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by acidburnNSA
2636 days ago
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> Uranium mining is an often overlooked environmental disaster [citation needed]. It was in the 1950s, for sure, before we knew that you should ventilate the radon. Today a lot of it is done in ways that's much cleaner than mining for resources for coal, fracking, or heavy metals for millions upon millions of battery banks, wind turbines, and solar panels. Remember E=MC2 is the key excitement about nuclear energy. There are 2 million times more Joules in a kg of uranium than in a kg of coal/gas/diesel/lithium. Thus you don't have to mine all that much of it to power the planet. In fact, with breeder reactors and reprocessing (super expensive, but that's another story), you could power the entire US for a few hundred years off the depleted uranium sitting in the yard of an enrichment plant in Kentucky. |
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Till and Chang argue in their book about the IFR that if we start building IFR style plants for production usage it's entirely possible that costs drop to about LWR levels.
So far fast breeders have been expensive, but that's largely because they've all been one-off designs largely for R&D purposes without much effort to reduce costs.
For reprocessing, their argument is that electrorefining (pyroprocessing) would be much cheaper than PUREX. To the point that the lower fuel acquisition cost and cheaper waste disposal could make it roughly comparable to once-through LWR costs, even with relatively cheap uranium.
Such a shame IFR was shut down.. sigh