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They're all ridiculously fuel inefficient and we're going to have to figure out how to dispose of thousands or tens of thousands of these reactors. Aside from t

They're all ridiculously fuel inefficient and we're going to have to figure out how to dispose of thousands or tens of thousands of these reactors. Aside from that one that starts pre buried, where the plan is to just leave a spent nuclear reactor buried in a hole. A cost that will almost certainly be externalized to the taxpayers. The promise here is the rich fleecing the average citizen. Getting downvoted wicked hard super fast. But how else are we supposed to see this? How else do we citizens of the world interpret this? The fuel efficiency is a fact. The nuclear clean up has been a problem every single time.

wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
'Fuel efficiency' is not the bottle neck to getting more clean energy on the grid, scale is. Waste? grind it up, vitrify it, bury it in an abandoned coal mine or something. People get more radioactivity from a coal power plant than they will ever get from properly handled nuclear waste.
- pfdietz 2mo ago
  It sure is. If the world were nuclear powered (all energy, not just grid) with burner reactors, estimates of uranium resources (not reserves) at up to 3x the current price would last about five years. A fully nuclear world needs to use nuclear fuel efficiently, which means breeder reactors.
  - wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
    ...and that's not a scenario that anyone is talking about employing with nuclear. We need enough for baseline load. Being able to build small modular reactors would give us scale that would help cut through the regulatory cost. By the time this crop of current reactors need to be decommissioned, we'd probably have dirt cheap grid storage figured out and could move away from them, but in the mean time, we need all the zero carbon energy we can get.
    - pfdietz 2mo ago
      A world that gets 10% of its energy from nuclear and 90% from renewables is not substantially easier than one that gets 100% from renewables. The intermittency/seasonality issues are not solved by that relatively light sprinkling of nuclear on top. So the objections nuclear advocates use to justify nuclear over cheaper renewables are vitiated. Those problems have to be solved anyway, so why the 10% nuclear? Nuclear really either goes big or it goes home. And you're saying it won't go big.
tstrimple 2mo ago
It's easy when you just ignore all the externalities! I'll be paying for the decommissioned nuclear plant near us for the next 20+ years through my electric rates. The plant is closed and no longer operational but still has to be staffed and guarded for decades during the decommission process. Imagine this issue scaled up across thousands of SMRs.

wing-_-nuts 2mo ago

'Fuel efficiency' is not the bottle neck to getting more clean energy on the grid, scale is. Waste? grind it up, vitrify it, bury it in an abandoned coal mine or something. People get more radioactivity from a coal power plant than they will ever get from properly handled nuclear waste.

pfdietz 2mo ago
It sure is. If the world were nuclear powered (all energy, not just grid) with burner reactors, estimates of uranium resources (not reserves) at up to 3x the current price would last about five years. A fully nuclear world needs to use nuclear fuel efficiently, which means breeder reactors.
- wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
  ...and that's not a scenario that anyone is talking about employing with nuclear. We need enough for baseline load. Being able to build small modular reactors would give us scale that would help cut through the regulatory cost. By the time this crop of current reactors need to be decommissioned, we'd probably have dirt cheap grid storage figured out and could move away from them, but in the mean time, we need all the zero carbon energy we can get.
  - pfdietz 2mo ago
    A world that gets 10% of its energy from nuclear and 90% from renewables is not substantially easier than one that gets 100% from renewables. The intermittency/seasonality issues are not solved by that relatively light sprinkling of nuclear on top. So the objections nuclear advocates use to justify nuclear over cheaper renewables are vitiated. Those problems have to be solved anyway, so why the 10% nuclear? Nuclear really either goes big or it goes home. And you're saying it won't go big.

tstrimple 2mo ago

It's easy when you just ignore all the externalities! I'll be paying for the decommissioned nuclear plant near us for the next 20+ years through my electric rates. The plant is closed and no longer operational but still has to be staffed and guarded for decades during the decommission process. Imagine this issue scaled up across thousands of SMRs.