New Nukes is Good Nukes

I think we can do better than fission.

Maybe so, but how? Controlled fusion is still far into the future. We have expended much money and effort on so-called "alternative" sources, such as solar, wind, tidal, etc., and until now none have proven viable for generating as much electricity as just one nuclear plant. Most of the available hydro sites have already been developed or are being blocked by environmental concerns. Fossil fuel plants pollute the air and water, causing many deaths each year. What do you recommend?

Break-even fusion would be much closer if we would be more willing to invest more than a couple hundred million dollars in research. The ITER reactor costs $10 billion, probably 1/1000 of what the Iraq War will cost, yet we cannot find enough money to try these projects in the USA.

Nuclear is not as cheap as it is made out to be. We haven't even figured out how to get rid of the waste. If civilization should collapse, there may not be anyone to watch the waste for 10's of thousands of years.

I think renewable energy is the answer until we get fusion solved. If each house had solar panels, that alone would probably take care of things until then. Each home could relieve some of the stress on the electric grid, then, though cogeneration.

I think the best way to get adequate clean power is not "Better that Fission", but Better Fission. I am referring to a class of Nuclear Reactor, called "Fast Neutron Reactors" which not only do not produce plutonium, but can consume it along with most of the long-lived highly radioactive waste products that have accumulated from our conventional "Light Water Reactors". Our current stockpile of highly radioactive waste from our current Nuclear Plants could be reprocessed and burned in these Fast Neutron Reactors, thus drastically minimizing the problem of storing huge plies of radioactive waste. We could win on two counts: We can get an unlimited supply of energy AND we can safely "dispose" of our existing stockpile of Nuclear Waste. (Reprocessing all this waste will require a lot of energy, but these V can provide it. Fast Neutron Reactors are not even new technology! The French have been running them for decades. You can read more about this in the December 2005 issue of Scientific American (or online at www.sciam.com). We should be moving full speed toward development and construction of these Reactors, as we are going to suffer fuel shortages during the long (15 year?) wait for them to come on line.

It is about time that we use this technology to a fuller potential. It is clean and the spent rods can be stored in an abandoned uranium mine. (so to speak returned to where they came from) The help of the guvernment is needed to prohibit delaying law suits from holding up the projects as they did at Seabrook NH and bankrupted the power company. This all for building the safest reactor in existance. The Boston lawyers did get rich. New Hamphshire lost.

There is a small but fairly significant error in the costing of energy that is generated in fission reactors and that is the cost of looking after the waste.

So how much dose it cost to keep this highly radio active and toxic stuff. The bare minimum number of people that are needed to look after this stuff would be at least 2 at any given time and to do this you need 10 people on a roster to cover it 24 hours a day. I don't know what the pay rate is but if would be fair to assume that they would need to be reasonably competent so lets say they earn $35,000 a year. This means that you are going to be out to the tune of $350,000 a year just for labour.

The half life for this stuff is something like 250,000 years and you would need at least 6 half lives or 1,500,000 years and probably a lot longer before the stuff was safe. Given the previous cost of the labour that means you are going to need to spend $525,000,000,000 or a bit over HALF A TRILLION DOLLARS looking after the waste and that's before you add in any other operating costs like equipment, insurance etc. or take inflation into account.

These calculations a extremely rough and probably no where near the real values but my point is that if you take the cost of the waste into account then fission energy is mind bogglingly expensive and is not the answer that many think it is.

We have to determine what to do with the waste, am I the only one concerned about the waste. What I do not understand is why are we messing with Uranium when we have Hydrogen? Come on world, simplify, why not figure out an atomic weight of 1 and know what you are working with instead of trying to figure out what the heck a 92 can do and bury the waste later. If we figure out Hydrogen we don't need Uranium contamination do we? Don't forget Chernobyl, don't forget transport of hazardous waste, don't forget our kids will have to deal with this mess and finally don't forget China's stellar record for environmental concerns, anyone for a swim in the Songhua River!?

Has anyone thought of the CANDU reactor? Subterrainian core, Heavy Water as a working fluid, lowest emmissions and higher efficiency (CANDU reactors use 15% less Uranium than other reactors). Here is their website: canteach.candu.org

Thank you for linking to NukeWorker.com in your article.

Rennhack, Webmaster of NukeWorker.