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Thanks to our ceaseless desire for more power, that number isn't going to shrink any time soon. The International Energy Agency's 2018 report found our energy demand has risen by 2.3 percent, the highest rise in a decade. Unfortunately, much of that demand was met by burning more fossil fuels, releasing even more CO2 into the atmosphere.
The hope is that the global economy can transition to carbon-free sources of energy before catastrophe strikes. There is another fuel technology that we already know works; one which offers a potentially limitless supply of low-carbon energy. It's cheap, certainly in the long term, and could radically reshape the way that we think about power, on paper, at least. For a variety of reasons, nuclear power has been benched and is currently contributing a lot less than it could to our global energy needs. Is it time we gave nuclear energy another shot?
Newer reactor designs that have passive cooling make accidents like Fukushima much less likely, because even in the event of power loss the reactor remains cool and stable, but unfortunately that event dealt a severe setback to efforts at expanding nuclear power.
to paraphrase the movie the graduate...i have one word "Thorium"..as i understand it thorium IS were geo-thermal energy derives and the earth is loaded with it..liquid salt thorium runs at about 600C and shuts down automatically if an issue occurs..completely different than uranium reactors https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html
What kind of symbols will they put on the storage that people 1000 years from now will know to leave it alone?
That is actually something they have debated quite a bit. I believe they came up with using multiple languages and markers that should be obvious. The issue is 100K years from now and the site is unrecognizable, I'm not sure how you put a marker in the earth.
That is actually something they have debated quite a bit. I believe they came up with using multiple languages and markers that should be obvious. The issue is 100K years from now and the site is unrecognizable, I'm not sure how you put a marker in the earth.
Even if 95% is reprocessed as in France, I sure don't want that 5% in my yard. Or on that fault line win NV.
They should be moving to thorium cycle reactors which were first developed in the 1960s.
Much safer, waste is mostly eliminated, if implemented as part of a comprehensive energy plan to hydrogen fuel cells, we could be off fossil fuels for transportation within the next generation.
The Free Market will dictate. If they can get insurance - for FOREVER and for all operations related to the fuel cycle, etc......in the free market, then they may want to give it a shot.
But - as many may know - Congress decided to hang their insurance bills onto the US Taxpayer and that was the ONLY reason they could operate. That's bad policy.
BTW, as we speak, about 8 nuclear power plants worth of PV solar (16GW) is being installed yearly in the USA. So, in a sense...if we are already building 8 of them each year, why do we need to build more?
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