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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy need

At the current rate of uranium consumption with conventional reactors, the world supply of viable uranium, which is the most common nuclear fuel, will last for 80 years. Scaling consumption up to 15 TW, the viable uranium supply will last for less than 5 years. (Viable uranium is the uranium that exists in a high enough ore concentration so that extracting the ore is economically justified.)

Conventional reactors are garbage compared to breeder reactors. Breeders increase efficiency about 50x over conventional light water reactors, getting U-238 and turning it into plutonium that can be burnt for more power. The technology is very simple, it was developed in the 1960s but abandoned since uranium was cheap and common. U-238 is around 50 times more common than U-235. There's also thorium. 'Economically justified' is another issue, uranium is pretty cheap right now since fuel only makes up 10% or so of nuclear energy costs. We could raise the cost of uranium x5 and be fine. We could also develop seawater extraction or explore for more uranium. There's little incentive to develop these technologies or explore since uranium is so cheap.

With seawater uranium extraction (currently too expensive to be economical), there is enough fuel for breeder reactors to satisfy the world's energy needs for 5 billion years at 1983's total energy consumption rate, thus making nuclear energy effectively a renewable energy.

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