It's really quite unfortunate that the promise was not delivered, mostly for political reasons. I hope that a new wave of reactors and the dire need for clean energy restarts the nuclear race.
The economics are not there. Solar + batteries are much cheaper per watt today and still improving. Even better, the solar can come online instantly and expand while US nuclear takes twenty years to start generating any energy.
I'm a huge solar fan, but I don't see energy transition happening as quickly as I'd hoped 10 years ago, and what seems apparent now is that it will only happen when energy storage gets 10x cheaper, which is why companies like Form Energy developing iron-air batteries might be the catalyst. You also need grid-forming inverters that balance the loads since relying on hundreds of thousands of residences for grid-tie is a real engineering challenge.
> Solar + batteries are much cheaper per watt today and still improving.
Are we still going to make the same error over and over again? The day China says "stop" the price per watts will explode, just like when Russia and Iran said "stop".
Those aren't really equivalent. Iran is affecting the supply of oil, an input. China can affect the supply of solar panels, but they would have to do something pretty drastic to affect the supply of the input. Sunlight is going to keep reaching the solar panels that were set up prior to any kind of embargo.
Most inverters come from China too, and these need to be replaced much more often that panels.
Anyways, panels are the solution now because we're at peak petrol, that's why they're so cheap, it won't last forever, evem if China keeps the door open
Nuclear fuel can also be recycled. The point is, a solar panel produces a finite amount of energy over its lifetime, so it's not exactly comparable to a power plant in terms of energy independence.
It's not appropriate to think of the solar panel as a constant source of power, but the solar panel manufacturing plant. All of our nuclear reactors and fuel are produced in-country, whereas china has dominated solar panel manufacturing and can cut us off. We need to be proactive about manufacturing.
Nuclear fuel cannot be recycled. Nuclear fuel is consumed during use, that's why it's fuel.
A spent solar panel contains the exact materials needed to make a new solar panel. Chemical changes are cheaply reversible, so you can turn an old solar panel into a new one for less energy than it will produce during it's lifetime. A solar panel factory can operate indefinitely. (Or at least for as long as their is solar energy available.)
Nuclear fuel must be mined. Nuclear changes are reversible, but that requires the same amount of energy you would get back out. The Earth has a finite amount of nuclear fuel. (To be fair, there's a lot. The Earth contains enough fuel to last roughly the lifespan of the Sun.)
Nothing lasts forever. Even nuclear plants have to eventually be decommissioned. Solar panels may be finite, but they give you a long, predictable horizon.
China might be subsidizing solar panels today. We should load up while we can. Let them bear the initial costs. We should also spin up more domestic manufacturing (which was a component of the IRA). If/when foreign sourced solar panels are no longer available, you are in the exact same position you were the day before. All of that already installed generation capacity will continue to function for years before a crisis emerges.
Meh. Cheap seasonal batteries aren't a thing yet so for much of humanity solar + batteries just can't cover the same needs as other means of generation.
There is certainly a lot of talk about micro reactors. I have yet to see anything materialize in the US. The MARVEL test reactor is meant for something puny like 100kw. Nuclear is something that benefits from scale -larger installations are just going to have better economics per watt.
No it really does not look that way. It sort of sounds like it might look that way at some point in the future but micro reactors are not useful for utility generation today.
One excellent nerd-sniping side-effect of those political reasons is that the good folks of Austria built an entire nuclear power station and then never put it into service [0]. Open for guided tours on Fridays [1].
Nuclear was never going to give us too cheap to meter regardless of politics. Uranium just isn’t that cheap. Fuel costs are lower then coal or gas, but not so low that operators would just not bother to charge for it
A MSTR only needs uranium-233, uranium-235, or plutonium to start. It then produces uranium-233 as part of its fuel cycle as thorium is input.
Given current found reserves and the current rate of use, the world has about 40 to 50 years of natural gas. Thorium used in molten salt thorium reactors would provide electricity for 60 billion years or so if we could actually extract all of it. That's 10 billion years or more if it provided all human energy consumption. Of course there's a limit to extraction, but it is over three times as common as uranium.
Also, besides thorium one can mix in partial amounts of other fuels, including uranium and plutonium. There is no runaway meltdown risk, as the fission is actively managed rather than actively suppressed. Fuel is spent more completely. The waste products are smaller, less radioactive, and have far shorter half-lives.
Then of course we're always getting slightly closer to productive fusion reactors.
These technologies along with solar PV, solar thermal, hydro, wind, geothermal, wave power, and batteries likely all have a place in the future.
There's a decent chance that at some point in the future residential customers will pay for the connection and only commercial or industrial customers will actually be metered. That's not because companies want to give up additional revenue. It's because at some point the cost of meters, tracking usage, and competitive advertising about who has the cheapest plans costs more than the power the typical customer uses above the base charge.
It contains a different mix of elements and isotopes than spent solid fuel rods from light water reactors.
The reactor creates new fissile material while it runs, then fissions that. The new fissile material is recycled into the reactor. Even actinides can largely be recycled into the fuel stream. The fuel and coolant being a liquid mixture allows a lot of chemical processing and returning parts of the initial waste back into the reactor more fully.
The waste that's actually handled for storage tends to have a lower proportion of fission byproducts that carry their own radioactivity, but some traces of highly active sources. I've read cesium, strontium, iodine, xenon, krypton, barium, and various noble metals are the bulk of the waste. Some of that cesium will be cesium-137. Some of the strontium will be strontium-90.
Solid rods from a light water reactor are not even nearly completely spent before they become too degraded for producing electricity. They contain cesium-137 and strontium-90 too but along with uranium-235, plutonium-239, americium-241, neptunium237, and curium at the time they're ready for storage. Small parts of this can be reprocessed rather than stored, but often for nuclear weapons. Having solid rods also makes it more difficult to separate elements.
MSTR waste is dangerous, but for about three hundred years. The radiation involved tends to be largely gamma, but from a very small portion of the waste rather than the bulk of the mass. Light water reactor waste can be dangerous for tens of thousands of years, producing alpha, beta, and gamma from most of the mass of the waste. The alpha and beta radiation will last tens of millennia.
I guess if you abused terminology to scale by risk then, something decaying faster but by a different mechandism could be “less radioactive”, e.g., for external exposure, an alpha emitter with a shorter half-life might be “less (dangerously) radioactive” than a beta emitter (of course, the reverse would be true for internal exposure.)
Can’t really think of any other way to rationalize that combination.
