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?