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Good news, no?


New kind of nuclear reactor to be built at retiring coal plant

The fully functional plant will serve to demo TerraPower’s nuclear tech.

A nuclear power startup founded by Bill Gates has announced plans to build a new kind of nuclear reactor at a retiring coal plant in Wyoming.

This reactor will be the first real-world demonstration of the startup’s technology, which could help power the world — without warming the climate.

Read on: [freethink.com]

Ryo1 8 Jan 17
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3 comments

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Visit [aureon.ca]
Nine short videos, fifteen minutes.

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Yes, lets generate more tons of nuclear waste that won't be safe for 500,000 years. Hey, we haven't figured out a way to get rid of the existing super-hazardous nuclear waste. Per Google:

More than a quarter million metric tons of highly radioactive waste sits in storage near nuclear power plants and weapons production facilities worldwide, with over 90,000 metric tons in the US alone.

None of that waste has come from Molten Salt Reactors !

[world-nuclear.org]

. . . false equivalence fallacy 😛

[en.wikipedia.org]

@FearlessFly You are wrong about Molten Salt Reactors not producing nuclear waste (long-lived radioactive daughter products). No known fission process can avoid producing highly radioactive daughter atoms. If you can describe such a process, I'd be interested to know, but Wikipedia agrees with me (see below).

Fission is a random splitting of heavy nuclei. These nuclei are stable by virtue of the ratio of neutrons to protons. When they split, the smaller nuclei have ratios of neutrons to protons that are unstable, usually very unstable. The nuclei must radiate negative beta particles in order to recover a stable ratio, usually several times (Emitting betas changes the neutrons to protons). Because the splitting is random, the daughter nuclei can be almost anywhere in the lower half of the periodic table.

Per Wikipedia:
"The discharged wastes are mostly fission products (nuclear ashes) with shorter half-lives. This reduces the needed geologic containment to 300 years rather than the tens of thousands of years needed by a light-water reactor's spent nuclear fuel. It also permits the use of alternate nuclear fuels, such as thorium."

[en.wikipedia.org]

As this information is generated in a politicized environment, it is suspect, even in Wikipedia. The point is that highly radioactive materials are generated, and the worst waste requires significant reprocessing to separate it from what can be recycled. The highly radioactive waste still needs to be sequestered, and our political processes have been unable to agree on a disposal mechanism.

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It's good news as long as they can solve the waste problem.

Hi there. According to the World Nuclear Association, Nuclear waste is neither particularly hazardous nor hard to manage relative to other toxic industrial waste. [world-nuclear.org]
I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on it, I'm afraid.

I would ask them then, why isn't the nuclear waste now stockpiled at nuclear plants not being dealt with?

I had a friend who unfortunately has passed away who worked in a nuclear power plant. He said the older nuclear power plants produced a lot of waste. The latest power plant version can actually use the waste from the old plants for fuel. That's actually reducing the amount of nuclear waste overall. I hope he's right.

Well it appears the US is the only country with nuclear power plants that is not reprocessing the waste.

[large.stanford.edu]

My personal view is that nuclear power isn't as bad as the anti-nuc people make it sound and isn't as good as the pro-nuc people make it. There currently is nothing being done to get rid of nuclear waste in this country. It's expensive and takes a long time to build. Currently renewables are more cost effective than coal so coal is going away in the near future. It's natural gas that's going to be the primary contributor to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

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