First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.
Fission and fusion reactors are really more like in-between renewable and non-renewable. Sure, it relies on materials that are finite, but there is way, way more of that material available in comparison to how much we need.
Making this distinction is necessary to un-spook people who have gone along with the panic induced by bad media and lazy engineering of the past.
Fusion and fission are quite different. A practical fusion reactor does not exist. It’s outside our technological capability right now. Current fusion reactors are only experimental and can not maintain a reaction more than a small fraction of a second. The problem is plasma containment. If that can be solved, it would be possible to build a practical fusion reactor.
The fuel for a working fusion reactor would likely be deuterium/tritium which is in effect unlimited since it can be extracted from seawater. Also the amount of fuel required is small because of the enormous amounts of energy produced in converting mass to energy. Fusion converts about 1% of mass to energy. Output would be that converted mass times the speed of light squared which is a very, very large number, in the neighborhood of consumed fuel mass times 1015.
Fusion is far less toxic to to the environment. With deuterium/tritium fusion the waste product is helium. All of the particle radiation comes from neutrons which only require shielding. Once the kinetic energy of the particles is absorbed, it’s gone. There’s no fissile waste that lingers for some half life.
Your info is a little out of date - some fusion experiments have been able to maintain fusion for almost a minute. However, your point still stands. We are decades away at a minimum untill a viable fusion reactor.
My guess is that fusion will be too expensive for commercial use unless they can get a super compact stellarator design to produce huge amounts of energy, and make them cheap to build (HA!).
Or we will see them in spaceships. :P
We don’t even know if fusion will ever be functionally able to produce more energy than it consumes, and on top of that it will need to be less expensive than natural gas or solar in order to compete. Which it will never do. Do you have any idea how much ITER has cost?
$22 billion, or $16 billion “over budget.” And this is a test reactor that will never produce commercial power. They still have 2 years of construction left so… it could hit $30 billion. At least at Vogtle they are getting two reactors.
We can still categorize a concept, even if the technology doesn’t exist in a useful state yet.
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I’m spooked by the fact that you have no idea how the US enriches uranium, or the difference between a power pressurized water reactor and a fast “breeder” reactor (if you were thinking of plutonium) or a centrifuge.
The US enriches uranium using a gas-centrifuge. The US also no longer recycles spent nuclear fuel, but France does.
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Not trying to be “difficult,” but isn’t that what people thought about coal/oil at first? I understand that the scale is different, but it still needs to be a stop gap as opposed to a long term plan.
Spent Nuclear Fuel, unlike coal or oil, can be recycled to a certain extent (this is done in places like France but not the US). If we recycled all of the spent fuel, we’d potentially have a thousand years (give or take) of fissionable fuel. Plenty of time for us to get fusion running so we can completely wean ourselves off petroleum energy generation.
Why do you think we need nuclear to transition fully off petroleum? Renewables with storage are cheaper today for new build power, let alone in another 20 years. They continue to get cheaper and more efficient quite rapidly.
Adding to what others have said here, nuclear is great for base load consumption. Use the renewables to supplement during peak hours where load variability is the greatest.
Sure, you could connect renewables to batteries / accumulators for times when they are not available (i.e. no wind, no sun) but this doesn’t give a very good consistent base load. A nuclear plant that is 1 MWe will always give 1MWe if it is up all the time. I’m not saying here that batteries aren’t a good option, just that they aren’t the optimal solution.
Another thing to consider is resistive transmission losses. Connecting long cables from, say offshore wind farms or areas of high wind density, to electrical substations long distances away makes delivering the electricity more inefficient. Granted, having it is better than not (nobody likes brownouts). But engineers try to take all of these into consideration when working on the regional power grid.
You’re conflating leftover dregs of Pu-239 (about a 10-15% boost in energy per fuel input) with non-fissile material like U238. Breeder reactors required to use the second have never been used commercially in breeding mode.
You’ve either fallen for or are intentionally spreading a lie.
What lie am I spreading? Conventional Light Water Reactor Nuclear Fuel (5-6% U-235 w/t%) can be recycled. This can be done even without using breeder reactors which operate through fast fission of U-235
Yes the plutonium can be stripped out along with the other transuranics, and it does pose a proliferation risk (separate issue), but it definitely can be recycled. France reprocesses their fuel.
Edit: typo correction
Ah. So intentional then. You’re trying to pretend extracting the <0.7% left over U235 and Pu239 (for a 10-15% increase in U235 fuel economy) is somehow fissioning U238.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. Reprocessed fuel does not imply that we’re now fissioning U-238. That takes place in a completely different energy regime (fast fission vs. thermal). Light Water Reactors and fast reactors operate differently, with different fuels. LWRs in commercial operation use slightly enriched U-235. There is no fissioning of U-238 other than the very small amount of spontaneous fission which is negligible compared to contributions from thermal fission in an LWR. The Six Factor formula governs criticality reactions, and these terms differ for both reactor types. The nuclear cross sections are fundamentally different between these energy regimes.
Reprocessed fuel is what it implies, recycled processed LWR fuel, stripped of the fission products that built up as the fuel underwent burnup in the core. If this were some sort of pretend activity then I guess the entire reprocessing back end of the nuclear fuel industry is fake.
I don’t appreciate the personal attacks, so if you have nothing constructive to say, good day to you sir slash madam.
You’re still trying to spread the “90% of nuclear waste is recyclable” myth, but now you’ve retreated to the bailey of “getting 10% more energy is technically getting something out of it so saying it is recyclable is totally true even though this has no impact on mining or the dangerous parts of waste!!” You’re also pretending it magically makes the Pu240 and Am241 go away.
Reprocessing yields a small fraction of leftover fissile material. It is in no way characterisable as recycling.
The strategy is a very boring and tiresome propaganda move that is part of the Duke Energy and Rosatom astroturfing playbook. As is the “who me? I couldn’t possibly be slyly trying to imply nuclear waste is actually fuel” act.
They never said that it’s 90% recyclable. They said it can be recycled ‘to an extent’. You’re projecting.