Do not mistake technical viability with economic viability.
The 1st Breeder reactor went into service in 1962, there have been many after and they have all meet the same fate.<p>Yes, they can breed their own fuel but the total cost of doing it is wildly prohibitive.<p>You can get gold/uranium/lithium from Ocean water, try and do it at a price people will actually pay for it. You can get minerals from space, so long as the market rate of $10 million a ton is viable... etc.<p>As always, if I get proven wrong - that will be a great day!
To me any technological projection that goes beyond 200 years is a bit of non-sense. 200 years ago trains did not exist. Steam power existed, but just in a tiny corner of the world economy.<p>If we don't run out of nuclear fuel in 200 years, then we'll never do.<p>And we certainly have enough uranium to not run out of it for 200 years, with the current technology. No breeder reactors, or anything fancy needed.<p>CANDU reactors run on unenriched uranium [1]. This instantly gives a multiplier of 10. If the current reactors can run for a few decades, then switching to CANDU reactors we'd have fuel for a few centuries.<p>Why aren't we switching to CANDU design? Some new builds are projected [2], but overall they appear to be too capital intensive, compared to the more traditional light water reactors. Still if fuel availability were a concern, we'd switch to CANDU reactors and stop having any scarcity for hundreds of years.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Romania-adopts-draft-law-on-Cernavoda-3-and-4" rel="nofollow">https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Romania-adopts-d...</a>
Do isotopes of any element exist with all three of these properties?<p>1. Radioactive with a half-life short enough to be dangerous (e.g., not bismuth-209) but long enough that waiting for it all to decay isn't a feasible way of getting rid of it (e.g., not francium)<p>2. Produced by nuclear reactors<p>3. Not usable as a fuel source in any breeder reactors<p>If not, then why is there such a thing as nuclear waste?
The bigger cost is storage. Very long term storage.<p>Fuel recycling and alternate fuels such as thorium might reduce storage burden by being able to burn up plutonium waste from traditional nuke plants.
Uranium will run out long after the sun's rising luminosity will reduce atmospheric CO2 levels to below the level plants need to live (600 million years) and boil the oceans away (1 billion years).
Whilst the setup `may` sustain itself fuel wise for that kind of duration, I'm not aware of any building able to last 4B years, let alone a nuclear plant, which generally has a lifespan of a few decades.