Posted on 01/02/2022 9:17:04 AM PST by rktman
If there is NO Energy and the Lights won’t come on, they will have fixed the energy poverty and equity problem, because NOBODY will have any and they will All be equally impoverished.
Back to the caves & burning wood.
No need for fusion reactors humans have mastered fission. The Koreans who ignore antinuclear fanatics have demonstrated that the cost of electricity from reprocessed fuel is less than 2 hundreds of a cent different 0.63 cents per kwh vs 0.65 cents per kwh in fuel costs. Also.demonstrating that nuclear fuel is the.cheapest source of thermal energy in a btu basis. LWR reactors are 33% efficient for every kWh electric three kwh of.heat were created by the nuclear fuel the other 60+% is available as low temp heat at 50 to 80C hit.enough for district heating systems to use over 50 km distances from the source at those temps. 0.21 cents per kWh thermal is the cost of reactor heat from the fuel itself. There are 3412 btu in a kWh or 0.0000635014 cents per kWh thermal. Natural gas is priced per therm at the retail side where one therm is 100,000 btu so nuclear heat is 6.35 cents per therm even with reprocessed fuel less with virgin uranium more. Gas in Europe is priced in Mwh currently it is 116 euro per mwh. 0.21 cents per kwh is = $2.10 per mwh thats what gas would need to sell for to equal nuclear heat in a btu basis.
In the USA there is the equivalent to 9 TRILLION BBL of oil in energy in the 70,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel currently in storage it is absolutely criminal what that moron Carter did when he banned the USA from reprocessing our spend fuel into more fuel. 96% of spent nuclear fuel is more nuclear fuel only 4% is fission products and actinides.
I am certainly no expert on nuclear physics but back in 2007 when gas prices went through the roof I studied a lot about different forms of energy. That is what we can do.
It was apparent that wave and wind energy just were not going to work because places with a lot of wind, like the Aleutian Islands, don’t have a lot of people there.
Solar would help as an addition to the electrical grid in places like the southeast and southwest, especially if panels were put on top of commercial buildings. But solar is too dispersed to act as a primary energy supply.
Then hydroelectric, but we have dammed up most of the places where a reasonable amount of head can be found, so that’s peaked out.
That left natural gas, oil and nuclear. If you’re looking to lower carbon dioxide emissions then natural gas and nuclear are the way to go.
Funny you should mentioned reprocessing nuclear fuel. I always wondered about nuclear waste and how dangerous it was. If it is dangerous then there is still a good amount of radioactivity. If there is a good amount of radioactivity then there is energy. So why not use that energy instead of burying in the ground out in New Mexico?
“Because if people are not dependent on fossil fuels, we will not have energy poverty,” she said.
I have never seen a more perfect example of begging the question.
Thorium is unnecessary we have mined enough uranium for.thousands of years of human use as long as you one reprocessed spent fuel into MOX and then burn said MOX in a high conversion ratio reactor. The choices of HC ratio reactor is large you can use sodium fast reactors with a CR of 1.4 or you can use BWR water reactors with a tight lattice and a moderator to fuel ratio of less than 0.5 those have CR=1.1 or greater same for a PWR reactor with a MF ratio of 0.3 or less. You can also use supercritical water mixed spectrum reactor with a CR or 1.2+ or supercritical CO2 with a CR of 1.4+ any of those create more fuel the form of PU239 than they burn in the fuel cycle. You MUST reprocess the fuel using fuel once and throwing it away is a crime against humanity. The ONLY reason Carter and the anti nuke zealots banned reprocessing is to cripple the nuclear industry and soon it to designed failure. There is a reason the Russians,Chinese,French, Japanese and Koreans all reprocess fuels they understand science that spent fuel is still 96% fuel. In a once through cycle you get 1% of the energy out of uranium the rest is thrown away with reprocessing you get access to the other 99% just the spent fuel in the USA alone has TRILLIONS of barrel equivalent energy this says nothing of the 600,000 tons of depleted uranium from the enrichment program that contains TRILLIONS more enough to support Western standard of.living level energy consumption for tens of thousands of years. It was 100% designed to cripple the nuclear industry in America by banning reprocessing. Carter should have been tried as a traitor and with crimes against humanity for that one executive order. F him when he finally gets to room temp I hope I live long enough to piss on his grave.
They wanted to bury it in NevaDUH.
BFL
The most dangerous parts of spent fuel is the actinides which are the elements heavier than uranium all of them are radioactive some for millions of years and every one of them is fuel in a epithermal or fast neutron spectrum being burnt to fission products. Only two fission products have half lives long enough to worry about on geological time scales Tc and Sr both have 100k half lives you have a choice with reprocessing separate them and turn them into borasilica glass which is chemically inert and not leachable by meteoric or ground waters. In that form you still a borehole into.granite or shake and put them in stable rocks. Or you make target pins with them and put them into a hard fast neutron spectrum and transmute them into short half life isotopes. Fast spectrum reactors can make fuel and burn long lived fission products at the same time in the same core.
As a professional geologist I can name four places in Texas also that have geologically stable rocks in place for 500 million to 1.3 billion years and will be stable for at least that length in the future Texas is not near any active tectonic margins. You only need a million years of isolation for the long lived fission products and less than 1000 for all the others that is a blink in geologic time. Drill a bore hole 1000 meters into granite fill the bottom 500 with reprocessing separate fission products in borosilica glass and the other 500 with cement same for scales still down then go horizontal just like a shale gas well for 2000+ meters then place the wastes at the time of the well fill the vertical with cement. There is a reason the.natural gas under tens of thousands of psi of pressure is still in the shale after tens to.hundreds of.millions of years it’s gas and water tight and stable over those times scales. No need to use gas shales for waste management there are plenty of dry shales in the Geological settings to.use for waste management.
Oh how I loathe auto correct. Especially when you can’t turn it off.
Still= drill
Shake = shales
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