to eventually bury some waste, even if its 30 times lower. If we, as a society, agree to open some deep geological repositories for nuclear waste, then it doesn't make all that much of a difference if we bury 10000 tons or a million tons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
      - bumby 3y ago
        Do you think the bulk of scientific progress has been made waiting for a “game changer” or through smaller, progressive iterative improvements?

You are right, but there is no realistic scenario in the next 100 years where it will be more economical for a power plant to reprocess spent fuel than to use freshly mined uranium.

bumby 3y ago

To put this in perspective, though, much of the problem being discussed is about the pitfalls of short-term thinking.

credit_guy 3y ago
Here's the long term thinking though: if you can't make nuclear power plants economical in the short term, there is no long term.
- bumby 3y ago
  Nah. That’s just talking in circles to rationalize bad choices. The whole point of long term thinking is being able to acknowledge short term losses so that you arrive at a better position in the more distant future.
  - credit_guy 3y ago
    If you talk in general about bad choices, you are right. On the specific topic of reprocessing though. Reprocessing achieves 2 things: 1. it can extract usable fissile fuel from spent fuel, and 2. it can reduce the amount of long lived radioactive waste, by a factor of 30. Point 1 can be further split in 1.a. usable fuel for the current generation reactors and 1.b. usable fuel for future, fast reactors (U-238). 1.a. Per wikipedia [1] Reprocessing the plutonium into usable fuel increases the energy derived from the original uranium by some 12%, and if the uranium-235 is also recycled by re-enrichment, this becomes about 20% In other words, all this reprocessing can reduce overall the total volume of uranium mined and spent fuel by 20%. That's not a game changer, and it certainly does not come for free. 1.b. reprocessing in order to extract U-238 for fast reactors. That's a nice concept, but if we ever build fast reactors that can burn U-238 (fingers crossed), we already have a huge stockpile of depleted uranium. The US alone has more than half a million tons, and the rest of the world at least as much. That's enough to keep the lights on in the entire world for hundreds of years. 2. reprocessing in order to reduce the waste. That makes sense. But burying the waste is probably cheaper. We have already buried hundreds of thousands of tons of waste at WIPP. We know it works and it is safe. We know we will need to eventually bury some waste, even if its 30 times lower. If we, as a society, agree to open some deep geological repositories for nuclear waste, then it doesn't make all that much of a difference if we bury 10000 tons or a million tons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
    - bumby 3y ago
      Do you think the bulk of scientific progress has been made waiting for a “game changer” or through smaller, progressive iterative improvements?