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157 comments on Will Nuclear Fusion Fill the Gap Left by Peak Oil?
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157 comments on Will Nuclear Fusion Fill the Gap Left by Peak Oil?
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I expect that far before the end of this century, all what we now call "nuclear waste" will be taken out and recycled. The actinides will be burnt in specially designed reactors and the remaining fissile material will be used and enriched, and only the small fraction of remaining undecayed isotopes will be returned to the storages.
And of course our kids will be amazed at the stupidity of their parents and grandparents, doing what they do now...
I expect that far before the end of this century, all what we now call "nuclear waste" will be taken out and recycled.
I beg to differ. Reprocessing of this kind has proven to be both unnecessary and uneconomical. Even burying spent fuel is not the most economical approach; it's cheaper to just seal the stuff in armored casks and guard them.
About the mining: a Japanese group, some years ago, came up with a polyamidoxime polymer (obtained basically by treating ordinary acrylic polymer with hydroxylamine in hot methanol). This polymer selectively adsorbs uranium from seawater. Suspended in the ocean in a natural current, it adsorbs 1% of its weight in uranium over a period of months, which is not bad when you consider the concentration of uranium in the water is around 3 ppb. It can then be washed with dilute acid to liberate the uranium and reused.
The group estimated the cost of the uranium obtained to be a few times the current spot market price. There would be no mining waste, since the uranium is already liberated in the enviroment, as are all the decay products like radium and radon. At their estimated cost, reprocessing and construction of breeder reactors could be delayed for centuries, even if the world goes over to mostly nuclear energy as its primary energy source.
Seawater uranium extraction deserves more attention than it has been receiving, since it could render some other large government energy research expenditures (like breeder reactors, advanced nuclear fuel cycles, or DT fusion) superfluous for the forseeable future. The primary cost of seawate extraction is the capital cost of the support structure for the adsorbant, so combining this with offshore wind might be a good idea (they could share structural elements).
This has only been market tested with aqueous methods which certainly arent low on capitial and labor and are sort of designed for plutonium extraction. Of course its been more expensive than it will ever be worth. I fully expect that utilizing pyroprocessing methods we'll at least do uranium and fission product extraction sometime this century, as long as we avoid the trap of trying to do MOX fuel nonsense. Now maybe the actinides can be burnt someday in a fast neutron reactor of some sort for profit or maybe they cant, but there is potential profit to be made with non-aqueous methods on the unburnt uranium, xenon, and fission platenoids.
And then we cant discount the political machines that make unnecissary and uneconomical things happen anyways.
And seawater uranium extraction doesnt deserve any attention at all because we'll have so much uranium from more conventional ores for it to ever compete.
I continue to disagree. As it stands right now, reprocessing would be uneconomical even if it were free. The plutonium has negative value, costing more to fabricate into fuel elements than it saves in enriched uranium. This will be true of any reactor with Pu in the fuel elements, since the cost driver (the intense alpha activity of the Pu) will be the same.
I consider homogenous reactor systems, like molten salt reactors, to be nonstarters for practical reasons. No reactor operator wants a reactor in which the entire primary loop is intensely radioactive. Nor do they want reactors that have to include sophisticated chemical processing equipment for online reprocessing.
And seawater uranium extraction doesnt deserve any attention at all because we'll have so much uranium from more conventional ores for it to ever compete.
If so, that would be another reason to not go with reprocessing or breeding.
Where did I talk about Pu?. As it stands, reprocessing just the uranium would be valuable, along with fission platenioids, xenon, and other marketable fission products. Dump the transuranic actinides seperately.
Its sure a seperate business model from LWRs. But the benifits of no fuel fabrication, low fissile load, and extremely small waste stream are there. And while fuel costs are a small component of the cost of nuclear power, they aren't negligable.
Given that MSRs have never been market tested, suggesting that they're a nonstarter because of a different business model is a bit premature.