Uranium?
Posted on 07/01/2016 4:39:49 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
America, Japan and China are racing to be the first nation to make nuclear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly inexhaustible.
And it seems America is in the lead. New technological breakthroughs from DOE’s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach and the only question is – when will the source of uranium for our nuclear power plants change from mined ore to seawater extraction?
Nuclear fuel made with uranium extracted from seawater makes nuclear power completely renewable. It’s not just that the 4 billion tons of uranium in seawater now would fuel a thousand 1,000-MW nuclear power plants for a 100,000 years. It’s that uranium extracted from seawater is replenished continuously, so nuclear becomes as endless as solar, hydro and wind....
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Yes, counter-productive government red tape is the only remaining real problem.
As for the costs, a solution is at hand: replace expensive, bespoke reactors with mass-produced modular reactors. Use the economies-of-scale inherent to mass production to make the cost/unit of power drop. Build modular plants, so that only relatively small up-front capital investments are required. That would greatly reduce financial risk, and further reduce overall costs.
So, that’s how William Windom’s character on the Night Gallery episode “Little Girl Lost” blew up the entire Planet.
Agreed.
Thanks
I remember reading about modular reactors years ago and I think Bill Gates invested in them. What happened?
BUT BUT BUT... IT’S NUCLEAR
Uranium?
If Hitlery gets in the ChiComs will have all our data within 24 hours. Right now just the muzzies have it.
My (limited) understanding is that this has become an “any day now” type of thing.
Uranium? Pfffft! Now Upsidaisium, there’s the future! ;-)
Bkmk
The biggest problem is that natural gas fired power plants are cheap and easy. Nuclear cannot begin to compete on base price regardless of reasonability of the regulatory stance.
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True. But 4th generations nuclear power plants will be cheaper.
Bump
Since they are extracting metals from seawater, I wonder if this is really a scheme to get government to fund extracting gold from seawater?
No they aren't, sadly.
Disagree.
The beta’s won’t be cheaper but mass produced truck sized reactors will be.
The cost decline curve will be much steeper and faster than for solar.
as well there’s an equal amount of waste uranium that can be used.
The key word in all this is the word “renewable”. The point is to have the government reclassify nuclear power as a renewable energy source.
Using a breeder reactor design like the French one, along with the pebble bed design from Germany (which got kiboshed by the idiot Greeniacs before any were built) would minimize the waste problem, but it would still exist, and as electrical needs balloon in a post-internal-combustion era, so would the waste problem. Most of the waste would be low-level, and more or less safe in under 20 years; long-term waste disposal is a political problem for the most part -- but aren't those always the hardest ones?
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