Nuclear Power Was Once Shunned at Climate Talks. Now, It’s a Rising Star.
Growing worldwide energy demand and other factors have shifted the calculus, but hurdles still lie ahead.
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I used to be pro-nuclear and I am still not worried about the safety issue. However, fissile material is still a finite resource and mining for it is an ecological disaster, so I no longer am in favor of it.
As someone who isn't well versed on the topic, is the impact from mining fissile material worse than the impact of mining the stuff we need for batteries and storage of renewable? Big fan of renewables, and not trying to start some shit. Trying to learn. Lol
Batteries can be made from literal saltwater nowadays.
Otherwise, lithium mining is certainly not exactly good for the environment, but can be managed. Uranium (even the non-fissile) is pretty toxic and can contaminate the whole area.
What happened to the Navajo Nation due to uranium mining is disgusting and it's what made me turn away from supporting the idea of nuclear power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navajo_people
The early and mid 20th century was the era of thousands of Superfund sites. This particular incident doesn't seem any worse than average. We're still dealing with the toxic aftermath of mining and processing all sorts of minerals with no regard for the environment during that time. Is uranium actually any worse than any other mineral in that sense?
I'm not sure "it's no more a local environmental catastrophe and healthcare nightmare than other forms of mining" is exactly a good argument to do it. And as I showed in another link, we have 90 more years of uranium to power the reactors we currently have, so we better hope we come up with some new way to power reactors quickly considering how long it takes to build one plant with the current technology we can come up with.
You did not show any such thing in your other link, rather the exact opposite.
By your logic about environmental impact, we should then stop ALL mining and processing activities because they caused pollution a century ago. That's obviously not realistic, practical, nor even helpful. It should be based on the technology and environmental impact of today.
Are you claiming uranium mining no longer causes environmental and health problems on a local level? That's quite a claim.
It's also not true.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3653646/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201047/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412020320626
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201052/
I admit, I am only smart enough to understand the abstracts of the papers and I did not read every link in its entirety, but this does not sound like a solved issue by any means.
I just went to the conclusion of this long paper, which essentially says "we just don't know enough to assess how bad it could be, but it could be bad," and I think the final sentence is especially prescient:
Our engineered solutions may well become the contaminated sites of the future.
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1228_web.pdf
Now, if your argument is that it is necessary to cause damage to the local environment and cause a lot of early, painful deaths, I would again say that is not a good argument.
I did not make any claim. As I said in my first comment, I have no idea what the environmental impact of uranium mining is. My point in the previous comment is merely that using an example from the 1950s is useless as we can find similar environmental disasters for any mineral we were mining in that era.
Okay, well now you have a lot more evidence that mining uranium is a really bad idea. Do you agree?
Will get back to you once I've had a chance to read through them, but I have no reason to think you're mistaken.
fissile material is still a finite resource
We have reserves that will last centuries, and it can literally be extracted from seawater just like lithium if the economics allow for it. Can't comment on the mining impact, though. Is it any worse than rare earth metals?
There is no economical way to extract fissile material from sea water. This is no different from people saying you can mine gold that way. Technically, yes. Practically, no.
The only way we know to get the uranium necessary for reactors in the quantities we need to do it is to mine it. And we don't even have enough to mine to last for a century at current consumption.
The world's present measured resources of uranium (6.1 Mt) in the cost category less than three times present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 90 years.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium
Sure, maybe some new practical way to make a reactor without uranium or to find uranium elsewhere might happen. But that's a MIGHT. With what we know now, we need uranium and we need to mine it and there isn't enough.
Dude. Read the rest of your source.
Thus, any predictions of the future availability of any mineral, including uranium, which are based on current cost and price data, as well as current geological knowledge, are likely to prove extremely conservative
In recent years there has been persistent misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the abundance of mineral resources, with the assertion that the world is in danger of actually running out of many mineral resources. While congenial to common sense if the scale of the Earth's crust is ignored, it lacks empirical support in the trend of practically all mineral commodity prices and published resource figures over the long term. In recent years some have promoted the view that limited supplies of natural uranium are the Achilles heel of nuclear power as the sector contemplates a larger contribution to future clean energy, notwithstanding the small amount of it required to provide very large amounts of energy.
Of course the resources of the earth are indeed finite, but three observations need to be made: first, the limits of the supply of resources are so far away that the truism has no practical meaning. Second, many of the resources concerned are either renewable or recyclable (energy minerals and zinc are the main exceptions, though the recycling potential of many materials is limited in practice by the energy and other costs involved). Third, available reserves of 'non-renewable' resources are constantly being renewed, mostly faster than they are used.
Literally half the page you linked discusses how we're not going to run out of resources anytime soon.
Known reserves are sufficient for 90 years because nobody wants to bother with further prospecting when supply hugely exceeds demand.
I did read that, which is why I said this:
Sure, maybe some new practical way to make a reactor without uranium or to find uranium elsewhere might happen. But that’s a MIGHT.
Building tons more nuclear reactors in the hopes that we'll find new resources to power them all because we haven't spent enough time prospecting does not make much rational sense to me.
You appear to be severely misunderstanding the source. You may want to take the time to read through it again.
Also, did you think we checked each and every resource we industrialised to make sure we had a few millenia worth before we started using them? Last I heard, our known lithium resources are only sufficient for a decade or two at current rates, never mind the increasing usage.
Are you asking if we did smart things before we began exploiting resources? Because the answer is no, never. Not once.
You're missing the point, which is that we don't normally measure reserves in centuries. We prospect as needed, and there is no reason to think that we would be unable to locate new deposits as necessary. All this and more is covered in the source you linked.
We prospect as needed
Which has never once caused a problem before, am I right?
Love how you ignored their actual point to focus on the one thing they said that didn't apply to the topic
That's what we normally do, which is a problem
But for nuclear we have centuries worth of stockpile, so we dont have to do that
We don't know we have centuries worth of stockpile. That's just an assumption.
In fact, I think it's a foolish assumption to make since if the world's nuclear powers haven't been quietly prospecting the globe for new sources of Uranium since 1945, they sure should have been. But you don't hear about a lot of new uranium mines opening.
And what if this big stockpile us close to a major waterway? Or under a bunch of people's homes?
Acting like "we can just look and find more" as if it's that simple doesn't make sense to me.
Most human acticity requires some degree of mining. Lithium, copper, uranium etc. The impact of that however pales in comparison to the sheer volumes of land that are destroyed by climate change and fossil fuel extraction. Besides, when mines finally do shut down they often become havens for wildlife.
Breeder reactors produce more fissile material than they consume.
As far as I can tell from looking, there are no breeder reactors for large scale power generation, there never have been, and while multiple countries are trying, none of them have actually done it.
There have been plenty. For example, the CANDU series of reactors developed in the 1950s and 60s. Breeder reactors were quite popular during the early days of nuclear power, as it was initially thought that there was maybe only 100 years' worth of (easily accessible) nuclear material on earth, rather than the thousands (or tens of thousands) of years' worth we know of now, due to both more reserves being discovered and also easier methods of fuel enrichment being developed. The fact that breeder reactors have fallen out of favour due to abundant fuel reserves certainly says something.
I know there have been plenty of breeder reactors. What I can't find is a breeder reactor in a scale large enough to generate power for a city. In fact, from what I read, that's been tried more than once without success. Can you point me to a breeder reactor that was actually a useful test case for powering a city?
The Wikipedia page for breeder reactors has a whole list you can even sort by output capacity. For example, the BN-800.
What I'm reading on Wikipedia is that none of them have been used for large scale power generation yet. Which was what I was saying. Wikipedia showing what their output capacity is does not show how long that output capacity can be maintained or how much it might fluctuate.
Otherwise, what do you think the reason is that no country has yet to use one to power any cities?
Here's the generation statistics of the BN-800 reactor I mentioned before: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=451 It's been operating at about 70% of it's rated capacity basically since it was first turned on, that's large scale power generation. Breeder reactors have been in commercial use for decades (see also: Phenix and Superphenix).
The simple reason why breeder reactors aren't the default is because most reactors don't need to be breeders. The two main upsides of a breeder reactor is a) breeding of nuclear material, which as I said before was only ever a concern in the very early days of nuclear power. We have thousands of years' worth of fuel available now. b) The reuse of nuclear waste for additional power generation. Of course you have to have nuclear waste to reuse first, which necessitates many other, non-breeder reactors already being in use, so breeder reactors are usually restricted to countries that already have significant investment into nuclear power, like France, Russia, China, etc.. If you don't need to breed more nuclear fuel, and you don't have waste to reprocess you might as well keep it simple and build a regular LWR reactor.
Once you use up all the heavy elements by fission you just put the newly created light elements into fusion reactors and get the originals back
That's currently science fiction.
No shit, it’s a joke. This would violate conservation of energy.
Ok, good. My humour detector must need a recharge.
To get the originals mater back would be a violation, but you'd get something out. Just less and less each time round. That's what I thought you were suggesting. Even that is fantasy for now.
I don’t believe in the /s.
Aside from conservation of energy being violated, I don’t think there’s enough hydrogen produced from fission to do it either. I’m no physicist but I don’t think fusion of iodine, cesium, strontium, krypton etc is viable, I think it’s gotta be the really low weight stuff like hydrogen and helium.
Agreed.
