PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum - View Single Post - New Invention Generates Electricity “Out of Thin Air”

Diseasel300 · #22 02-19-2020, 11:48 AM

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge advocate of nuclear energy myself. I think it's the way forward for mass production with a minimal amount of waste or pollution. The problem is that the way our present fission reactors work is extremely wasteful and political red-tape makes it impossible to reprocess fuel. So all the waste that comes out just sits around in pools for decades on end. All the high level crap could be refined out and stored safely with the bulk returning to use in the reactor, but no. Politics.

Breeder reactors really are the answer, but they breed plutonium as part of their fuel cycle. The big fear is nuclear arms proliferation, so again, politics. They burn a significantly higher percentage of their fuel load and generate far less high-level waste. Most of the active designs are of liquid metal or gas cooled varieties which are more or less passively safe. Then if you wanna get super technical, the Thorium-cycle is far more useful and orders of magnitude more abundant than the Uranium cycle, but the ore production and research/development is dominated by India. Again, politics.

So here we sit with our BWR and PWR reactors from the 1960s which aren't built to the greatest safety standards, all reaching the ends of their service lives, churning out high-level waste that can't be stored or reprocessed, and people wonder why nuclear has such a bad rap...