Originally posted by: SarcasticDwarf
Originally posted by: futuristicmonkey
Originally posted by: SarcasticDwarf
Originally posted by: futuristicmonkey
Originally posted by: SarcasticDwarf
Originally posted by: Heisenberg
If I could buy pure nuclear power, I would. "Green" power sounds all nice and everything, but nuclear is the only source that can replace fossil fuel plants and not just supplement them IMO.
Have you run across any studies that show what amount of nuclear fuel we will have if we went from the current ~20% to 100% and China did as well (this assumes that prices would be "normal" thus encouraging further mining)?
Here's a few numbers:
A fiscal-year 2003 $7USD fuel rod will supply as much energy as a ton of coal, and you're not going to be exhausting mutliple tons of oxides into the atmosphere per each ton of coal. As for fuel supply, right now the estimates are about a 150 year useable supply of natural uranium. New deposits are being found once in a while, sure, but if our retarded governments (Canada and the USA) would allow us to use breeders, we could both reprocess our spent fuel (solving that damned waste issue) AND turn the 97% useless natural uranium into completely useable fuel.
Ignorance is nuclear's biggest issue.
I see those numbers, but I don't see anything that indicates how long of a supply we will have (foreign or domestic) if both the US and China increase their rate of usage.
If we can breed, the supply is damned-near infinite.
References for that statement?
Wiki: breeder reactor
It's hard to tell you why without going into a long discussion. I'll try to keep it short.
There are two basic types of reactors: thermal (moderated) and fast (breeder) reactors. The former uses a moderator to slow down(thermalize) the neutrons in order to make them more likely to collide with a U-235 nucleus, thus sustaining the reaction. In these reactors, U-238 is useless because it is more stable than U-235, while constituting 97% of all natural uranium -- it won't react without an input of energy, which is useless for generation.
In breeder reactors there is no moderator to slow down the neutrons. What happens is the fast neutrons have a tendency to be absorbed by the U-238 nuclei, turning them into Pu-239 nuclei. This plutonium is just as good as U-235 for a thermal reactor (which every commercial reactor in NA is, aside from the CANDU's which can be converted, but I digress). As I said before, breeders give us two advantages. First, they can take natural uranium (3% u-235; 97% u-238) and transform it into a completely useable mix of u-235 and pu-239. Second, they can take the spent fuel from normal reactors (essentially natural uranium, minus the u-235) and turn it back into useable fuel,
while still creating energy.
The only major problem is plutonium is more suited to making a "simple", Hiroshima-type bomb, where the explosion is due to developing a very supercritical assembly of weapons-grade uranium really quickly. You need less plutonium to make a similarly-destructive bomb than uranium.
Edit: I forgot this in my first post, it sums it up quite well: Current supplies are about 150 years. With breeding that'll turn into about 150 million years, give or take
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