this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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Yes, but energy density doesn't matter for most applications and the waste it produces is highly problematic.
"85% of used fuel rods can be recycled" is like "We can totally capture nearly all the carbon from burning fossil fuels and then remove the rest from the atmosphere by other means".
In theory it's correct. In reality it's bullshit that will never happen because it's completely uneconomical and it's just used as an excuse to not use the affordable technology we already have available and keep burning fossil fuels.
They’re saying that plausible uses don’t necessarily translate to real world use, in practice. I have no stake in this, just translating
While I understand where they're coming from, it should be noted that they're likely basing their experience with recyclability on plastic recycling which is totally a shit show. The big difference comes in when you realize that plastic is cheap as shit whereas uranium fuel rods are not.
Fossil fuel lobbyists know very well that their business model is running into a dead end. So now their goal is to extend it as long as possible.
Today's fossil fuel propaganda isn't "Climate change from CO₂ isn't real" anymore. It's "We can totally fix this with carbon capturing later", "Renewables are actually bad for the environment" and "Better don't build renewables now as a much better solution will be available soon™ ". Yet it's not happening. Nuclear is uneconomically expensive and produces toxic waste we actually don't know how to handle safely for the amounts of time it stays toxic.
Nuclear basically only has a very limited amount of fake arguments constantly used in variations of the same chain:
"Nuclear is perfectly safe!"
"That's not the problem. The problems are the massive costs and the waste."
"But we can recycle most of the waste. Also renewables produce so much waste, too."
"But you actually don't do it because it's very expensive and makes nuclear power even less economicallly viable. Also how is recycling wind-turbine blades and solar-panels unrealistic but recycling nuclear waste is not?"
"But nuclear would be economically viable and so much cheaper if it wasn't so over-regulated. And lithium mining is so toxic to the environment."
"It's only perfectly safe because it's highly regulated. And we don't actually need lithium for grid storage where energy optimised density is not the biggest concern."
", also nuclear will totally become much cheaper with SMRs any day now..."
In the end it's always the same story. Nuclear might be safe but it is insanely expensive and produces radioactive waste. No, the fact that you can theoretically recycle the waste doesn't matter, because you don't do it. No, it will not become cheap magically soon. And no it is not expensive because it's highly regulated because without those regulations we can start at the top again and talk about how safe it is.
There are only two reasons to pretend otherwise: you work in nuclear power and need to sell your product or you work in fossil fuels and need to keep the discussion up so people keep talking instead of actually working to get rid of them. And the nuclear industry and lobby is actually not that massive compared to the fossil fuel one. So it's very clear where the vast majority of nuclear fan boys get their talking points. Have you ever thought about the fact why pro-nuclear is so massively over-represented on social media? 😉
PS: Nice, I only need to scroll ~ one page up and down to find all those fake arguments repeated here. How surprising ^/s^
Capturing all the extra carbon from the atmosphere is not as expensive as it sounds like. It can easily be done by a few rich countries in very few decades once we stop adding more there every day.
Recycling nuclear waste is one of those problems that should be easy but nobody knows what the easy way looks like. It's impossible to tell if some breakthrough will make it viable tomorrow or if people will have to work for 200 years to get to it. But yeah, currently it's best described as "impossible".
What?
For starters, carbon capture takes an insane amount of power. And to follow up: we couldn't even build the facilities is "a few decades" even if we free power and infinite money.
Yep, "insane amounts" of power like you what you get by investing something like 1% of a few countries' GDP in PV panels.
It's a solved problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU
If something is Nuclear enough it can generate heat, its just the reactors make use of an actual reaction that nuclear waste can't do anymore. Yever watch the Martian, he has a generator that's fuel is lead covered beads of radioactive material, it doesn't generate as much as reactors but it's still a usable amount.
That's an extreme oversimplification. RTGs don't use nuclear waste. Spent reactor fuel still emits a large amount of gamma and neutron radiation, but not with enough intensity to be useful in a reactor. The amount of shielding required makes any kind of non-terrestrial application impossible.
The most common RTG fuel is plutonium (^238^Pu, usually as PuO~2~), which emits mostly alpha and beta particles, and can be used with minimal shielding. It can't be produced by reprocessing spent reactor fuel. In 2024, only Russia is manufacturing it. Polonium (^210^Po) is also an excellent fuel with a very high energy density, but it has a prohibitively short half-life of just over a hundred days. It also has to be manufactured and can't be extracted.
^90^Sr (strontium) can be extracted from nuclear fuel, and was used by early Soviet RTGs, but only terrestrially because the gamma emission requires heavy shielding. Strontium is also a very reactive alkaline metal. It isn't used as RTG fuel today.