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To: butlerweave

Calling wind turbines “green” is a huge hoax and prank being pulled on the enviro-weenies. The manufacture and construction of the towers, transformers and gearboxes that convert the wind flow into alternating electricity may be engineering marvels, but they are ultimately monuments to unreliability, and are a huge boondoggle in terms of the number of kWHs of electrical energy actually distributed on the electric grid. For every kWH these windmill towers are calculated to produce, an equivalent number of hydrocarbon-fueled generators have to be standing by for those times when the wind fails, or equipment failures take the wind turbine offline. Just dispense with the windmill towers and solar panels altogether, and go back to the hydrocarbon-fueled power generation systems, cutting out the expense of even erecting the towers or building the solar farms to begin with.

Now, you want cheap, reliable, baseline power, that runs 24/7/365 year after year, go to some form of nuclear. The uranium-fueled light water reactors are technology that was new in maybe 1960, but there are better alternatives now tested and proven on a smaller scale, that can replace the uranium-fueled light water reactors, and do it even cheaper, faster, and with NO chance of core meltdown, or storage of the “spent” fuel rods for maybe 10,000 years until radioactivity dies down to tolerable levels.

The thorium-fueled molten salt reactors were developed as an alternative, and have been shown to be feasible. The fuel, thorium, is much more available than uranium, and the spent fuel residue is of much smaller volume and toxicity than the “spent” uranium fuel rods, which still contain some 97% of their potential energy. In fact, to initiate the chain reaction in a thorium atomic pile, the molten salt has to be “seeded” with a small amount of this “spent” fuel rod material, eventually using up all the “spent” uranium fuel rods, ending the need to keep it in storage for extended periods of time.


29 posted on 07/23/2022 3:27:03 PM PDT by alloysteel (There are folks running the government who shouldn't be allowed to play with matches - Will Rogers)
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To: alloysteel

Humans will never run out of uranium.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/

Oh it gets better

https://spectrum.ieee.org/uranium-from-seawater

The cost to fuel a PWR is a very small part of the total cost of the energy sold depending on the country under 2% of total LCOE. we could double the cost of uranium and it wouldn’t add 5% to the total cost. Doubling the cost allows for two paths one is the reprocessing route that the French , Russians,Koreans and Chinese all chose. The other is to use seawater based uranium and just deep bore hole the whole waste stream in mile plus deep dry Granite. The Koreans already have costs of reprocessing down to within a few fractions of a cents per kWh. The benefit for reprocessing is the waste stream is only the 4% of spent fuel that actually is wastes the other 96% is still valuable fuel it should be a crime to throw that away but Jimmy the fool Carter cost the USA our leadership position in reprocessing we invested the dang process after all.

https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/29/046/29046757.pdf


31 posted on 07/23/2022 3:38:47 PM PDT by JD_UTDallas ("Veni Vidi Vici" )
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