Nuclear engineer here. I did a similar write-up (gratuitously leveraging GNU Units) since most people don't seem to know this fact about fission breeder reactors. I added some other references at the bottom of people pointing this out throughout nuclear fission's history.<p><a href="https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html</a><p>In addition to the OP, it's also worth mentioning that you can breed with slow (aka 'thermal') neutrons as well as fast ones, you just have to use the Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle to do so.
The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc.<p>Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil.<p>Important to note that the image is for 2018. So, things have shifted a bit in favor of wind and solar since then. There's an updated chart for this: <a href="https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-09/Energy_2021_United-States.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-09/E...</a><p>A few nice insights from the two versions of this graph:<p>- Wind and solar grew a lot.<p>- Nuclear declined.<p>- Gas grew a little.<p>- Coal declined a lot. Oil usage is up.<p>- Overall energy production went down, usable energy went down, rejected energy actually went up. So a little bit of extra oil and gas usage resulted in more rejected energy for less usable energy.<p>- fossil fuel usage is dominant for transport. But most of that is rejected energy. Going electric is going to make a massive difference as we'll be able to do more with less.<p>- Industrial usage of energy is a bit more efficient. A reason for that is a lot of it is heating. So heat is the intended output rather than wasted.<p>- Renewables are a small portion of the inputs but a large part of the usable output because of the efficiencies. And it grew a lot in just 3 years.<p>- We don't have to replace most of the inputs if we replace them with more efficient ones. A lot of people ge their back of the envelope math wrong and consider only the energy input and not the output. If you replace something with 40% efficiency with something that is 80% efficient, you can do with 2x less.<p>Great visualization. Worth studying if you want to understand the energy market at a glance.<p>Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline. And that decline is cost driven. Coal is tanking hard for the same reason. Yes coal is dirty and nuclear isn't. But they are both too expensive.
Yes, we could get a lot more energy out of our fission fuel. The reason the USA doesn't is because Jimmy Carter set a policy of not reprocessing fuel because he felt it encouraged nuclear weapons proliferation, coming just a few years after India exploded its first device. Carter's statement:
<a href="https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120960615.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML120960615.pdf</a>
If humans were perfect then all problems are trivial. In cryptography there is the idea of misuse resistance, and the same line of thinking applies to other fields where things are expected to be used at scale. Wind and solar are pretty much idiot-proof, and their low density means that the risks are spread out also.<p>As someone who is in principle pro-nuclear but has been following the process of OL3, I am pretty pessimistic about current prospects of nuclear, especially in the timescales regarding climate change. Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our <i>current</i> engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho.
Nuclear is the only optimistic energy solution—I.e. one that could enable continually increasing human prosperity, rather than rationing. Forget simply replacing today’s energy generation. That’s sad. What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available? Moreover, technology that will “level up” civilization is almost certainly going to be an outgrowth of nuclear development, or something similarly energetic, rather than windmills or solar.
> Many different units are used to discuss large quantities of energy. The graph above uses “quads”, or quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units. The SI unit of energy is the joule, and a comparable quantity is the exajoule (EJ),<p>Why use “quads” instead of exajoules? I really don’t understand the use of non-SI units in cases like this, it seems like pointless obscurantism. Using something like terawatt-hours, well that isn’t SI (although it is based on SI), but I can at least see the point to it. But “quadrillion BTUs” and calling that “quads” doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose
If you have money, you can make energy. Therefore you should spend your capex on the things that will get you the most power soonest. And that is what is happening: <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/overview-and-key-findings" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/ove...</a><p>Nuclear is a niche category now. But nuclear technology is a fashionable investment that VC limiteds want in their portfolio. So you get articles like this that position uranium fission energy as "renewable."
> Providing energy for a global economy in which billions of people in developing countries aspire to a lifestyle similar to that of Europe, North America, and East Asia is one of the most daunting challenges of the 21st century<p>A daunting challenge, but that on paper "only" requires a few thousand nuclear plants. The actual challenges have to do with humans - many of those countries are unstable or are at war, and cannot do things that are way simpler than building a bunch of nuclear plants. Not to mention even among developed countries there is an irrational fear of that technology.
Interesting (maybe?) background info, this is John Walker, the creator of AutoCAD, an o.g. software entrepreneur. Also the author of The Hacker's Diet: <a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/</a>
One thing this doesn't really address is that the way you separate plutonium from uranium is via acid. At the end of the process, you have a barrel of radioactive acid to deal with. Not nice stuff to handle. Toxic AND corrosive waste.
Maybe, but the heat added to earth has to be radiated away from earth.<p>We have never added energy from matter at this scale before.<p>Same for fusion.
All the analysis like this forget to count the cost of decommissioning the nuclear technology, reactors and fuels.
Cost for end of life reactors are an order of magnitude those of contruction, and no safe definitive solution for fuel exist, both payed by -public-.<p>The technology is not safe, a nuclear incident will span years and affect a wide area, people life, healt, and economic impact are to count in, not easy to calculare, but is not like a plane crash, not at all.<p>The rise energy consumption in developing countries is driven mainly by the use of -old- technology, this is forced by economic/financial reasons.
If all the world, developing or not, will adopt more efficient energy resource -and- use, the numbers will be very different.<p>Uranium resources extimation will not count the cost of extracting and market pricing evolution, just like fossil fuels, the last drops are the most difficult/costly ones.<p>Frankly is not a true wide and deep analysis.<p>One key of green energy is the distributed nature of solar/wind/water sources, less losses for transport, less dipendence on big company, more public control.<p>Anoter key issue is the adoption of more efficiency on energy use.
EG: is worthless to adopt led for public illumination replacing 100w sodium lamp with 100w led, Better to use led to obtain the same illumination result ( or less, is we care to not illuminate the belly of airplanes).<p>The growing numbers in energy consumption are mainly from the -old- idea: growt = development, but in nature the only things with illimitate growt are entropy ( tax and cancer are a good candidates too)
This is brilliantly interesting. However, I lack a taxonomy for understanding nuclear power. What’s outdated, what’s just old, what’s new and promising, what’s just nonsense, and what are the ways we expect to deploy nuclear energy?<p>Finding reliable and accessible sources is tricky. Does anybody here have a good starting point for a technically minded non-expert outsider?
After 70 years of trying we haven't built an economic traditional nuclear reactor. Even less a breeder.<p>It is like saying we have infinite fossil fuels because we can use renewables to create it from water and air. The interesting part of the conversation is the efficient allocation of money and people. In that conversation nuclear power never materialized.
> Uranium could power the world as far into the future as we are today from the dawn of civilization—more than 10,000 years ago.<p>Thermodynamics would like to have a word:<p>> […] the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years.<p><a href="https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...</a>
> But due to historical accidents, lack of imagination, government bungling and regulation, incompetent engineering and operation leading to a small number of highly-visible accidents, fear mongering by media and ignorant advocates of other technologies or abandonment of our energy-intensive modern civilisation, nuclear fission power never achieved the ambitious goals (“too cheap to meter”) it originally seemed to promise.<p>Perhaps that promise was empty?<p>Blaming government regulation is especially a red flag to me here. It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating, even though the laws are, to put it mildly, draconian. With all that it's the safest mode on transportation by a wide margin.<p>China is currently in the process of realizing nuclear power's potential and it appears that in terms of energy delivered it can't actually keep up with renewables - despite no systemic obstacles like in the west.<p>Eventually everyone is going to just build renewable capacity and storage because that's simply the fastest, cheapest way to get energy.<p>Developing countries especially have an interesting approach to renewables, because grids there are notoriously unreliable, so there's no expectation of having power 24/7. For this reason they opt for renewables instead of waiting for that nuclear power plant to happen.
They had me until the antepenultimate paragraph:<p>> Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks, and design, construction, management, and operation of these facilities will require teams of people recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not metrics of “diversity”, “equity”, or “inclusion”.<p>For me that turned the whole piece from a level-headed well-reasoned argument from domain experts to a Facebook political rant. That isn’t to say I agree or disagree with DEI initiatives, that sentence simply undermines the credibility of all that came before.
Absolutely false premise from the first sentence. It is NOT possible for the world to live like the first world did in the 20th century. And nuclear energy is an apocalypically short-sited solution, mostly favored by the current energy industry for maintaining the current model of distribution.