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A while back I watched a documentary about Bill Gates investing into research for a "new" form of nuclear power plants that use all the nuclear waste.
The new plants are supposedly radically different from our old antiquated plants, safer and almost impossible to overheat. And the huge plus is that it uses up the nuclear waste that we are a storage hazard.
There was suppose to be collaboration between the Gates foundation and China to build the 1st new power plant, but then trump happened and the deal went bust.
I know that nuclear power is a huge controversial subject, but the truth is that it's one of the cleanest powers we have... until we figure out how to do nuclear fusion.
If we are to switch over to electric vehicles, etc... our power plants will need to be beefed up. Our electrical demands will surely skyrocket if fossil fuels become less prevalent and our population continues to grow.
So what happened to these "new" plant designs? And are they as good as Gates says they are.
Language has it's shortcomings. Sky-diving is safer than auto racing, but neither is safe in the first place...???
Nuclear power generation has proven itself to be a very safe method of producing electricity. It's its potential for calamity that is worrisome to some people. There have been remarkabley few injuries or deaths from mishaps at nuclear sites, and only one small incident of a leak at a waste disposal site.
Cold fusion is an interesting dream, but like The Philospher's Stone for turning Pb into Au, it may remain just that.
I'm looking for investors to finance my research into harnessing Di-Lithium crytals. Please send me a $20 bill with your name and address on it and I will return an official stock certificate to you. Thanks in advance....(and don't mention this to the SEC or IRS.)
Nuclear power is safe. The problem isn't actual safety, but the average person hears "nuclear" and see a mushroom cloud and radioactive zombies running around. Says more about the level of science education than about nuclear power.
Nuclear power is safe. The problem isn't actual safety, but the average person hears "nuclear" and see a mushroom cloud and radioactive zombies running around. Says more about the level of science education than about nuclear power.
That's what my engineer friend tells me. He says it's by far the cleanest power we have... well except for the waste products.
The problem is that most of our nuclear plants are really old. Well ours in Canada anyways. Some are past their mandated life span, but still running because nobody is willing to invest the $$$ to make new ones and yeah the idea that nuclear power is dangerous.
Hence me wondering about these so called new technology connected to Gates.
That's what my engineer friend tells me. He says it's by far the cleanest power we have... well except for the waste products.
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That's the catch. There really isn't any such thing as safe disposal of nuclear waste products. Awhile ago, a huge cache of nuclear waste was discovered off the coast of Southern California. Of course, the barrels were leaking, after being in salt water for who knows how many decades. That stuff was not only washing onshore (and still is), but of course it's been getting into the ecosystem, into the fish people eat, and into the fish and marine mammals people don't eat. And people wonder why there are mass whale or dolphin beachings.
Yes, I know they like to store nuclear waste in caves, but how safe would those be in an earthquake? And of what quality are the drums they store that stuff in? France and Taiwan were dumping theirs into the Pacific Ocean offshore. I don't know if France is still doing that.
Bill Gates' company, TerraPower, is planning to build a "Natrium" reactor in WY. A Natrium reactor uses molten salt for energy storage, and either uranium or thorium can be used as a fuel source, but I believe TerraPower's system uses uranium for fuel.
That's the catch. There really isn't any such thing as safe disposal of nuclear waste products.....
There is a catch. It's really, really safe. Your position is what tnff is talkig about in his earlier post. Unreasonable concerns not borne out by the evidence.
...and here's a list of waste disposal leaks of all types. None of them involves accidents-- Of the four nuclear contaminations, they all involved criminal or unauthoirized handling of nuclear material, and one of those was the indiscriminate, irresponsible handling of waste in Russia in the '50s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...osal_incidents
Yes, it can provide clean and safe electrical generation relative to many other electricity production sources. There are myriad improvements from the plants built in the 60s and 70s and advancements in HVDC lines means that efficient transmission far away from dense populations is possible. The issues aren't just that though. The cost of nuclear plants need to go down significantly including the entire lifecycle of the plant as decommissioning and storage are also a significant part of the cost--and storage has a very, very long tail whose costs are hard to gauge adequately (you can try to build to account for such, but it's not entirely clear how effective it'll be decades or centuries down the line). However, this could potentially be monitored and greatly improved and it's certainly being worked on and potentially avoided or greatly reduced via reuse (reusing spent nuclear fuel to generate more electricity in a different process) and transmutation (using some of the energy output to turn high-level waste into something less dangerous).
There's also an issue of how high costs can potentially become for the fuel nuclear plants use if they start proliferating again, but that's something we can probably deal with as nuclear power expands though I suppose there are some fears of nuclear generation being a starting point for more nuclear weapons proliferation.
At the very least, the US should be aggressively pursuing research and building of smaller plants.
Molten Salt reactors are hardly new, they had a working unit in Oak Ridge years ago. Saw an interesting program on the technology recently on TV. Certainly seemed worth exploration. I believe there were technical hurdles back in the day that caused the interest to wane. Possibly newer ideas are offering a possible solution, rekindling interest?
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