Nuclear fuel will last us for 4B years

25 points by phyphy 2 years ago | 39 comments
  • NovaVeles 2 years ago
    Do not mistake technical viability with economic viability. The 1st Breeder reactor went into service in 1962, there have been many after and they have all meet the same fate.

    Yes, they can breed their own fuel but the total cost of doing it is wildly prohibitive.

    You can get gold/uranium/lithium from Ocean water, try and do it at a price people will actually pay for it. You can get minerals from space, so long as the market rate of $10 million a ton is viable... etc.

    As always, if I get proven wrong - that will be a great day!

    • panick21_ 2 years ago
      The reason for this is that commercial adoption happened with PWRs and after that the nuclear companies had no need to commercialize anything else.

      By the time Breeder research by government was happening the anti-nuclear movement of the 70/80 was already in full effect and research money was being cut and very few nuclear plants were being built so there wasn't much reason invest in commercial breeders.

      Specially because fuel isn't that expensive in the first place and waste isn't actually a big problem either.

      There are still other good reason to create breeders and if we are gone develop next generation reactors, we might as well go in that direction.

      • josephcsible 2 years ago
        It might be cost-prohibitive now, but is there any reason to think that it can't get cheaper?
        • defrost 2 years ago
          The entire history of mineral and energy extraction tells us that once dense deposits are exhausted extraction costs substantally increase even in the face of more sophisticated technology.

          eg: Oil was once extracted by sucking it out of a surface pool with a pump .. and now we are fracking for gas fractions.

          These "there are XXX tones at YY ppm (or ppb) of Z in the crust or ocean" calculations are almost always impractical wishful thinking economically infeasible bullshit.

          For example:

          Have a shot at guesstimating the tonnage and value of Palladium (used in catalytic converters) in the near vicinity of road surfaces - it falls there as by product waste.

          Now have a stab at the cost of ripping up and processing the central north american road surface to extract Palladium.

          Worth it?

          It'll be cheaper once we abandon cities and roads, of course.

          • ETH_start 2 years ago
            Breeder reactors are extremely fuel efficient. The cost is in building an actual breeder reactor itself, as it is an experimental technology. And the cost is not "widely prohibitive". The Wikipedia page says they are 25% more expensive than non breeder reactors.
            • eesmith 2 years ago
              I think gold cyanidation considerably reduced costs for gold extraction compared to traditional mining methods which depended on higher-quality deposits.
          • Schroedingersat 2 years ago
            > Yes, they can breed their own fuel but the total cost of doing it is wildly prohibitive.

            You're being too generous. It's could theoretically not can. An actually closed fuel loop has never happened.

        • credit_guy 2 years ago
          To me any technological projection that goes beyond 200 years is a bit of non-sense. 200 years ago trains did not exist. Steam power existed, but just in a tiny corner of the world economy.

          If we don't run out of nuclear fuel in 200 years, then we'll never do.

          And we certainly have enough uranium to not run out of it for 200 years, with the current technology. No breeder reactors, or anything fancy needed.

          CANDU reactors run on unenriched uranium [1]. This instantly gives a multiplier of 10. If the current reactors can run for a few decades, then switching to CANDU reactors we'd have fuel for a few centuries.

          Why aren't we switching to CANDU design? Some new builds are projected [2], but overall they appear to be too capital intensive, compared to the more traditional light water reactors. Still if fuel availability were a concern, we'd switch to CANDU reactors and stop having any scarcity for hundreds of years.

          [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

          [2] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Romania-adopts-d...

          • Schroedingersat 2 years ago
            All current nuclear reactors run on U235 or the barely significant dregs of Pu239 left over.

            They do varying amounts of breeding to produce up to 50% of their energy from Pu, but the fuel source is always U235. Leaving more U238 with it in a HWR doesn't change this.

            > And we certainly have enough uranium to not run out of it for 200 years, with the current technology

            At the current (insignificant) portion of final energy they produce. Increase it 10x for just the current electrical grid and it's <20 years. Switch to SMRs which are inefficient and it's <10.

            If you want people to take nuclear seriously, try telling the truth about anything at all at least once, ever.

            • credit_guy 2 years ago
              > try telling the truth about anything at all at least once, ever.

              I'm not sure HN is the place for this type of language.

              • Schroedingersat 2 years ago
                It's not the place for an unending torrent of fake pro nuclear lies designed to try and keep coal relevant either, but here we are.
            • acidburnNSA 2 years ago
              CANDUs run on natural uranium but get about 1/10th as much energy out of each kg of fuel than a LWR. So it's much more of a wash. Not a factor of 10.

              Check the average discharge burnup.

            • josephcsible 2 years ago
              Do isotopes of any element exist with all three of these properties?

              1. Radioactive with a half-life short enough to be dangerous (e.g., not bismuth-209) but long enough that waiting for it all to decay isn't a feasible way of getting rid of it (e.g., not francium)

              2. Produced by nuclear reactors

              3. Not usable as a fuel source in any breeder reactors

              If not, then why is there such a thing as nuclear waste?

              • Schroedingersat 2 years ago
                Because breeders with closed fuel cycles don't exist, and Pu240 breeders double don't exist.

                They're just a fiction used for marketing and to buy social license for the plutonium separation facilities.

                • credit_guy 2 years ago
                  > Not usable as a fuel source in any breeder reactors

                  I don't know, but to me "not usable" and "not economically usable" don't sound quite the same.

                • HereIGoAgain 2 years ago
                  It's nice to get some facts instead of just "green" FUD.
                  • chaimanmeow 2 years ago
                    The bigger cost is storage. Very long term storage.

                    Fuel recycling and alternate fuels such as thorium might reduce storage burden by being able to burn up plutonium waste from traditional nuke plants.

                    • panick21_ 2 years ago
                      No it isn't. The cost isn't high at all. Even the current spent fuel is tiny in volume and tiny in storage cost. They are literally a bunch of cask on a parking lot. All of Switzerlands fuel for 50+ years is literally in one storage building. The US has already collected a huge amount of money that could be invested in solution but they just leave it on a parking lot.

                      And if we are going to use nuclear for the long term, using that 'waste' as fuel is clearly the thing to do, and we can simply burn all that stuff up and the remaining fuel only needs to be stored for 300 years.

                      Thorium is not needed for this, just better reactors.

                    • ETH_start 2 years ago
                      Uranium will run out long after the sun's rising luminosity will reduce atmospheric CO2 levels to below the level plants need to live (600 million years) and boil the oceans away (1 billion years).
                      • Zenst 2 years ago
                        Whilst the setup `may` sustain itself fuel wise for that kind of duration, I'm not aware of any building able to last 4B years, let alone a nuclear plant, which generally has a lifespan of a few decades.
                        • josephcsible 2 years ago
                          Is anyone claiming otherwise? Isn't this article just about having enough fuel?
                          • panick21_ 2 years ago
                            Current reactors are already being certified for 80 years and might be longer eventually.

                            But of course this articles assume you would build new reactors over time.