[NovaVeles]

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_]

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]

It might be cost-prohibitive now, but is there any reason to think that it can't get cheaper?

[defrost]

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]

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.

[defrost]

Breeder reactors have no bearing on the costs of primary mineral extraction from the crust - it's a seperate line of discussion altogether to this sub thread.

Perhaps you intended your comment in reply to someone discussing the pros|cons of fuel generation via breeder reactors rath than to my comment which addresses the inevitable rising effort required to extract more resource from the crust (or ocean) over time.

[ETH_start]

The comment you initially responded to was asking about the cost of breeder reactors:

"It might be cost-prohibitive now, but is there any reason to think that it can't get cheaper?"

[eesmith]

I think gold cyanidation considerably reduced costs for gold extraction compared to traditional mining methods which depended on higher-quality deposits.

[defrost]

By "Traditional methods" I guess you mean pre 1887 methods?

You still need a relatively high (ie greater than mean crustal compisition) gold percentage to make circuit leeching (by whatever method) profitable.

On the matter of the articles discussion of uranium in the ocean - that's a dream of chasing something evermore expensive.

If there was an empty ocean basin the size of the Earths oceans and if there was an efficient cheap extraction method,

then we could pass the entire ocean through that process from our ocean to the empty basin (okay, this already sounds impractical).

Instead (if we had this hypothetical cheap extraction) we'd find ourselves endlessly pumping the same ocean through the same process and forever chasing smaller and smaller concentrations.

[eesmith]

Yes.

Your statement was "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."

That statement should be independent of time, so hold for 1887 too.

> that's a dream of chasing something evermore expensive

I have no issue with that point.

[defrost]

And it essentially is true, minor bumps aside.

Early gold mining (and tin, lead, etc) followed rich veins with good rewards for hand tools.

Throughout history gold mining has had bursts of finding new rich grounds, but the essential trajectory has been more effort (in the sense of moving more material) to extract less target material, often with more complex processing and harmful side effects (leaching trace amounts from paydirt).

Years back I did the computational backend for a mine modelling program (under ground and pit) with application here at the superpit [1].

The dimensions of this hole are .. large - the volume of material removed is large, and the energy requirements to lift that volume free and the sort it for discard, crushing, refining, etc are also large.

This is just for gold, which is mostly useless (aside from some jewellery and some actual essential use in space electronics the bulk of gold goes to bullion and is valuable because, well, it's gold (go figure)).

You can (I have, and others do) plot the per tonne increased extraction costs of target materials against deposit richness as reserves are depleted.

The entire notion of peak oil is predicated against increasing effort for diminished returns.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wykx-_RWDw

[Schroedingersat]

> 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.

[acidburnNSA]

It's not theoretical. EBR-1 actually made more fissile material than it consumed, as confirmed by chemical measurements in 1953 [1].

[1] https://www.asme.org/wwwasmeorg/media/resourcefiles/aboutasm...

[Schroedingersat]

And did it run on said fuel? Or did any of them? It has never happened.

[panick21_]

I mean yes, it was continuously breeding and the result of that breeding was in the reactor and partially was used to sustain the reaction.

What has not happened is that that fuel was removed from that reactor and then inserted into another reactor.

[Schroedingersat]

> I mean yes, it was continuously breeding and the result of that breeding was in the reactor and partially was used to sustain the reaction.

This is a lie just like the rest. EBR 1 had a separate core and blanket. It didn't run on the bred fuel any more than a PWR does.

[panick21_]

You are right, I thought Shippingport reactor 3 did but it also was a blanket design.

I don't really think this matters that much. The neutronics is pretty well understood and the principle has been proven. Its just a matter of investing the money to do it.