Nrbelex writes "The New York Times reports that about 10 percent of electricity generated in the United States comes from fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, mostly Russian. 'It's a great, easy source' of fuel, said Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an analyst at Renaissance Bank and an expert in the Russian nuclear industry that has profited from the arrangement since the end of the cold war. But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn't secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers.'"
FTFA "But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn't secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers."
Gotta end sometime, but was fun while it lasted
Yeah, too bad we can't, you know, mine the stuff or something.
I would guess that they were referring to a figurative pipeline, however, part of the enrichment process for uranium is to convert it to Uranium Hexafluoride (UF6) which is a gas.
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday November 10, @12:08PM (#30047606)
No. In the path uranium -> nukes -> nuclear fuel, it is cheaper to go directly from A to C. This is talking about going from B to C only because people already went overbroad going from A to B as a solution to "security" problems. You can't justify going from A to B from an energy standpoint.
Considering that we have between the US and Russia close to TWENTY thousand warheads, if we take even 20% of that collectively, that'd be enough for another 15-20 years. By which time one would think we'd have gotten our act together on these other more renewable resources.
More expensive to the industry, yes, but overall it is much more expensive to produce highly enriched uranium (weapons grade) and later thin it out to fuel grade.
A more accurate pathway is Unenriched -> Enriched (fuel grade) -> Highly Enriched (weapons grade) -> Warheads. The path to go from low enriched to highly enriched is VERY time consuming and expensive. So even though going from D->B is cheaper now because we have a surplus of warheads produced with taxpayer money, it's still cheaper overall to go from A->B instead of A->D->B.
So even though going from D->B is cheaper now because we have a surplus of warheads produced with taxpayer money, it's still cheaper overall to go from A->B instead of A->D->B.
To be even more specific, there are a number of reactor designs that don't require enrichment at all for usage in a nuclear power plant. There are efficiency gains to be had using higher enriched stuff, but it's not absolutely necessary.
Right now the Civilian uranium mining and enrichment industry is supressed due to the materials flowing out of our former stockpiles. It'd be like if during the cold war we built up trillions and trillions of barrels of oil as an 'emergency war stockpile' and now are releasing it - we wouldn't be bothering much with drilling for oil at the moment.
From my readings, fuel cost is pathetically cheap and even if we have to mine the stuff it won't raise the cost of electricity by a penny per kwh.
We have energy problems? I guess we did have rolling brownouts a while back here in California, but California has had its collective head up its butt for a long time when it comes to power infrastructure.
And no, I'm serious. There's no real looming crisis when it comes to power. Even if we move to a completely carbon neutral energy grid, it'll raise prices by about 50% across the board if we stick with coal, but would remain around the same if we start switching more to nuclear.
Since making a statement like that tends to draw out the Greens on Slashdot, I'll post the prices of different sources of energy. I looked at four different sources: ClimateProgress.org, a tidal power company survey of power costs, the California Energy Commission study on what wholesale prices would be for new plants built today, and the Federal DoE energy costs estimates. There's quite a bit of discrepancy between the four sources, so I'll give the range of prices between the four.
There's also subsidies and carbon/social cost adjustments, which I'll also list.
Summarizing from cheapest to most expensive: 1) Coal (currently 49% of our power production): 3.15c to 9.4c/KWH. Carbon Capture or Reduction systems raise the price to around 10c to 12c/KWH.
2) Natural Gas (20% of current production): 4.95c to 9.15c/KWH. Produces half the CO2 of coal. Carbon Capture or Reduction raises the price to 8c - 11.5c/KWH.
3) Nuclear (19% of current production): 2.16c - 11.5c/KWH. No CO2 production. Price includes decommissioning and lawsuit costs. Federal subsidies knock about 1c/KWH off. Actual wholesale costs from existing plants runs around 4c/KWH these days.
4) Hydro (7% of current production): 8.7c to 19.5c/KWH. No CO2 production. Federal subsidies knock off about 2c/KWH. Dams have recently become non-politically correct, with some being dynamited to free up fish runs.
5) Oil (1.7% of current production): Roughly twice as much as natural gas, but prices have fluctuated massively in the last few years. Mainly used as a power backstop. Also puts some pressure on consumer fuel costs.
6) Biofuel (0.93% of current production): 7.5c - 20c/KWH. No CO2 production, but produces other pollutants. Federal subsidies are large, knocking the price to 5c-15c/KWH for biofuel. Can put pressure on consumer food costs if they do something stupid like burning edible food products for power. (Braindead plans like Ethanol.)
7) Wind (0.78% of current production): 6.5c - 14.1c/KWH. Offshore adds another 5c-10c/KWH. No CO2 production. Wind farms run into NIMBY resistance from people like the late Sen. Kennedy (who didn't want offshore wind near his estate because it'd ruin the view - what a great environmentalist, no?) Subsidies would knock the price from 13.9c/KWH to 9.9c/KWH, so it's likely the low end estimates (which came from the hippie sources) already include the subsidies.
8) Metropolitan Solid Waste (0.4% of current production): 6.5c - 8.6c/KWH. No CO2 production. Somewhat limited sources of fuel. Subsidies reduce price to 5.4c/KWH.
9) Geothermal (0.36% of current production): 5.5c - 13c/KWH. No CO2 production. Somewhat limited sources. Federal subsidies knock the 13c/KWH price to 9c/KWH. (It's likely the 5.5c price from the Hippie groups include the subsidies already.)
10) Solar (0.03% of current production): 12c - 98c/KWH; discarding high and low: around 18c - 39c/KWH (counting subsidies, 36c-60c/KWH or so without). No CO2 production. Sierra Club has been blocking development of solar power in deserts for environmental reasons.
11) Wave Power (~0% of current production): 6.5c - 137c/KWH. Note the 6.5c estimate came from a wave power company. The 137c estimate came from the State of California's estimated costs of actually building one. No CO2 production. Some people dislike tidal power plants.
Knowledge is power. Hopefully, with these numbers out there (which, again, were drawn half from hippie sources, and half fr
Links to credible information on that. In particular, I will bet 20 right now that hydropower is CHEAPER than coal or nukes. Hell, if you use a LITTLE bit of intelligence, you would realize that hydropower will be cheaper than either coal or nukes. Why? Because it is STILL cheaper to put in a dam than either coal, gas, or nuke plant (assuming suitable location). In addition, you have free energy after that. And geo-thermal has already been shown to be cheaper than nukes (but there are few locations for shal
Quietly engaging in what? Buying up all of our debt so that our government can continue to spend like crazy? Fixing their currency to ours so that their goods are even cheaper for US consumers? Spending 100-150 billion dollars per year on defense while the US spends something on the order of $1 trillion per year (includes general military budget + wars)?
Call me crazy, but I don't think this is a new cold war. And even if it were, the US (and others) has the capability of killing every last man, woman, and child on the planet with nuclear weapons. I'm more concerned with local gangs than with China.
But at times, recycled Soviet bomb cores have made up the majority of the American market for low-enriched uranium fuel. Today, former bomb material from Russia accounts for 45 percent of the fuel in American nuclear reactors
I guess it's easier to get past the Slashduh "editors" if you inject a suitable dose of hyperbole. It's not like they're going to check, is it?
There were nukes built by Soviets. And there were nukes built for delivery to Soviets. (Intercontinental ballistic missiles: When it absolutely, positively has to be there in twenty minutes.) Whether most of that material would belong to Soviets or Americans depends on who launched first.
... if we'd use common sense and recycle the fuel, as many other nuclear nations already do. The whole terrorist argument against this was bogus from the start. Recycle the damn fuel, and you can reuse 93 percent of it.
... if we'd use common sense and recycle the fuel, as many other nuclear nations already do. The whole terrorist argument against this was bogus from the start. Recycle the damn fuel, and you can reuse 93 percent of it.
Not in any existing reactor you can't. The fissile content (U235+Pu) going into a reactor in fresh fuel is about 4%, the rest is unusable U-238. Burning the fuel fissions about 4% of the actinide nuclei present, and leaves a fissile content of something slightly under 1% (due to plutonium breeding) at the end. Recycling this spent fuel would extend existing fuel supplies by only 25%.
The fundamental problem with doing this is that it is extremely expensive. The cost of plutonium extracted from spent fuel is equivalent to natural uranium costing $700/kg or so. The actual market price of natural uranium is about $100/kg and for $300/kg you could extract natural uranium from seawater and have a 1000 year supply. Even if the extracted plutonium were free (instead of being far more expensive than the uranium) the cost of fabricating and handling plutonium-bearing fuel is so high that it would still be more expensive that uranium-only fuel. In fact the DOE has to pay utilities to use the mixed plutonium/uranium MOX fuel it makes from ex-Soviet weapons.
Reprocessed plutonium is that rarest of industrial products: one that it worth less than nothing (even if the extravagant production cost is completely written off).
Now a breeder reactor fuel cycle could use the U-238 to produce power in principle, but the cost would be much more than conventional nuclear power, and it is hampered by the fact that every breeder reactor project thus built has failed. It may be possible to build a workable breeder pwer reactor, but no one has yet succeeded in doing it.
The IFR (Integral Fast Reactor) would be able to extract 99% of the energy in the fuel, rather than the 1% we get from the types of reactor used today.
Looks like the main drawback is the liquid sodium coolant, because sodium is so reactive. What other metals might work?
It's reactive if you let it out. We know how to handle liquid sodium.
Otherwise, I don't see a downside here, at least not compared to traditional reactors. If there is one, someone kindly pipe up.
It's nookulur. Clinton defunded it with one of his first executive orders, and Gore and Kerry lead the fight to kill it in the Congress the next year. At the time the speculation was it was payback to environmental lobbyists - Sierra Club is against anything nuclear, for instance.
it's going to be 30 years before there viable breeder reactor producing power. It's going to take 50+ years before there's a possibility of a viable fusion reactor.
There are significant engineering problems with both now.
We had a working 40MW IFR reactor in the early 90's.
The problem is that you can't recycle nuclear fuel. There are always residual byproducts that last for long and have a potential to pollute eveything around them.
Well that's funny. France [ieee.org] has recycled their fuel for years, and Japan [japannuclear.com] is following suit.
You can burn up the long-lived actinides resulting in waste that's 'hot' for 100's of years instead of 100's of thousands, not to mention reduce the volume of waste by a factor of almost 100. See this paper [nationalcenter.org] for some really good information.
Right up until now I thought US foreign policy was extremely poor. I feel I must apologise for thinking that, in fact US foreign policy is an act of unparalleled genius! North Korea is being largely ignored by the US as is Iran, not because they are not dangerous (they are) but you are simply employing them to gather enough nulear armaments together that you will later use to generate power, whilst silmutaneously reducing your dependency on fossil fuel and also creating world stabalisation. Outstanding work, forward thinking and downright cunning. I salute you!
If anything we should increase the amount of energy created by using nuclear fuel in this country. Every form of 'green' power has some kind of drawback that makes it less than ideal, hyrdo affects fish, solar requires nasty chemicals, geothermal is accused of causing earthquakes, wind power kills birds and so on. Point being if we're going to have widespread energy production it needs to be done on a feasible basis that responds to economy of scale. I'd love to have solar panels for my house (and will probably have them within a couple years), but that doesn't mean where I live is a good location for building solar power plants.
The biggest obstacle keeping us from using the greenest energy source we have is the pushback from groups like greenpeace. Ever notice that greenpeace never actually does research or other work to make the world a greener place? The research they do is politically motivated and centered around preventing others from doing things they are politically intolerant of. When's the last time you read a press release from greenpeace about a new technological development they made? If groups such as greenpeace were actually serious about the environment they would be all over themselves in doing everything they could in order to increase the use of nuclear energy.
The fact that the government feels it had to keep this story below the radar in the first place shows how much damage these groups have done to nuclear power. It's time for greenpeace to stand up, do the right thing, and make amends for decades of harm to the environment they have caused. They are no better than some of the old factories that dumped chemicals into rivers.
I'm a big supporter of nuclear power but to be fair Nuclear power kills fish too nearly any way you wing it. Those puppies need water cooling so most are built near large bodies of water. Even if they cool their water properly (cooling towers or canals) so that they don't mess the fish up by raising the temperature of the body of water at all there's no getting around the fact that those intake pipes are going to suck in some fish and other larger animals can often get stuck on the mesh.
I know one plant was required to build a "slide for life" to get some of the fish out of the intake. Got the fish out all-right, but their fate wasn't much delayed. The birds on the other hand, thought it was the best fucking invention ever.
The New York Times reports that about 10 percent of electricity generated in the United States comes from fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, mostly Russian.
Highly enriched nuclear bomb materials are like the old surface oil wells, or gold nuggets lying in the Australian desert, way too easy to pass up. Doesn't mean there aren't stupendous reserves yet to be mined.
"Reprocessing can last us for a time but it requires more infrastructure and time to put in place."
The various estimates I've seen indicate that Reprocessing can last us a *very long* time (hundreds of years, possibly thousands of years). In the meantime, we should be working on solar (both terrestrial and space), wind, etc, and Fusion. Once we can make the leap to fusion, we don't really need any more Uranium (or only relatively small quantities) - fusion just needs water, and most countries on Earth have
Actually, I have in the past wondered the same thing, so I tried to see if I could find an answer. I don't really know for sure, but from what I could find, it seems like the answer is:
1) Helium is pretty inert, and basically won't react with any other elements to form any dangerous compounds (I think, not entirely sure about this, but that seems to be the answer)
2) Helium, apparently, won't generally hurt organic life (again, because it is so inert), although, of course, large quantities in a confined spac
Not only is there a bunch of helium in the upper atmosphere, helium's mass means that most helium molecules end up achieving escape velocity and just leave the atmosphere completely. There were some 'omgs running out of helium' articles a bit ago on slashdot.
I don't know about Russia, but the US military frequently uses it's old launch vehicles (or at least the engines) for suborbital weapons tests and satellite launches. For example, the Minotaur [wikipedia.org] series of rockets by Orbital Sciences use old Minuteman and Peacekeeper engines. I'm sure there are many other examples.
Do you count the cost of the original coke can when the aluminum is recycled and resold and then made into a new coke can in an infinite loop until you say we shouldn't recycle because now that coke can costs $20,000 or do you simply count the cost of the aluminum the recyclers sells you versus the cost the freshly mined/processed aluminum?
And how cheap is this ex-Soviet fuel, while it lasts? Shouldn't we count the cost to get them, which includes $TRILLIONS on the Cold War?
In economic terms, that's a sunk or opportunity cost. Those trillions have been paid. Whether we decide to use the material or knowledge or not doesn't change the amount of money put in, and the incremental cost of actually using that is all that we should continue to worry about.
If we can take all those trillions and turn them into something good, why not do it? Ignori
In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Funny)
... oh my goodness, I can't bring myself to do it. Go on without me! For great justice!
Reply to This
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Funny)
Don't worry - I'll take one for the team.
In Soviet Russia, nukes derive energy from you!
Reply to This
Parent
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, nuclear weapons disassemble YOU!
Reply to This
Parent
In Post-Soviet Russia... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:In Post-Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFA "But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn't secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers."
Gotta end sometime, but was fun while it lasted
Yeah, too bad we can't, you know, mine the stuff or something.
Reply to This
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In Post-Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Funny)
But what happens when we encounter a situation where we need our over 10,000 nuclear warheads?
Reply to This
Parent
So... the solution is more nukes? (Score:5, Funny)
Reply to This
Re:So... the solution is more nukes? (Score:5, Informative)
No. In the path uranium -> nukes -> nuclear fuel, it is cheaper to go directly from A to C. This is talking about going from B to C only because people already went overbroad going from A to B as a solution to "security" problems. You can't justify going from A to B from an energy standpoint.
Reply to This
Parent
Re:So... the solution is more nukes? (Score:5, Insightful)
sounds quite optimistic to me.
Reply to This
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
other more renewable resources.
You mean like trees, wood, and paper? --- Ow! I'm being stoned by greenies
Re:So... the solution is more nukes? (Score:4, Informative)
More expensive to the industry, yes, but overall it is much more expensive to produce highly enriched uranium (weapons grade) and later thin it out to fuel grade.
A more accurate pathway is Unenriched -> Enriched (fuel grade) -> Highly Enriched (weapons grade) -> Warheads. The path to go from low enriched to highly enriched is VERY time consuming and expensive. So even though going from D->B is cheaper now because we have a surplus of warheads produced with taxpayer money, it's still cheaper overall to go from A->B instead of A->D->B.
Reply to This
Parent
Re:So... the solution is more nukes? (Score:4, Informative)
So even though going from D->B is cheaper now because we have a surplus of warheads produced with taxpayer money, it's still cheaper overall to go from A->B instead of A->D->B.
To be even more specific, there are a number of reactor designs that don't require enrichment at all for usage in a nuclear power plant. There are efficiency gains to be had using higher enriched stuff, but it's not absolutely necessary.
Right now the Civilian uranium mining and enrichment industry is supressed due to the materials flowing out of our former stockpiles. It'd be like if during the cold war we built up trillions and trillions of barrels of oil as an 'emergency war stockpile' and now are releasing it - we wouldn't be bothering much with drilling for oil at the moment.
From my readings, fuel cost is pathetically cheap and even if we have to mine the stuff it won't raise the cost of electricity by a penny per kwh.
Reply to This
Parent
Re:So... the solution is more nukes? (Score:5, Interesting)
>>So the solution to the energy problems we face
We have energy problems? I guess we did have rolling brownouts a while back here in California, but California has had its collective head up its butt for a long time when it comes to power infrastructure.
And no, I'm serious. There's no real looming crisis when it comes to power. Even if we move to a completely carbon neutral energy grid, it'll raise prices by about 50% across the board if we stick with coal, but would remain around the same if we start switching more to nuclear.
Since making a statement like that tends to draw out the Greens on Slashdot, I'll post the prices of different sources of energy. I looked at four different sources: ClimateProgress.org, a tidal power company survey of power costs, the California Energy Commission study on what wholesale prices would be for new plants built today, and the Federal DoE energy costs estimates. There's quite a bit of discrepancy between the four sources, so I'll give the range of prices between the four.
There's also subsidies and carbon/social cost adjustments, which I'll also list.
Summarizing from cheapest to most expensive:
1) Coal (currently 49% of our power production): 3.15c to 9.4c/KWH. Carbon Capture or Reduction systems raise the price to around 10c to 12c/KWH.
2) Natural Gas (20% of current production): 4.95c to 9.15c/KWH. Produces half the CO2 of coal. Carbon Capture or Reduction raises the price to 8c - 11.5c/KWH.
3) Nuclear (19% of current production): 2.16c - 11.5c/KWH. No CO2 production. Price includes decommissioning and lawsuit costs. Federal subsidies knock about 1c/KWH off. Actual wholesale costs from existing plants runs around 4c/KWH these days.
4) Hydro (7% of current production): 8.7c to 19.5c/KWH. No CO2 production. Federal subsidies knock off about 2c/KWH. Dams have recently become non-politically correct, with some being dynamited to free up fish runs.
5) Oil (1.7% of current production): Roughly twice as much as natural gas, but prices have fluctuated massively in the last few years. Mainly used as a power backstop. Also puts some pressure on consumer fuel costs.
6) Biofuel (0.93% of current production): 7.5c - 20c/KWH. No CO2 production, but produces other pollutants. Federal subsidies are large, knocking the price to 5c-15c/KWH for biofuel. Can put pressure on consumer food costs if they do something stupid like burning edible food products for power. (Braindead plans like Ethanol.)
7) Wind (0.78% of current production): 6.5c - 14.1c/KWH. Offshore adds another 5c-10c/KWH. No CO2 production. Wind farms run into NIMBY resistance from people like the late Sen. Kennedy (who didn't want offshore wind near his estate because it'd ruin the view - what a great environmentalist, no?) Subsidies would knock the price from 13.9c/KWH to 9.9c/KWH, so it's likely the low end estimates (which came from the hippie sources) already include the subsidies.
8) Metropolitan Solid Waste (0.4% of current production): 6.5c - 8.6c/KWH. No CO2 production. Somewhat limited sources of fuel. Subsidies reduce price to 5.4c/KWH.
9) Geothermal (0.36% of current production): 5.5c - 13c/KWH. No CO2 production. Somewhat limited sources. Federal subsidies knock the 13c/KWH price to 9c/KWH. (It's likely the 5.5c price from the Hippie groups include the subsidies already.)
10) Solar (0.03% of current production): 12c - 98c/KWH; discarding high and low: around 18c - 39c/KWH (counting subsidies, 36c-60c/KWH or so without). No CO2 production. Sierra Club has been blocking development of solar power in deserts for environmental reasons.
11) Wave Power (~0% of current production): 6.5c - 137c/KWH. Note the 6.5c estimate came from a wave power company. The 137c estimate came from the State of California's estimated costs of actually building one. No CO2 production. Some people dislike tidal power plants.
Knowledge is power. Hopefully, with these numbers out there (which, again, were drawn half from hippie sources, and half fr
Reply to This
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Tequila? Vodka? Beer?
Quick, Another Cold War . . . (Score:3, Funny)
Reply to This
Re:It is already here (Score:4, Insightful)
Call me crazy, but I don't think this is a new cold war. And even if it were, the US (and others) has the capability of killing every last man, woman, and child on the planet with nuclear weapons. I'm more concerned with local gangs than with China.
Reply to This
Parent
Correction (Score:5, Informative)
For about 10 percent of electricity in the United States, it's fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, INCLUDING Russian ones.
10% from all not all from Russia . Dammit it is the first sentence.
Reply to This
Re: (Score:3)
I guess it's easier to get past the Slashduh "editors" if you inject a suitable dose of hyperbole. It's not like they're going to check, is it?
Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who (Score:5, Funny)
There were nukes built by Soviets. And there were nukes built for delivery to Soviets. (Intercontinental ballistic missiles: When it absolutely, positively has to be there in twenty minutes.) Whether most of that material would belong to Soviets or Americans depends on who launched first.
Reply to This
Parent
So, what we need are . . . (Score:2)
But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn't secured soon, the pipeline could run dry . . .
. . . new, old Soviet nukes . . .
I'm sure there must be profit for someone in there somewhere . . .
What a waste... (Score:5, Funny)
Reply to This
Re:What a waste... (Score:5, Funny)
Why hasn't Obama denied he is powering America's future with his secret Communist/Soviet nuclear power? What is he hiding?
Reply to This
Parent
There would BE no supply problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
... if we'd use common sense and recycle the fuel, as many other nuclear nations already do. The whole terrorist argument against this was bogus from the start. Recycle the damn fuel, and you can reuse 93 percent of it.
Reply to This
Re:There would BE no supply problem... (Score:5, Informative)
... if we'd use common sense and recycle the fuel, as many other nuclear nations already do. The whole terrorist argument against this was bogus from the start. Recycle the damn fuel, and you can reuse 93 percent of it.
Not in any existing reactor you can't. The fissile content (U235+Pu) going into a reactor in fresh fuel is about 4%, the rest is unusable U-238. Burning the fuel fissions about 4% of the actinide nuclei present, and leaves a fissile content of something slightly under 1% (due to plutonium breeding) at the end. Recycling this spent fuel would extend existing fuel supplies by only 25%.
The fundamental problem with doing this is that it is extremely expensive. The cost of plutonium extracted from spent fuel is equivalent to natural uranium costing $700/kg or so. The actual market price of natural uranium is about $100/kg and for $300/kg you could extract natural uranium from seawater and have a 1000 year supply. Even if the extracted plutonium were free (instead of being far more expensive than the uranium) the cost of fabricating and handling plutonium-bearing fuel is so high that it would still be more expensive that uranium-only fuel. In fact the DOE has to pay utilities to use the mixed plutonium/uranium MOX fuel it makes from ex-Soviet weapons.
France has conclusively proven that a nuclear fuel cycle with recycling is more expensive than one without it. See: http://www.fas.org/press/_docs/021507PlutoniumRecycle3L.pdf [fas.org].
Reprocessed plutonium is that rarest of industrial products: one that it worth less than nothing (even if the extravagant production cost is completely written off).
Now a breeder reactor fuel cycle could use the U-238 to produce power in principle, but the cost would be much more than conventional nuclear power, and it is hampered by the fact that every breeder reactor project thus built has failed. It may be possible to build a workable breeder pwer reactor, but no one has yet succeeded in doing it.
Reply to This
Parent
Re:There would BE no supply problem... (Score:5, Funny)
So that's where the term 'hot chick' came from. Thanks, always wondered about that.
Reply to This
Parent
Re:There would BE no supply problem... (Score:5, Informative)
That type of breeder reactor isn't the only alternative.
Try this one instead:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor [wikipedia.org]
The IFR (Integral Fast Reactor) would be able to extract 99% of the energy in the fuel, rather than the 1% we get from the types of reactor used today.
Reply to This
Parent
Re:There would BE no supply problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like the main drawback is the liquid sodium coolant, because sodium is so reactive. What other metals might work?
It's reactive if you let it out. We know how to handle liquid sodium.
Otherwise, I don't see a downside here, at least not compared to traditional reactors. If there is one, someone kindly pipe up.
It's nookulur. Clinton defunded it with one of his first executive orders, and Gore and Kerry lead the fight to kill it in the Congress the next year. At the time the speculation was it was payback to environmental lobbyists - Sierra Club is against anything nuclear, for instance.
Reply to This
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
it's going to be 30 years before there viable breeder reactor producing power. It's going to take 50+ years before there's a possibility of a viable fusion reactor.
There are significant engineering problems with both now.
We had a working 40MW IFR reactor in the early 90's.
"You can't recycle nuclear fuel" (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that you can't recycle nuclear fuel. There are always residual byproducts that last for long and have a potential to pollute eveything around them.
Well that's funny. France [ieee.org] has recycled their fuel for years, and Japan [japannuclear.com] is following suit.
Reply to This
Parent
Re:There would BE no supply problem... (Score:4, Informative)
You can burn up the long-lived actinides resulting in waste that's 'hot' for 100's of years instead of 100's of thousands, not to mention reduce the volume of waste by a factor of almost 100. See this paper [nationalcenter.org] for some really good information.
Reply to This
Parent
I feel I must apologies (Score:5, Interesting)
Right up until now I thought US foreign policy was extremely poor. I feel I must apologise for thinking that, in fact US foreign policy is an act of unparalleled genius! North Korea is being largely ignored by the US as is Iran, not because they are not dangerous (they are) but you are simply employing them to gather enough nulear armaments together that you will later use to generate power, whilst silmutaneously reducing your dependency on fossil fuel and also creating world stabalisation. Outstanding work, forward thinking and downright cunning. I salute you!
Reply to This
We should do more (Score:4, Insightful)
If anything we should increase the amount of energy created by using nuclear fuel in this country. Every form of 'green' power has some kind of drawback that makes it less than ideal, hyrdo affects fish, solar requires nasty chemicals, geothermal is accused of causing earthquakes, wind power kills birds and so on. Point being if we're going to have widespread energy production it needs to be done on a feasible basis that responds to economy of scale. I'd love to have solar panels for my house (and will probably have them within a couple years), but that doesn't mean where I live is a good location for building solar power plants.
The biggest obstacle keeping us from using the greenest energy source we have is the pushback from groups like greenpeace. Ever notice that greenpeace never actually does research or other work to make the world a greener place? The research they do is politically motivated and centered around preventing others from doing things they are politically intolerant of. When's the last time you read a press release from greenpeace about a new technological development they made? If groups such as greenpeace were actually serious about the environment they would be all over themselves in doing everything they could in order to increase the use of nuclear energy.
The fact that the government feels it had to keep this story below the radar in the first place shows how much damage these groups have done to nuclear power. It's time for greenpeace to stand up, do the right thing, and make amends for decades of harm to the environment they have caused. They are no better than some of the old factories that dumped chemicals into rivers.
Reply to This
Re:We should do more (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a big supporter of nuclear power but to be fair Nuclear power kills fish too nearly any way you wing it. Those puppies need water cooling so most are built near large bodies of water. Even if they cool their water properly (cooling towers or canals) so that they don't mess the fish up by raising the temperature of the body of water at all there's no getting around the fact that those intake pipes are going to suck in some fish and other larger animals can often get stuck on the mesh.
I know one plant was required to build a "slide for life" to get some of the fish out of the intake. Got the fish out all-right, but their fate wasn't much delayed. The birds on the other hand, thought it was the best fucking invention ever.
Reply to This
Parent
I don't believe it (Score:3, Funny)
The New York Times reports that about 10 percent of electricity generated in the United States comes from fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, mostly Russian.
Wow, that Bono really has a global impact!
Reply to This
want to buy some uranium? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.google.com/finance?q=TSE:UF.UN [google.com]
Just buy a few hundred shares of UF.UN and you make money if the price of the stuff goes up. And you can tell chicks that you own uranium!
Reply to This
Now tell me (Score:4, Funny)
Isn't it better to have all that energy released gradually, instead of all at once? :)
Reply to This
This proves the old saying... (Score:5, Funny)
Dismantle a nuclear bomb, and you can light a city for a year. Drop a nuclear bomb...
Reply to This
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Dismantle a nuclear bomb, and you can light a city for a year. Drop a nuclear bomb...
Not in my back yard
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Reprocessing can last us for a time but it requires more infrastructure and time to put in place."
The various estimates I've seen indicate that Reprocessing can last us a *very long* time (hundreds of years, possibly thousands of years). In the meantime, we should be working on solar (both terrestrial and space), wind, etc, and Fusion. Once we can make the leap to fusion, we don't really need any more Uranium (or only relatively small quantities) - fusion just needs water, and most countries on Earth have
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But what about all that helium? Won't that cause global warming or cooling or some other disastrous consequence for humanity?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I have in the past wondered the same thing, so I tried to see if I could find an answer. I don't really know for sure, but from what I could find, it seems like the answer is:
1) Helium is pretty inert, and basically won't react with any other elements to form any dangerous compounds (I think, not entirely sure about this, but that seems to be the answer)
2) Helium, apparently, won't generally hurt organic life (again, because it is so inert), although, of course, large quantities in a confined spac
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They aren't wasted. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about Russia, but the US military frequently uses it's old launch vehicles (or at least the engines) for suborbital weapons tests and satellite launches. For example, the Minotaur [wikipedia.org] series of rockets by Orbital Sciences use old Minuteman and Peacekeeper engines. I'm sure there are many other examples.
Reply to This
Parent
Re:What a waste of launch vehicles (Score:4, Informative)
Dnepr_rocket [wikipedia.org] reuses SS-18 Satan.
Reply to This
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The only difference between an offensive missile and a non-offensive missle is the orbit.
Re: (Score:3)
Do you count the cost of the original coke can when the aluminum is recycled and resold and then made into a new coke can in an infinite loop until you say we shouldn't recycle because now that coke can costs $20,000 or do you simply count the cost of the aluminum the recyclers sells you versus the cost the freshly mined/processed aluminum?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In economic terms, that's a sunk or opportunity cost. Those trillions have been paid. Whether we decide to use the material or knowledge or not doesn't change the amount of money put in, and the incremental cost of actually using that is all that we should continue to worry about.
If we can take all those trillions and turn them into something good, why not do it? Ignori