You know, this isn't too far off of a plan that I think would be very interesting. What if you could somehow harness the energy of a colony of ants? You have them run down a tube to collect sugar and bring it back to their nest. While they are walking they are pressing small buttons beneath them which collect the kinetic energy of the ants. It's a crazy idea, with some technological challenges, but, it would be extremely green. Unless some ant right group gets pissed.
@@qqqqqq101 Its extremely expensive and still radioactive, also, when the orbit decay into the atmosphere it will burn up so u will have radioactive gas that you will be beathing.
***** I completely agree with you; I was in a rush to type my comment so I wasn't really thinking about the "disgustingly" part, but they should be receiving much more funding.
Mystogan LC Considering the fact that most of the things science is studying right now are inventions and techniques that we hope to be able to use to save humanity from our inpending doom. Referring to climate change and the '' world killer '' asteroid that's heading straight for us.
***** I'm starting to think that the new comment system in youtube isn't that bad. I would never found such a pleasant conversation with the old format. The current advances in science are amazing and will only develop faster .
Yeah you're right. The reason so many new people hate the new comment system is because it forces you to use your Google+ account. Anyway, yes science is advancing faster and faster but not fast enough. Maybe you haven't heard but a couple of astronomers have discovered an asteroid roughly 3/4th's of the moon heading straight for us. There's a 70% chance of it hitting us so we better come up with a plan fast.
Thorium reactors are understood to convert most radioactive waste into energy; the nuclear waste products are more stable and much easier and cheaper to dispose of. *Even if we reach a breakthrough with fusion technology* THORIUM reactors will need to be implemented just to dispose of radioactive waste stockpiles we have accumulated. It is the most logical conclusion. Yet you make no mention of this*
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, that's what we need. Thorium is readily found on earth, and is a waste product of mining for rare-earth metals, places literally give it away because they can't use it for anything. A LFTR doesn't use compressed water vapor, so there's no need to have huge domes with 8 inch thick walls to prevent blowouts. If the reactor fails there's nothing rapidly expanding that would blow radioactive particles into the air. And if the reactor over heats, or loses power, a small plug at the bottom of the tank melts which drains the fuel into another container where it won't be reacting. This is automatic and is powered by gravity, so no nuclear meltdowns. The fuel doesn't need to be super pure, so you don't need a refining plant on site, saving time and money. And where uranium rods lose effectiveness after using less than 10% of the fuel before not being able to sustain fission, thorium reactors use almost 90% of the fuel. This leads to a dramatic decrease in the amount of waste made. And the waste itself has a half life of 30 years, and degrades to relatively harmless level within three hundred years, as compared to the 300,000 years of the stuff we make now. And the plant itself is actually simpler to build than that of a uranium based plant, which almost all the machines and parts already being made. And the best part, the fuel for LFTR's can't be weaponized (at least not with today's technology)! This is where we need to focus on nuclear energy! We could get these things built and running, saving billions of year on the price of energy, not to mention making safer power plants and less toxic waste. But with so many restrictions on developing nuclear power, we may never see this amazing technology lift off.
The only issue with the molten salt tech is that it is still fairly primitively developed. The tech was proven the same time as our current reactor tech was but since weapon grade material was being sought it was left undeveloped. They just need to figure out how to change out waste products with fresh fuel while the reactor is online and molten salt reactors will be able to take all wastes and fuels and turn them into power and the waste is actually worth keeping around with its shorter half lives and higher values for the materials once their 'cooled' off.
@@bethymears2648 many things affect the lungs and yet we still use them. Not too many of those things could make a similar impact as thorium is set to once the tech is were it needs to be.
We need to dump money into Thorium reactor research and start cranking those bad boys out. That would fix a lot of our nuclear waste woes while providing clean power that also uses up a materiel that is considered a waste product by rare earth miners.
***** TL;DNR: Thorum plants are much cheaper and easier to build. I know Laurence Liver more and the Tokamak in France are both Works in progress and that the math seems to show that the Tomamak will be successful but the sad truth is, regardless of how cheep or abundant the fuel is for Fusion, the devices themselves are always going to be enormous and complex. They will require extremely close monitoring and advanced computer systems to constantly monitor hundreds if not thousands of variables. For ever dollar you save on the price of fuel you spend thousands on the construction of the device itself. Thorium is cheep and is a waste product of rare earth metal mines that they have to figure out what to do with already though, granted not as cheap as deuterium. It is way more stable and easy to work with than uranium or plutonium. But the reason it will ultimately beat out Fusion for at least the next 50+ years is that construction of power plants is much cheaper than even current gen Uranium plants.
***** True and most of the waste is solid which has little or no danger of contaminating water supplies and they have learned how to contain the liquid waste in glass, effectively solidifying it, removing its elevated risk of water contamination. That said, If we switched to Thorium fuel sources, we effectively eliminate a lot of waste issues as well as proliferation concerns.
If it wasn't so expensive to send it in outer space, we would already do it and from an engineering standpoint, it is never going to happen to do it on the cheap... The cheapest I found as quick as a google research can be, was 1700$/kg of mass, and this was only the rocket itself without any extra weight strapped to it... Considering you want to shoot a few tons + the rocket into space wich weighs lets say 10tons... Yeah... Do the math... And consider the danger of the rocket blowing up in our atmosphere, spreading this super radioactive stuff all over the place...
Ok, this episode is almost right enough to sound plausible but still very misleading. A. Not all the fuel in a fuel bundle is used up. The bundle is no longer usable after three cycles through the reactor due to build up of byproducts that prevent further fission. B. We never, ever, dumped spent fuel into the ocean. C. By the Atomic Energy Act of 1972; only the Department of Energy may dispose of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. D. The DOE was mandated to take custody of all spent fuel rods from commercial licensees by fiscal year 1998 for reprocessing and recycling.. The DOE has yet to take custody of any commercial fuel even though the utilities have been paying into the disposal fund since they were first licensed. E. It is criminal that the U.S. does not recycle their nuclear fuel as is done in Europe. (MOX Fuel for "Mixed Oxide" - mix of new U-235 and recycled fissionables from spent fuel) F. The WIPP project is where the leftover high level radioactive material goes. It is in a salt dome 2 miled below ground in a desert. There is little chance of corrosion of containers nor leakage to groundwater as there is no groundwater there. That is why the repository was built there. G. Vitrification of hazardous waste is not "NEW". It was new in the late 1970s for handling hazmat. It is currently a proven technology. The U.S. DOE just doesn't have a vitrification plant for nuclear waste operational except for the tiny proof of concept one built in the early 1990s. The rest of the world has been vitrifying high level waste for decades. Just a few points that were off of the factual bulls eye in the video. I'll shaddup now.
+Steven Jerkins about point B who are you talking about when you say "We"? if We == Humans then thats not true: - Russians once dumped nuclear waste into the ocean - a nuclear powerplant in England dumps contaminated water into the ocean - probably more that I don't know of...
+Kawakeb Astra What about it? We *could* dump nuclear waste into the ocean because the radiation halves every 15cm through water. That's about 12 halving's for the height of the average man. In other words, a fatal dose of radiation would be negligible from just a few meters away! So vitrify nuclear waste into ceramic tablets. But first make sure , and you've used all the transuranics! They're the things that make nuclear waste dangerous for 100,000 years. Once they've been burned, you could take it out into the ocean and dump it there quite safely. A few sea worms in the bottom of our deepest ocean trenches might get burned, but nothing else. Then in 500 years it is safe anyway. Remember, no long lived transuranics!
+Steven Jerkins I am starting a little video series on nuclear power. I will be addressing the commonly misunderstood topics like Spent Fuel, Types of reactors, passive safety, proliferation and decay heat. Would you and anyone else listening we willing to give it a little spot check once it is complete?
I WORKED AS A NAVY NUCLEAR ENGINEER! WE DO IN FACT STILL DUMP OUR NUCLEAR WASTE IN THE OCEAN TO THIS DAY IN 2016!!! Not only does the navy rarely recycle resources, they dump plastic, asbestos and nuclear waste in to the ocean
More nuclear power creates more nuclear waste. Vitrification is a new solution to that problem and Anthony Carboni explains the process and it’s benefits. Check it out: The New Solution To Our Nuclear Waste Problem
Waste is a non-issue because soon we will have Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs) that can consume the old waste and which itself only produces a fraction of waste compared to our current nuclear plants. And that waste only need to be stored for 300 years. Or, instead of storing it you could sell it to NASA to power their space probes. Do a story about that.
blackops1223and2 That is more than a reference to Pacific Rim, Kaijus are the Japanese word for the monsters like Godzilla that attack Japanese cities and fight amongst themselves in movies.
I always thought putting the waste in glass was a good idea as it can't get into water etc. But the best answer is to move to a thorium fuel cycle as the waste is much less dangerous as they can burn their actinides by transmuting them into fissionable products. Molten salt reactors take the safety one step farther by getting rid of the pressure vessel and makes shutting down the reactor much easier . You just let the already molten core material drain into a pan under reactor to cool off.
actually the best solution was the original solution when nuclear power was first a thing... the nuclear plants would rerefine the waste back into usable nuclear fuel onsite. allowing the plant to run on relatively small amounts of material for an almost indefinite period of time. however the nuclear waste problem was caused by the government with the "nuclear non proliferation" policies that ban anyone but the government from refining nuclear material. this means that all the waste fuel can only be rerefined by the government who never came up with a plan to do it. so once again. if the government got out of the way, the problem would have never been made in the first place.
***** True but you would still have some waste regardless. As far as government being in the way this is what you get when you primarily elect lawyers and scientifically illiterate asshats. Put some engineers, scientists, and maybe a couple economists in there and the country would be far better for it.
Elijah Miller yeah but it would still be a tiny fraction of what it is now. And yes that is just like how some in the government wanted to ban "barrel shrouds" on rifles. But when asked what that is, had no idea.
I agree, that, as for a reactor, thorium, is the fuel to use. But, I also am a firm believer, that energy as a whole. Should be grabbed from zero point energy. I DO believe it is possible, and I DO believe the technology is known. And I DO think it is time to unveil it.
@@tiddybearkush Lol, try 20 years. And that's just the typical warranty that guarantees a certain efficiency retained in that time. It still works after.
Both. But aim for thorium. It produces less waste,that is shorter lived. The thorium cycle burns 100% of the thorium used, where uranium based reactors barely burn 1% of the fuel before the rods are expend.
See "LFTR in 5 minutes". Why pay the mean of $0.11 per kilowatt hour when we could be paying between $0.02 and $0.03 per kilowatt hour for electricity. Once we get the price of electricity down, the cost of everything else drops dramatically also, including those solar panels. Now the price of electricity will be considerably less than the grid price. We have a known 20,000 year supply of thorium.
The cost will drop but that just doesn't mean the price will ,too.At least not in the short run. Also what Bill said: your price doesn't include the line costs.
china will have their commercial LFTR online in 2025. pretty pathetic how america invented the tech in the first place, and it took the chinese to actually take it seriously.
ATADEMO it’s because damn regulations put in place by past presidencies. If we are smart, we would take the French route and build more nuclear power plants, all of which would be thorium or molten salt reactors.
a different type of nuclear reactor running on thorium and designed around molten salt for its heat transfer. it's safer, more efficient, and produces less and less toxic waste with a shorter half life than uranium breeder reactors.
+Seth Apex U233 can still make bombs, but the odds of that are exaggerated by hippies and coal lobbies. If a government is denying international investigators (IAEA) then just use massive sanctions. Thanks Obama!
Hey I have a question. The stacks at nuclear power plants release the steam from creating nuclear energy, this escaping steam should be captured and recycled so none escapes and therefore none is wasted. Nuclear energy creates the heat to boil water and the boiling water creates steam to drive the massive turbines that in turn drive the generators that produce electricity that is then sent indirectly to peoples homes. But some of this steam is allowed to escape up the smoke stakes and into the atmosphere. Harness all this escaping steam and reuse it to drive the turbines.
I am all FOR nuclear but only THORIUM reactors they are more efficient and much safer because there is no pressure vessel so nothing can explode. If something does go wrong the reactor drains the molten salt in another vessel and the reaction stops. You can also feed these reactors with radioactive waste from plutonium reactors. Please correct me if Iam wrong. And its al 1950's thechnology.
"Thorium Reactors" is a broad term to use as you can consume Thorium in any nuclear reactor type with limited degrees of success... in fact the very first Thorium fuel cycle reactors basically shoved a rod of it into the fuel pile of a LWR and converted it to U-233 through it's 30 day decay cycle... To clarify, for others reading, what you are talking about, is specifically a Molten Salt Reactor. The concept was proven in the 1950's with the Aircraft Reactor Experiment and a prototype MSR commercial reactor was created with the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). Now the MSRE did NOT use Thorium fuel. It ran first on U-235 and then was drained, processed, and refilled with U-233. U-233 is the uranium produced from the Thorium Fuel cycle. NO ONE has built a commercial MSR and no one has developed and proven the techniques necessary to remove the Protactinium-233 that is the longest part of the Thorium Fuel Cycle. Pa-233 is a huge neutron poison (it wants your neutrons!) and if it isn't removed to decay it will not produce U-233 which means no breeding is done which means the Thorium fuel cycle is a waste of time. In truth, a Waste Burner MSR would be a great first commercialization step towards a true LFTR (Molten Salt Reactor using Thorium Fuel Cycle). It would pave the way for the materials proof and it would pave the way for the passive safety systems while providing a logical stepping stone towards LFTR.... given our current stockpile of waste, these first MSR's would do wonders for current existing nuclear plant's waste problem and what remained would be far easier to maintain storage of, either on site or in repositories.
Thorium is a fuel not a reactor design. Molten salt is an interesting approach but thorium reactors can be light water, heavy water, fast breeder, etc. . As attractive as thorium is there has been much more development of uranium reactors because during we used them to produce plutonium for weapons during the cold war. As far as reactor designs I like the heavy water CANDU reactors. CANDU reactors can burn natural (unenriched) uranium, reprocessed uranium, MOX fuels or thorium.
Unfortunately, we are a good 10-15 years from a viable COMMERCIAL molten salt reactor, and probably even further away in terms of regulation. Current reactor technology is old, but new designs are safer and more efficient. With the freeze on new reactor construction since TMI, though, we've really put ourselves behind. Not only in research and controls technology, but in education, because when I went to school for NE back in the early-to-late 90's, it was considered a DEAD career path. We are now only beginning to train new "practical" NE students in numbers.
Well... I disagree about the 10-15 year time frame. If we really wanted to commercialize it, the MSRE at ORNL was a prototype reactor and their studies through the mid 1970's solved most of the major technical hurdles... that being corrosion (Hastelloy-N or a custom alloy of Inconnel), fuel reprocessing, safety, graphite issues, etc. There is no reason we couldn't build a commercial scale prototype reactor based off of the MSRE and progress from there. AND there is nothing preventing that from happening aside from regulatory hurdles and funding. The former has a bill in Congress to address, and the later the DoE can fix if they get off the solid fuel kick...
I actually studied this and wrote a paper on it. The more we put into nuclear reactors, the more we can research. We already have plans for fusion reactors that run off thorium and theoretically could "burn" old nuclear waste. There have also been advancements in nuclear fusion. Right now, a company is working on a form of fusion that would essentially just need a lot of power to start, and then all it needs is basically salt water and small amounts of lithium to generate large amounts of energy. It is a much better choice to pursue this than to abandon it completely for things like solar panels that are still fairly inefficient.
liquid salt reactors can actually use up the current waste we have. I have done Limited research, but the scientist that worked on the US funded project know it work it works! How come Discovery news hasn't had an episode about thorium?
Hi I just wanted to ask a question: if nasa or space x wanted to build a rocket, how much would it cost and from where they get it’s parts ( nozzle ...) ?
***** We've seen the power of fusion from various hydrogen bombs. The problem is that in order to fuse two atoms of deuterium (hydrogen with an neutron) we needed to mount fission based bombs around it to generate the necessary heat and pressure. We do have atom smashers and particle accelerators, but the power that would be generated would likely be less than the power generated.
Roymond Olsen :-D no thats not the reason :-D its because sending it to space would be too expensive... and we dont really want to send it to space. There are new ways to use the nuclear waste again.
1) That would be EXTREMELY expensive. 2) If one of the transport vessels fail the government will have successfully covered 1/4 of the earth in radioactive waste. 3) We can't predict what will happen with the radio active material once it's in space or once it's delved into the sun
i have a question = I understand that thorium must be bred with uranium or radio active waste from traditional thermal reactors but what i cant get my head around is what happens to that waste in a thorium reactor LFTR or normal after the fuel rods burn out?????
Otherized Meme neither fusion or thorium will be financially supported by governments because they don't produce the waste that we use to create nuclear warheads.
I know right! The only reason we have to use Uranium is because it can be efficiently weaponized. Since Nuclear weapons are a terrible idea there's no reason to continue with Uranium reactors. Thorium is plentiful anyways.
Humans: think we're clever, but we fight like children, destroy our planet, and place the accumulation of wealth over all else. I really have no faith in humanity at this point, we're probably doomed to blow ourselves up in a few hundred years, and if that doesn't happen, Mother Nature would kill us anyway.
probably a molten salt reactor by sounds of it. Not new in in its own right concept was proven back in the 50s but since it couldn't produce nuclear bomb effectively it was shelved in favor of other types of reactors that produced elements like plutonium that can be used for bombs. Since the technology would require likely billions and years of research to get to a point where it's widely available few governments will invest in it.
Wade Haden thanks for correction I was thinking of the LFTR not a MSR though I guess with broad definitions a LFTR is a reactor using a fuel dissolved in a molten salt. Also the phrase 'thorium reactor' is a bit misleading as your really just breeding uranium 233 to fission, as thorium 232 is not readily fissionable.
I worked with the scientists who first developed the process in the eighties. As a lab tech I ran the gamma spectroscopic which was used to characterize the composition of the waste. I learned to program by fixing the code on it and other lab instruments.
Thorium Reactors are the solution, safe, less waste with sorter half-life, and best of all you can't get weapons grade material out of them so making nukes.
***** Cheaper for whom? The public can and should generate their own power. The only thing preventing the cost from coming down are the economies of scale. I'm not against technology, I'm against bad planning, and bad actors. They have literally hid the facts of every nuclear incident that has ever occurred. BTW, I'm pretty sure that Hydrogen comes from water.
Don't have to but thorium itself is not fisile. it needs to absorb a neutron, decay to uranium 233, then get hit by a second neutron to fission and release energy and emit more neutrons. So you really breeding uranium 233 for your fuel, but to get started you would need a source of uranium, plutonium, or some other source of neutrons. Also if you ran at a slight negative neutron economy you could make up the difference by doping your 'fuel' with plutonium or something similar acquired from old nuclear reactors or decommissioned bombs.
"According to proponents, a thorium fuel cycle offers several potential advantages over a uranium fuel cycle-including much greater abundance on Earth, superior physical and nuclear fuel properties, and reduced nuclear waste production." - Wikipedia. Also they it's impossible for them to melt down and cause leaks like Chernobyl or Fukushima
+Absolutia 1 thorium pound = power of FUCKING 200 PUNDS OF URANIUM = 4.5 MILLION POUNDS OF COAL WHY IS URANIUM STILL BEING USED an col thorium makes less waste, radioactive for a few decades apposed by centures to millions of years thorium is more efficient thorium is more abundant thorium is life
+Standard AI thays what they said about nuclear reactors back when they came out. They wont meltdown they are safe is what we were told. Keep believeing their bullshit. let me put something into your head. Can you just imagine for a sec how many renewable inventions have been bought by these companies and then just simply put the idea in a filing cabenet somewhere so they can makentheir money with the crap we have now. The system is corrupt and to think that they are giving you the right information is a mistake
The problem with "Eco friendly" power is that it isn't exactly eco friendly. Hydro damns for instance, flood the lands upstream, they also cut off fish from being able to spawn naturally and in the event of a failure can endanger thousands of lives. Solar farms also pose a problem as California found out they can create super heated air that can burn the feathers off of a bird. This super heated air is also a problem for the environment as it can create a thermal which can have serious consequences during the formation of storms. Wind-farms also have a lot of issues ranging from susceptibility to storm damage, to birds being hit by the blades. They too pose a risk to people as they can collapse causing a fair bit of damage. All three also have unfriendly manufacturing practices which creates nearly the same amount of pollution as an active coal or natural gas plant. Not to mention the cost associated with designing, implementation, operation, and maintenance of such facility's. Yes Nuclear energy is hazardous and I look forward to a day we no-longer need to rely on it. But the facts remain true, lets not kid ourselves with "Renewable energy" being fine for the environment.
Nuclear *technology* is sound. We certainly can harness nuclear energy safely. The image of the "glowing piles of nuclear waste" is extremely exaggerated. The major problem is not the technology, but the *industry*. Particularly in America. The technology is only as safe as the regulators demand it to be, and in America, regulators answer to the industry, not the other way around. With money in politics, you can't have safe nuclear energy, which is fucking tragic. So if we really want to put all our money on nuclear to get us off coal/oil, step 1 is setting up brutal regulations that ensure if there's a leak, or any sort of malpractice, someone's gonna get their head kicked in. Right now we just don't have that level of integrity.
EDKsurly You're right, no way they'd let us know if someone died in a nuclear power plant. They'd just tell the families of the workers that died that they went on a vacation, plus all the witnesses and coworkers? We gotta keep them quiet too, that's where our tax dollars go. No wonder taxes are so damn high! We're all just paying to keep people quiet! And they must grind the bodies up and fuse them with the waste! OH MY GOD. *THE NUCLEAR WASTE IS PEOPLE! IT'S PEOPLE*
There are 2 documentaries on Netflix, I highly recommend them. One is Pandora's Promise, the other is The Atomic States of America. Pandora's Promise explains the technology, and illustrates how, in the right hands, Nuclear power is safe and sound. How Radiation isn't the Boogeyman. And the even cooler shit Nuclear energy has to offer in the future. The documentary is exiting as fuck. The second, The Atomic States of America is admittedly a little conspiratarded. There's some misinformation about how dangerous the *technology* is. However, it also shows all the ways in which the industry has failed the people of America. The biggest story they follow is the one on Long Island, where rates of cancer skyrocketed. It was discovered that hey what do you know, a local nuclear facility was leaking tritium into the water, and the regulators covered it up. There's plenty of other examples of dangerous oversights, and deliberate cover-ups. Which all has to do with money in politics, and internal corruption. Pretending there isn't a problem with a technology as potentially harmful as nuclear is, with all do respect, retarded. It's not hard to believe there's corruption in every other sector of the American government, why would the Nuclear Industry be immune to that?
Jeremy Kean Every industry has the potential to leave a waste-trail behind it. Coal, fertilizer, soap, etc... For someone to argue against nuclear for such reasons they would have to argue against all industry as a whole. Of course the nuclear industry's existence has lead to deaths, but that's true of every single large industry in the world.
If former president Carter hadn't outlawed reprocessing in the 70's, we would only be storing 5% of the high level waste we have now. Plus, we wouldn't be importing the useful products made from other nuclear countries reprocessed waste. Nuclear is such a concentrated and abundant fuel source, a single PWR can be fueled at 1/5000'th the cost of the cheapest fossil fuel plants (LN2, coal). Couple that with their focused and effective US safety record, (coal is 10,000 deaths per trillion kwhr vs nuclear's 3 for the entirety of it's existence) and I'd like to say it's a "no brainer" and we should be tripple/quadrupeling down on nuclear (such as France and South Korea), but I'm continually amazed by how many no brain's there are out there.
@ Wade Haden - Chernobyl was a boiling water reactor, designed primarily for fuel efficiency and continuous operation without refueling, without much concern for safety. And even by the standards of the day it was engineered horribly. Do some research into design features of the Chernobyl reactors vs modern pressurized water designs
Rs Rt The main issue with nuclear power is the long break-even time and risks of being shut down due to mistakes in construction or political opposition. That means private companies are not interested and would rather poison us and destroy our planet with fossil fuel plants that have a predictable revenue stream. The citizenry has not yet figured out how to put moneyed interests in their place, so anything that doesn't interest corporations in today's world is not happening.
blast furnace slag can be used as excellent additive (30-60%) in OPC or PPC cement to make Portland Slag Cement (PSC) which is extremely good quality cement.
0:45 No, it's not a liquid. Mostly solid, and 1 or 2 (a few) isotopes gaseous elements. 0:54 Fuel rods have never been sealed in these tanks... and definitely not stored deep in the ground. We have no solution for the high-level waste problem, I think that would be the point of the video. (But we do put low and intermediate waste to the ground in those tanks.)
Fusion power is critical for two reasons OTHER than being a new energy source: First, it makes helium as its waste product, and the other sources of helium on Earth, although abundant, are non-renewable (trapped in gas deposits, created over millions of years by alpha decay of uranium and the subsequent decay products); and second, the neutron flux can be used to speed up decay of existing nuclear waste.
Yes we definitely should invest in nuclear energie and we should use nuclear energy until we have found a better alternative for it. Every alternatieve way of making energie is making more pollution than nuclear The math is simple!!!
What if the waste isn't waste? What if all the Fission products have other uses and the un-fissioned uranium and plutonium could be useful someday? Separating these components is costly and highly involved, but it's way better than putting this stuff in bullet-proof casks and leaving it in the parking lot. #MSR #LFTR #thorium
Uranium tank shells contaminate their target (not radiation wise but toxic metal wide) reducing salvageability. Sorry to bring this back to war... But this has actually been implemented.
They do utilize it. They put F12 and F14 in your food and water, so you shit and piss some of it out in your municipal water supply which passes it onto the next human, which has perpetuated the biggest cancer epidemic of human history, or more specifically fluoride has a 10,000 year half life. DRINK UP!
Cont. Makes me wonder why they would even conceive the idea that America was O.K. with putting a nuclear bomb in their nutrients, and that proof is in the pudding at the Nevada Nuclear test site and those Villiaumite(Goog it) rocks with a mohs hardness of 2.5 scattered across the desert landscape. Knowing that the big industry are responsible for the hexafluorascilic 'acid rain' that has egged on them perpetuating lies to cover their asses and blaming it on cows farting and humans breathing.. The >energy cartel< is why there isnt any free energy plan(Tesla.) You gotta take out the bullies who control the politicians/Wallstreet. But phase 1 is to eliminate the Fed Rez, which will forfeit the stock exchange(so no Wallstreet). We cant go picking fights we wont win, so each move is crucial. We have to take out the head of the snake. Which will collapse the WORLD market. Thats when citizens unite to take down government tyranny. Some really good hacker is gonna be labeled Anonymous, lol.
People should cut down on consumption at all things not just the using your car less but cut down on buying stuff that needs to be shipped 3 times around the planet. Eat less meat buy less clothes and other stuff we don't really need..
Cut down on consumption? Consumption has gone up year after year and is already exploding in developing countries. If your suggestion is to put a halt to progress, you need to rethink things...
FullFledged2010 There's nothing mindless about it. Energy should be about 3 cents a kWh right now, and it's around 13 because people are afraid of progress. I'M not going to use less because idiots like you want me to.
RipleySawzen We will see who the idiots are in a few years ;) Atleast i don't have to liv in shame for the rest of my life when we totally screw up the earth...
do you think it's easy to send heavy stuff out of the gravitational pull of the earth? ruclips.net/video/RVMZxH1TIIQ/видео.html&ab_channel=Kurzgesagt%E2%80%93InaNutshell
looking at the date 2013 it is dated but still thorium cycle is way cheaper than a burner setup that does not recover heat to make electricity. you have to actively reduce the radioactive waste, setting around waiting for it to be safe is not an option.
Or if you just use molten salt instead of solid fuel rods, you could just continuously reprocess the fuel utilizing all of the fuel rather than the 0.5% to 0.7% possible with solid fuel rods before they become structurally unsound and need to be stored as nuclear waste.
I read that placing the waste on a subduction zone can potentially solve the problem. It's a place where one tectonic plate slides under another, so theoretically any radioactive waste could be sent back into the Earth (radioactive material in the Earth is responsible for the heating and movement of the tectonic plates in the first place). I like the idea. One of the reasons being that since the problem is a long term one, the solution is fittingly long term as well (The plate carrying the waste sliding into the Earth moves very slowly). Of course, there are the problems of logistics, cost, risk of leakage on the seabed and radiation exposure to any life that would live there, so I don't see it being viable soon.
How about both, renewables work super efficiently in sunny places like Arizona, Windy places like the north sea, Valcanic places like Iceland and Lakes like lake Victoria in Ghana
I think it should be made into radiant heating flooring for homes. Think about it. The floor will stay warm all year long. It would be perfect for the Canadians.
Geothermal Gaming just in the winter? when I lived in Nova Scotia it certainly got cold in the winter, but the summer was also pretty cold at night. you pretty much have to be able to heat the house even in summer and that's going to decrease the effectiveness of a geothermal heat pump for year-round production.
Elliander Eldridge no one mentioned geothermal pumps? also I know it gets colder near the west and east coasts. that's oceans for you. radiant flooring is a good idea but you need to think about their half life and the best way to maintain the radiation that is still present. even though it's less dangerous it's still an isotope. so there is still the risk of radiation. maybe if there was an insulator in between the radiant material and the main floor that conducts heat but neutralizes radiation. that's the best way I can think but feel free to correct me or suggest a better idea.
We should put *short term research into Nuclear as we haven't even unlocked the power of Fusion* and spend *long term research into renewable energy* to supplement it and possibly replace it in the future. I think some *emphasis needs to definitely be put in the reducing of the mass of Nuclear waste and more research than either energy needs to be put towards finding a way to recycle/dispose of Nuclear waste effectively and easily*
Ive always been curious on one idea, the newly formed islands, that have slow magma tubes, would that not be a good way to destroy said waste? Such as a heavy weighted object, like the concrete tubes they used for nuclear waste disposal, dropping one in a volcanic tube, surely it would sink quite a ways before breaking apart from the massive heat
I can suggest geothermal and hydro sources, mainly because that there is a metric but ton of energy from those two sources alone and you can keep it going essentially 24/7
It's not waist. It is fuel. And it can provide energy for thousands of years if we burn it in a MSR, Molten Salt Reactor. It's the best way to get rid of it.
If it's leaking into ground water then it's not buried deep enough or safe enough. Storing deep in the WV mountains would be a good idea. Deep enough to keep away all the radiation and in solid enough rock to get rid of leakage. Plus we already have tons of mines and trains to transport the waste here. There's very low seismic activity as well making it even safer.
Hi, Mack here: I believe the future of nuclear waste will be separating all the different materials, and then putting the transuranic (anything with a higher z than uranium) into fast reactors. This will then go onto powering new reactors while getting rid of some of the longer lived waste
Nuclear reprocessing technology was developed to chemically separate and recover fissionable plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. With commercialization of nuclear power, the reprocessed plutonium was recycled back into MOX nuclear fuel for thermal reactors. The reprocessed uranium, also known as the spent fuel material, can in principle also be re-used as fuel, but that is only economical when uranium supply is low and prices are high. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
Renewables are already efficient enough if you use the right approach. For example, Japan's working on a typhoon turbine. if we used a similar technology in the Gulf of Mexico and harness the power of even a fraction of a single Hurricane a year we could power the entire country since the hurricane has enough kinetic energy to power the entire world two hundred times over. the only real issue is going to be storage of that energy because it's not continuous and that's the main limitation, but if we only needed one array of turbines in the Gulf of Mexico and no other power plants anywhere else we could easily use solar as a supplemental and basically set up a series of water pumps and turbines where the excess energy is pumped up and then used later to run a turbine when power is in demand which is actually what we already do in large-scale power storage locations. the thing is even if you make nuclear waste easier to store it still needs to be stored long-term. if you're going to insist on using nuclear power make a switch to thorium which won't need to be stored as long. Any waste system that needs to be stored for longer than humans have existed as a species is a bad idea to begin with comma and although are many other pollution strategies are also bad they're not as bad when you consider that they're not going to be as long term if and when we clean them up. we've got carbon sequestration technology after all. If we went all energy green and had a surplus of power we could easily set up systems to scrub the atmosphere too.
I definitely think we haven't really looked into nuclear power enough to see all the benefits and all the things we can learn from this. Im sure along the way we will even find a way to take away all the negatives from nuclear power
Molten salt reactors allow the fuel to be more completely burned so there is about 1% as much waste and it decays a lot faster so storage doesn't have to be as permanently secure. Vitrification sounds like the way to go for that long term storage though.
id like to know what that 1% is and if we only use nuclear plants in time won't we run out of usable radioactive material? its not like its being renewed
The idea of using waste to minimize nuclear waste is appealing. I'm sure that one day we will find a use for nuclear waste. Wind and solar are NOT base line power, Nuclear is baseline and cannot be ignored. We just need to minimize the waste and find other uses for the radiation which itself is a form of energy.
The simple answer to make nuclear really usable is to use a coolant other than water. Light water reactors are subject to explosions when the water inside, under pressure, splits into oxygen and hydrogen. Fukushima was a conventional hydrogen explosion that can happen with a car battery (on a much smaller scale) Light water reactors only use about 1% of the uranium in the fuel rods and they discard the rods. With a MSR closer to 98% of the fuel, in a liquid state, is used. PLUS the waste from LWR can be put into a MSR and be used up to a similar degree. Check out how much uranium and thorium is put into the atmosphere by coal energy facilities.
A good idea, but thorium is where it's at from both a cost and safety perspective. Also we can't rely on one source alone, a mix of efficient renewables and nuclear would be ideal
The biggest problem we have in regards to evolving our energy sources is how inexpensive fossil fuels still are. Because we keep finding more ways to extract these fuels and we have 150 years of experience and infrastructure based on petroleum energy, the urgency to find better and safer ways to utilize nuclear energy and renewables is just not there. We will most likely have no choice but to eventually make this jump. And in the short term finding safer, more efficient ways to harness nuclear energy would make that jump a little bit more gentle. There exist many advances over the last few decades in this area that could be tapped right now. Reusing spent fuel in the next generation of reactors would be a huge bonus. But we can't completely trust industry to regulate itself. We must create more strict guidelines to protect the public while we move forward.
Does the environment of orbital space (or "deep space") offer any advantages for processing/production/conversion of nuclear waste as an energy source? ( image space 'fuel stations", similar to SpaceX OMT orbital mega tanker). Considering that spaceflight has become considerably more reliable, along with the billions spent to produce this material.. why not squeeze a few additional bucks out of the leftovers? We have certainly pumped out enough carbon to feed electrolyzed water into hydrocarbons + oxygen as rocket fuel.
i'm an aspiring nuclear engineer and i need to say that nuclear waste isn't even a problem, as it stands. for 70+ years of power production, in our extremely inefficient pressurized water reactors, being incredibly wasteful of fuel, etc. ALL OUR WASTE would fit on a football field. this is because nuclear is 10,000,000 times more energy-dense than fossil fuels. have you ever seen a coal tailings pile? it's a mound of toxic mercury and radium and radon and lead that just gets dumped into our environment. nuclear produces 200x less waste per watt than solar panels, and nobody is worrying about that like it's a deal-breaker. toxic heavy metals from solar panels also get dumped into the environment. nuclear is the ONLY power source whose waste is entirely sequestered properly, BECAUSE IT'S SO LITTLE WASTE, it's possible to sequester. the long-lived isotopes can even be burned in a fast-spectrum reactor, give us more power, and be converted to stuff that's only radioactive for 300 years. it's a fake problem. it's invented by fossil fuel companies to make people scared of transitioning to nuclear, because they know for a fact that our grid cannot run on solar/wind alone. people will not tolerate constant rolling blackouts, and the fossil fuel companies understand that if we don't have nuclear, we are gonna be burning gas or coal to make up that difference.
What about burying it REALLY deep? Like under the continental crust deep. For that we would need some new fancy drilling machines, the deepest we got today is 12 km in Kola (cca 1/3 of crust there) and drilling had to stop because of temperature down there. But there wouldn't be any concerns about leakages.
I think that the waste still have a big potential to generate power. As you just explained. There is a way to compress the waste in an other solid material. Now just finde the way to use the rest of the power that still in there. Solar cells aren't good two. The heat that is being generated from one panel is imens. So we do not support the clima. If you use 80 panels that have 60 Celsius and the ground has 40 Celsius together with the airflow you will generate up to 50kw of heat at 10ms you can finde a calculator for that online. Windgenerators aren't good as well. They stop the natural flow of air because they are to hi above the trees that normally wud stop the flow. And again the co2 that is produced to build that alternative electricity source were no buddy thinks of correct. It's not only manufactured. It's installed and stored.
Thank you, a more efficient pathway for nuclear waste storage. You have answered your issue on my lasted comment. I still think a dry nonseismic location would be the best. We just now know how to do it even safer. Hopefully we reuse that waste in some manner like we reuse recyclables. Thank you. -JDB
I think we need to relentlessly pursue all avenues of energy with a heavy focus on all energy derived from atomic reactions while also relentlessly pursuing ways to make it cleaner, more efficient and reliable. The goal is ultimately to find a way to give everybody access to as much energy as they could ever need.
Both, needs more recources, but wind and solar needs mouch more. Acually storage technology needs the most investments, like batteries, hydro-pump stations using underground caves and the like, also kinetic storage systems using renewables to push trains up hills, and letting them regenerate the power back on their way down. These are all wery effective solutions for storage already, but they could be imporoved a lot still.
The spent fuel rods are not liquid waste. They are also not buried in a mountain. The spent fuel rods (in the US anyway) are stored on site at the power plants that used them.
we need to genetically engineer a gigantic hamster and put it in a ferris wheel.
lol
You know, this isn't too far off of a plan that I think would be very interesting. What if you could somehow harness the energy of a colony of ants?
You have them run down a tube to collect sugar and bring it back to their nest. While they are walking they are pressing small buttons beneath them which collect the kinetic energy of the ants.
It's a crazy idea, with some technological challenges, but, it would be extremely green. Unless some ant right group gets pissed.
Leave it to a 10 year old to solve the world's energy problem. I'm in!
Why not just throw the waste in space?
@@qqqqqq101 Its extremely expensive and still radioactive, also, when the orbit decay into the atmosphere it will burn up so u will have radioactive gas that you will be beathing.
I think we should be putting more work into both, science is disgustingly underfunded...
***** I completely agree with you; I was in a rush to type my comment so I wasn't really thinking about the "disgustingly" part, but they should be receiving much more funding.
Mystogan LC
Considering the fact that most of the things science is studying right now are inventions and techniques that we hope to be able to use to save humanity from our inpending doom. Referring to climate change and the '' world killer '' asteroid that's heading straight for us.
*****
I'm starting to think that the new comment system in youtube isn't that bad. I would never found such a pleasant conversation with the old format.
The current advances in science are amazing and will only develop faster .
Yeah you're right. The reason so many new people hate the new comment system is because it forces you to use your Google+ account.
Anyway, yes science is advancing faster and faster but not fast enough.
Maybe you haven't heard but a couple of astronomers have discovered an asteroid roughly 3/4th's of the moon heading straight for us. There's a 70% chance of it hitting us so we better come up with a plan fast.
Evil Google Corp. soon shall rule all.
Thorium reactors are understood to convert most radioactive waste into energy; the nuclear waste products are more stable and much easier and cheaper to dispose of. *Even if we reach a breakthrough with fusion technology* THORIUM reactors will need to be implemented just to dispose of radioactive waste stockpiles we have accumulated. It is the most logical conclusion. Yet you make no mention of this*
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, that's what we need. Thorium is readily found on earth, and is a waste product of mining for rare-earth metals, places literally give it away because they can't use it for anything. A LFTR doesn't use compressed water vapor, so there's no need to have huge domes with 8 inch thick walls to prevent blowouts. If the reactor fails there's nothing rapidly expanding that would blow radioactive particles into the air. And if the reactor over heats, or loses power, a small plug at the bottom of the tank melts which drains the fuel into another container where it won't be reacting. This is automatic and is powered by gravity, so no nuclear meltdowns. The fuel doesn't need to be super pure, so you don't need a refining plant on site, saving time and money. And where uranium rods lose effectiveness after using less than 10% of the fuel before not being able to sustain fission, thorium reactors use almost 90% of the fuel. This leads to a dramatic decrease in the amount of waste made. And the waste itself has a half life of 30 years, and degrades to relatively harmless level within three hundred years, as compared to the 300,000 years of the stuff we make now. And the plant itself is actually simpler to build than that of a uranium based plant, which almost all the machines and parts already being made. And the best part, the fuel for LFTR's can't be weaponized (at least not with today's technology)! This is where we need to focus on nuclear energy! We could get these things built and running, saving billions of year on the price of energy, not to mention making safer power plants and less toxic waste. But with so many restrictions on developing nuclear power, we may never see this amazing technology lift off.
From what I've read, Thorium Fission looks like a worthwhile nuclear energy source to investigate.
O
The only issue with the molten salt tech is that it is still fairly primitively developed. The tech was proven the same time as our current reactor tech was but since weapon grade material was being sought it was left undeveloped. They just need to figure out how to change out waste products with fresh fuel while the reactor is online and molten salt reactors will be able to take all wastes and fuels and turn them into power and the waste is actually worth keeping around with its shorter half lives and higher values for the materials once their 'cooled' off.
Thorium affects your lungs.
@@bethymears2648 many things affect the lungs and yet we still use them. Not too many of those things could make a similar impact as thorium is set to once the tech is were it needs to be.
They have. And it’s so poisonous it’s ridiculous to manage
We need to dump money into Thorium reactor research and start cranking those bad boys out. That would fix a lot of our nuclear waste woes while providing clean power that also uses up a materiel that is considered a waste product by rare earth miners.
Yep. . . What he said.
***** TL;DNR: Thorum plants are much cheaper and easier to build.
I know Laurence Liver more and the Tokamak in France are both Works in progress and that the math seems to show that the Tomamak will be successful but the sad truth is, regardless of how cheep or abundant the fuel is for Fusion, the devices themselves are always going to be enormous and complex. They will require extremely close monitoring and advanced computer systems to constantly monitor hundreds if not thousands of variables. For ever dollar you save on the price of fuel you spend thousands on the construction of the device itself. Thorium is cheep and is a waste product of rare earth metal mines that they have to figure out what to do with already though, granted not as cheap as deuterium. It is way more stable and easy to work with than uranium or plutonium. But the reason it will ultimately beat out Fusion for at least the next 50+ years is that construction of power plants is much cheaper than even current gen Uranium plants.
Liquid fluoride thorium reactor I'm all for it!!!!!!
***** True and most of the waste is solid which has little or no danger of contaminating water supplies and they have learned how to contain the liquid waste in glass, effectively solidifying it, removing its elevated risk of water contamination. That said, If we switched to Thorium fuel sources, we effectively eliminate a lot of waste issues as well as proliferation concerns.
If it wasn't so expensive to send it in outer space, we would already do it and from an engineering standpoint, it is never going to happen to do it on the cheap... The cheapest I found as quick as a google research can be, was 1700$/kg of mass, and this was only the rocket itself without any extra weight strapped to it... Considering you want to shoot a few tons + the rocket into space wich weighs lets say 10tons... Yeah... Do the math... And consider the danger of the rocket blowing up in our atmosphere, spreading this super radioactive stuff all over the place...
Ok, this episode is almost right enough to sound plausible but still very misleading.
A. Not all the fuel in a fuel bundle is used up. The bundle is no longer usable after three cycles through the reactor due to build up of byproducts that prevent further fission.
B. We never, ever, dumped spent fuel into the ocean.
C. By the Atomic Energy Act of 1972; only the Department of Energy may dispose of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants.
D. The DOE was mandated to take custody of all spent fuel rods from commercial licensees by fiscal year 1998 for reprocessing and recycling.. The DOE has yet to take custody of any commercial fuel even though the utilities have been paying into the disposal fund since they were first licensed.
E. It is criminal that the U.S. does not recycle their nuclear fuel as is done in Europe. (MOX Fuel for "Mixed Oxide" - mix of new U-235 and recycled fissionables from spent fuel)
F. The WIPP project is where the leftover high level radioactive material goes. It is in a salt dome 2 miled below ground in a desert. There is little chance of corrosion of containers nor leakage to groundwater as there is no groundwater there. That is why the repository was built there.
G. Vitrification of hazardous waste is not "NEW". It was new in the late 1970s for handling hazmat. It is currently a proven technology. The U.S. DOE just doesn't have a vitrification plant for nuclear waste operational except for the tiny proof of concept one built in the early 1990s. The rest of the world has been vitrifying high level waste for decades.
Just a few points that were off of the factual bulls eye in the video. I'll shaddup now.
+Steven Jerkins about point B
who are you talking about when you say "We"?
if We == Humans then thats not true:
- Russians once dumped nuclear waste into the ocean
- a nuclear powerplant in England dumps contaminated water into the ocean
- probably more that I don't know of...
+Kawakeb Astra What about it? We *could* dump nuclear waste into the ocean because the radiation halves every 15cm through water. That's about 12 halving's for the height of the average man. In other words, a fatal dose of radiation would be negligible from just a few meters away! So vitrify nuclear waste into ceramic tablets. But first make sure , and you've used all the transuranics! They're the things that make nuclear waste dangerous for 100,000 years. Once they've been burned, you could take it out into the ocean and dump it there quite safely. A few sea worms in the bottom of our deepest ocean trenches might get burned, but nothing else. Then in 500 years it is safe anyway. Remember, no long lived transuranics!
??? Both work well.
+Steven Jerkins I am starting a little video series on nuclear power. I will be addressing the commonly misunderstood topics like Spent Fuel, Types of reactors, passive safety, proliferation and decay heat. Would you and anyone else listening we willing to give it a little spot check once it is complete?
I WORKED AS A NAVY NUCLEAR ENGINEER! WE DO IN FACT STILL DUMP OUR NUCLEAR WASTE IN THE OCEAN TO THIS DAY IN 2016!!! Not only does the navy rarely recycle resources, they dump plastic, asbestos and nuclear waste in to the ocean
More nuclear power creates more nuclear waste. Vitrification is a new solution to that problem and Anthony Carboni explains the process and it’s benefits.
Check it out: The New Solution To Our Nuclear Waste Problem
dne.ws/1acG7dX
DNews
First time i been on test tube
_bookmark_
Ha you said kaiju Pacific rim reference I just got done watching that
Waste is a non-issue because soon we will have Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs) that can consume the old waste and which itself only produces a fraction of waste compared to our current nuclear plants.
And that waste only need to be stored for 300 years.
Or, instead of storing it you could sell it to NASA to power their space probes.
Do a story about that.
blackops1223and2
That is more than a reference to Pacific Rim, Kaijus are the Japanese word for the monsters like Godzilla that attack Japanese cities and fight amongst themselves in movies.
I always thought putting the waste in glass was a good idea as it can't get into water etc.
But the best answer is to move to a thorium fuel cycle as the waste is much less dangerous as they can burn their actinides by transmuting them into fissionable products.
Molten salt reactors take the safety one step farther by getting rid of the pressure vessel and makes shutting down the reactor much easier .
You just let the already molten core material drain into a pan under reactor to cool off.
Either way this would still be a good way to store the optimally 1-2% waste you would still have.
actually the best solution was the original solution when nuclear power was first a thing... the nuclear plants would rerefine the waste back into usable nuclear fuel onsite. allowing the plant to run on relatively small amounts of material for an almost indefinite period of time.
however the nuclear waste problem was caused by the government with the "nuclear non proliferation" policies that ban anyone but the government from refining nuclear material. this means that all the waste fuel can only be rerefined by the government who never came up with a plan to do it.
so once again. if the government got out of the way, the problem would have never been made in the first place.
***** True but you would still have some waste regardless. As far as government being in the way this is what you get when you primarily elect lawyers and scientifically illiterate asshats. Put some engineers, scientists, and maybe a couple economists in there and the country would be far better for it.
Elijah Miller yeah but it would still be a tiny fraction of what it is now.
And yes that is just like how some in the government wanted to ban "barrel shrouds" on rifles. But when asked what that is, had no idea.
I agree, that, as for a reactor, thorium, is the fuel to use. But, I also am a firm believer, that energy as a whole. Should be grabbed from zero point energy. I DO believe it is possible, and I DO believe the technology is known. And I DO think it is time to unveil it.
"Solar is going to pay off"
Only if you can produce consistent energy and can recycle broken panels.
And if you live near the equator 😂
A solar panel last couple of years then it's done for.
@@tiddybearkush what about night time dumbass?
@@devanshbhaw9187 You don’t know how the process works.
@@devanshbhaw9187 calling him a dumbass? Ah the Irony..
@@tiddybearkush Lol, try 20 years. And that's just the typical warranty that guarantees a certain efficiency retained in that time. It still works after.
Both.
But aim for thorium. It produces less waste,that is shorter lived.
The thorium cycle burns 100% of the thorium used, where uranium based reactors barely burn 1% of the fuel before the rods are expend.
Sugar? WTF??? I think you mean SAND.
Michael Flowers you caught it too. 50 comments till I found someone else who caught it.
"sugar" LOL nuclear caramel!!!!
you mean "sand"? or "soda"?
"Because that is how you get a Kaiju" Lol
See "LFTR in 5 minutes". Why pay the mean of $0.11 per kilowatt hour when we could be paying between $0.02 and $0.03 per kilowatt hour for electricity. Once we get the price of electricity down, the cost of everything else drops dramatically also, including those solar panels. Now the price of electricity will be considerably less than the grid price. We have a known 20,000 year supply of thorium.
The cost will drop but that just doesn't mean the price will ,too.At least not in the short run. Also what Bill said: your price doesn't include the line costs.
There was some language issues in the explanation which make numerous statements in this video incorrect.
were*
Agreed, I work in IT for a nuclear technology research company and have never heard of sugar used in vitrification. It's vitrified in a type of glass.
Ya think?
Uhhhh Thorium based reactors?
ROKASniper89 thunderf00t
exactly
china will have their commercial LFTR online in 2025. pretty pathetic how america invented the tech in the first place, and it took the chinese to actually take it seriously.
ATADEMO it’s because damn regulations put in place by past presidencies. If we are smart, we would take the French route and build more nuclear power plants, all of which would be thorium or molten salt reactors.
the fluoride salt reactors were squashed because the don't produce byproducts that can be turned into nukes. that basically the short answer
What do we do with nuclear glass then? What can we reuse that for?
instead of improving waste storage (which is still very important) we should invest in better nuclear fuel. Like Thorium
a different type of nuclear reactor running on thorium and designed around molten salt for its heat transfer. it's safer, more efficient, and produces less and less toxic waste with a shorter half life than uranium breeder reactors.
+aotearota new zealand I think look up a Thorium Reactor
+Seth Apex U233 can still make bombs, but the odds of that are exaggerated by hippies and coal lobbies. If a government is denying international investigators (IAEA) then just use massive sanctions. Thanks Obama!
Hey I have a question. The stacks at nuclear power plants release the steam from creating nuclear energy, this escaping steam should be captured and recycled so none escapes and therefore none is wasted. Nuclear energy creates the heat to boil water and the boiling water creates steam to drive the massive turbines that in turn drive the generators that produce electricity that is then sent indirectly to peoples homes. But some of this steam is allowed to escape up the smoke stakes and into the atmosphere. Harness all this escaping steam and reuse it to drive the turbines.
I am all FOR nuclear but only THORIUM reactors they are more efficient and much safer because there is no pressure vessel so nothing can explode. If something does go wrong the reactor drains the molten salt in another vessel and the reaction stops. You can also feed these reactors with radioactive waste from plutonium reactors. Please correct me if Iam wrong. And its al 1950's thechnology.
came here for this
"Thorium Reactors" is a broad term to use as you can consume Thorium in any nuclear reactor type with limited degrees of success... in fact the very first Thorium fuel cycle reactors basically shoved a rod of it into the fuel pile of a LWR and converted it to U-233 through it's 30 day decay cycle...
To clarify, for others reading, what you are talking about, is specifically a Molten Salt Reactor. The concept was proven in the 1950's with the Aircraft Reactor Experiment and a prototype MSR commercial reactor was created with the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). Now the MSRE did NOT use Thorium fuel. It ran first on U-235 and then was drained, processed, and refilled with U-233. U-233 is the uranium produced from the Thorium Fuel cycle. NO ONE has built a commercial MSR and no one has developed and proven the techniques necessary to remove the Protactinium-233 that is the longest part of the Thorium Fuel Cycle. Pa-233 is a huge neutron poison (it wants your neutrons!) and if it isn't removed to decay it will not produce U-233 which means no breeding is done which means the Thorium fuel cycle is a waste of time.
In truth, a Waste Burner MSR would be a great first commercialization step towards a true LFTR (Molten Salt Reactor using Thorium Fuel Cycle). It would pave the way for the materials proof and it would pave the way for the passive safety systems while providing a logical stepping stone towards LFTR.... given our current stockpile of waste, these first MSR's would do wonders for current existing nuclear plant's waste problem and what remained would be far easier to maintain storage of, either on site or in repositories.
Thorium is a fuel not a reactor design. Molten salt is an interesting approach but thorium reactors can be light water, heavy water, fast breeder, etc. . As attractive as thorium is there has been much more development of uranium reactors because during we used them to produce plutonium for weapons during the cold war. As far as reactor designs I like the heavy water CANDU reactors. CANDU reactors can burn natural (unenriched) uranium, reprocessed uranium, MOX fuels or thorium.
Unfortunately, we are a good 10-15 years from a viable COMMERCIAL molten salt reactor, and probably even further away in terms of regulation. Current reactor technology is old, but new designs are safer and more efficient. With the freeze on new reactor construction since TMI, though, we've really put ourselves behind. Not only in research and controls technology, but in education, because when I went to school for NE back in the early-to-late 90's, it was considered a DEAD career path. We are now only beginning to train new "practical" NE students in numbers.
Well... I disagree about the 10-15 year time frame. If we really wanted to commercialize it, the MSRE at ORNL was a prototype reactor and their studies through the mid 1970's solved most of the major technical hurdles... that being corrosion (Hastelloy-N or a custom alloy of Inconnel), fuel reprocessing, safety, graphite issues, etc. There is no reason we couldn't build a commercial scale prototype reactor based off of the MSRE and progress from there. AND there is nothing preventing that from happening aside from regulatory hurdles and funding. The former has a bill in Congress to address, and the later the DoE can fix if they get off the solid fuel kick...
I'm willing to bet we'll have a better way of dealing with it between now and the year 102,015.
I actually studied this and wrote a paper on it. The more we put into nuclear reactors, the more we can research. We already have plans for fusion reactors that run off thorium and theoretically could "burn" old nuclear waste. There have also been advancements in nuclear fusion. Right now, a company is working on a form of fusion that would essentially just need a lot of power to start, and then all it needs is basically salt water and small amounts of lithium to generate large amounts of energy. It is a much better choice to pursue this than to abandon it completely for things like solar panels that are still fairly inefficient.
liquid salt reactors can actually use up the current waste we have. I have done Limited research, but the scientist that worked on the US funded project know it work it works!
How come Discovery news hasn't had an episode about thorium?
Practical solutions like MSR's aren't "woke" enough, I guess.
two words, Breeder Reactor. stop throwing away useful fuel. I'm sure there are plenty of people leaving similar comments, but what the heck, why not?
Hi I just wanted to ask a question: if nasa or space x wanted to build a rocket, how much would it cost and from where they get it’s parts ( nozzle ...) ?
No more nuclear reactors. Put our money into solar power.
***** We've seen the power of fusion from various hydrogen bombs. The problem is that in order to fuse two atoms of deuterium (hydrogen with an neutron) we needed to mount fission based bombs around it to generate the necessary heat and pressure. We do have atom smashers and particle accelerators, but the power that would be generated would likely be less than the power generated.
***** You absolutely CAN post links now. But keep in mind that if they are RUclips links, it will display the title of the video, not the URL.
yup why dont just shoot it to outer space? send it to the moon..its just a rock anyhow.
Sending it to the moon wouldn't be viable, think of the possibility that we might habit it within the next 100-200 years.
Because you'll spray half the planet with high level waste in the case of a loss of vehicle.
Thinking in the case that we had a safe way to get it out of the atmosphere.
Roymond Olsen :-D no thats not the reason :-D its because sending it to space would be too expensive... and we dont really want to send it to space. There are new ways to use the nuclear waste again.
1) That would be EXTREMELY expensive.
2) If one of the transport vessels fail the government will have successfully covered 1/4 of the earth in radioactive waste.
3) We can't predict what will happen with the radio active material once it's in space or once it's delved into the sun
i have a question = I understand that thorium must be bred with uranium or radio active waste from traditional thermal reactors but what i cant get my head around is what happens to that waste in a thorium reactor LFTR or normal after the fuel rods burn out?????
Thorium
Thorium reactor ftw
+Otherized Meme fusion*
+LayTzz_swe HD thorium is easier and better than uranium which is what we use now and we haven't invented a sustainable fusion reactor yet.
Otherized Meme true, but fusion reactor ftw > thorium reactor ftw.
Otherized Meme neither fusion or thorium will be financially supported by governments because they don't produce the waste that we use to create nuclear warheads.
LayTzz_swe HD one day we will have fusion reactors, but right now we have to go with thorium reactors.
How much energy can one pellet generate?
So if I had this pellet shoot neutrons to him would the chain reaction start and heat up the Pellet?
Or, use thorium and stop being cheap about the reactors.
Thorium?
zeppelin67637 Search it up, pretty good solution but more expensive is what i know so far about it
I know right!
The only reason we have to use Uranium is because it can be efficiently weaponized. Since Nuclear weapons are a terrible idea there's no reason to continue with Uranium reactors.
Thorium is plentiful anyways.
Humans: think we're clever, but we fight like children, destroy our planet, and place the accumulation of wealth over all else. I really have no faith in humanity at this point, we're probably doomed to blow ourselves up in a few hundred years, and if that doesn't happen, Mother Nature would kill us anyway.
It was tried before but the Energy Output was not high enough
Wasn't there a kid on TED who designed a reactor that ran on nuclear waste and didn't have a risk of melting down?
probably a molten salt reactor by sounds of it. Not new in in its own right concept was proven back in the 50s but since it couldn't produce nuclear bomb effectively it was shelved in favor of other types of reactors that produced elements like plutonium that can be used for bombs. Since the technology would require likely billions and years of research to get to a point where it's widely available few governments will invest in it.
Wade Haden thanks for correction I was thinking of the LFTR not a MSR though I guess with broad definitions a LFTR is a reactor using a fuel dissolved in a molten salt. Also the phrase 'thorium reactor' is a bit misleading as your really just breeding uranium 233 to fission, as thorium 232 is not readily fissionable.
Become familiar with fissile and fertile, you're most of the way there.
It's impossible for a fusion reactor to meltdown.
Reluctant Couch I question anything on "TED" regardless of the source.
I worked with the scientists who first developed the process in the eighties. As a lab tech I ran the gamma spectroscopic which was used to characterize the composition of the waste. I learned to program by fixing the code on it and other lab instruments.
Thorium Reactors are the solution, safe, less waste with sorter half-life, and best of all you can't get weapons grade material out of them so making nukes.
How is it better for the public than solar, windmills, or hydrogen fuel cells?
*****
Cheaper for whom? The public can and should generate their own power. The only thing preventing the cost from coming down are the economies of scale.
I'm not against technology, I'm against bad planning, and bad actors. They have literally hid the facts of every nuclear incident that has ever occurred.
BTW, I'm pretty sure that Hydrogen comes from water.
They finally made a video about it! Check it out :)
You are right. And science is finally paying attention to it. D news made a video about it as pointed out by the previous comment.
Noneya
hydrogen is incredibly energy inefficient if you want to make it from water. It's only ever useful for the propulsion of rockets.
Thorium can burn Plutonium
They don't use plutonium.
Don't have to but thorium itself is not fisile. it needs to absorb a neutron, decay to uranium 233, then get hit by a second neutron to fission and release energy and emit more neutrons. So you really breeding uranium 233 for your fuel, but to get started you would need a source of uranium, plutonium, or some other source of neutrons. Also if you ran at a slight negative neutron economy you could make up the difference by doping your 'fuel' with plutonium or something similar acquired from old nuclear reactors or decommissioned bombs.
Elijah Miller U-238 isnt fissile either. U-238 is fissionable, so you should see if thorium is also as such.
Except you're not getting rid of the waste, you're just storing it more efficiently.
I always knew a slag is a solution to our energy needs xD
my god, that was so poor
Thorium reactors are the answer.
+Standard AI why? whats the diffrence? uranium, thoriom, plutonium it just have to be radioactive right?
"According to proponents, a thorium fuel cycle offers several potential advantages over a uranium fuel cycle-including much greater abundance on Earth, superior physical and nuclear fuel properties, and reduced nuclear waste production." - Wikipedia. Also they it's impossible for them to melt down and cause leaks like Chernobyl or Fukushima
YES
+Absolutia 1 thorium pound = power of FUCKING 200 PUNDS OF URANIUM = 4.5 MILLION POUNDS OF COAL
WHY IS URANIUM STILL BEING USED an col
thorium makes less waste, radioactive for a few decades apposed by centures to millions of years
thorium is more efficient
thorium is more abundant
thorium is life
+Standard AI thays what they said about nuclear reactors back when they came out. They wont meltdown they are safe is what we were told. Keep believeing their bullshit. let me put something into your head. Can you just imagine for a sec how many renewable inventions have been bought by these companies and then just simply put the idea in a filing cabenet somewhere so they can makentheir money with the crap we have now. The system is corrupt and to think that they are giving you the right information is a mistake
The problem with "Eco friendly" power is that it isn't exactly eco friendly.
Hydro damns for instance, flood the lands upstream, they also cut off fish from being able to spawn naturally and in the event of a failure can endanger thousands of lives.
Solar farms also pose a problem as California found out they can create super heated air that can burn the feathers off of a bird. This super heated air is also a problem for the environment as it can create a thermal which can have serious consequences during the formation of storms.
Wind-farms also have a lot of issues ranging from susceptibility to storm damage, to birds being hit by the blades. They too pose a risk to people as they can collapse causing a fair bit of damage.
All three also have unfriendly manufacturing practices which creates nearly the same amount of pollution as an active coal or natural gas plant. Not to mention the cost associated with designing, implementation, operation, and maintenance of such facility's.
Yes Nuclear energy is hazardous and I look forward to a day we no-longer need to rely on it. But the facts remain true, lets not kid ourselves with "Renewable energy" being fine for the environment.
Nuclear *technology* is sound. We certainly can harness nuclear energy safely. The image of the "glowing piles of nuclear waste" is extremely exaggerated.
The major problem is not the technology, but the *industry*. Particularly in America. The technology is only as safe as the regulators demand it to be, and in America, regulators answer to the industry, not the other way around. With money in politics, you can't have safe nuclear energy, which is fucking tragic.
So if we really want to put all our money on nuclear to get us off coal/oil, step 1 is setting up brutal regulations that ensure if there's a leak, or any sort of malpractice, someone's gonna get their head kicked in. Right now we just don't have that level of integrity.
With 0 major nuclear accidents in America, I beg to differ with your logic. No one here has ever died due to nuclear. Our regulations are fine.
RipleySawzen Do you work in the nuclear industry? Either no you don't or you're upper management. Keep the plant running at all costs...
EDKsurly You're right, no way they'd let us know if someone died in a nuclear power plant. They'd just tell the families of the workers that died that they went on a vacation, plus all the witnesses and coworkers? We gotta keep them quiet too, that's where our tax dollars go. No wonder taxes are so damn high! We're all just paying to keep people quiet! And they must grind the bodies up and fuse them with the waste! OH MY GOD. *THE NUCLEAR WASTE IS PEOPLE! IT'S PEOPLE*
There are 2 documentaries on Netflix, I highly recommend them. One is Pandora's Promise, the other is The Atomic States of America.
Pandora's Promise explains the technology, and illustrates how, in the right hands, Nuclear power is safe and sound. How Radiation isn't the Boogeyman. And the even cooler shit Nuclear energy has to offer in the future. The documentary is exiting as fuck.
The second, The Atomic States of America is admittedly a little conspiratarded. There's some misinformation about how dangerous the *technology* is. However, it also shows all the ways in which the industry has failed the people of America. The biggest story they follow is the one on Long Island, where rates of cancer skyrocketed. It was discovered that hey what do you know, a local nuclear facility was leaking tritium into the water, and the regulators covered it up. There's plenty of other examples of dangerous oversights, and deliberate cover-ups. Which all has to do with money in politics, and internal corruption.
Pretending there isn't a problem with a technology as potentially harmful as nuclear is, with all do respect, retarded. It's not hard to believe there's corruption in every other sector of the American government, why would the Nuclear Industry be immune to that?
Jeremy Kean
Every industry has the potential to leave a waste-trail behind it. Coal, fertilizer, soap, etc... For someone to argue against nuclear for such reasons they would have to argue against all industry as a whole. Of course the nuclear industry's existence has lead to deaths, but that's true of every single large industry in the world.
If former president Carter hadn't outlawed reprocessing in the 70's, we would only be storing 5% of the high level waste we have now. Plus, we wouldn't be importing the useful products made from other nuclear countries reprocessed waste.
Nuclear is such a concentrated and abundant fuel source, a single PWR can be fueled at 1/5000'th the cost of the cheapest fossil fuel plants (LN2, coal).
Couple that with their focused and effective US safety record, (coal is 10,000 deaths per trillion kwhr vs nuclear's 3 for the entirety of it's existence) and I'd like to say it's a "no brainer" and we should be tripple/quadrupeling down on nuclear (such as France and South Korea), but I'm continually amazed by how many no brain's there are out there.
@ Wade Haden - Chernobyl was a boiling water reactor, designed primarily for fuel efficiency and continuous operation without refueling, without much concern for safety. And even by the standards of the day it was engineered horribly. Do some research into design features of the Chernobyl reactors vs modern pressurized water designs
Rs Rt The main issue with nuclear power is the long break-even time and risks of being shut down due to mistakes in construction or political opposition. That means private companies are not interested and would rather poison us and destroy our planet with fossil fuel plants that have a predictable revenue stream. The citizenry has not yet figured out how to put moneyed interests in their place, so anything that doesn't interest corporations in today's world is not happening.
blast furnace slag can be used as excellent additive (30-60%) in OPC or PPC cement to make Portland Slag Cement (PSC) which is extremely good quality cement.
now i understand what vitrified meant in portal 2
Yeah... But in Portal 2, Aperture Science uses a mix of Fusion and Fission reactors.
Loshan Thevanesan Yeah... but Portal 2 is a video game
and therefor WAY better than real life. XP
When I heard slag I thought of the weapon element from Borderlands.
* HITS BLUNT * -They need a straw like vaccum object that sucks that shit out and pushes it into space
Breeder reactors would also help with this...
awesome
0:45 No, it's not a liquid. Mostly solid, and 1 or 2 (a few) isotopes gaseous elements.
0:54 Fuel rods have never been sealed in these tanks... and definitely not stored deep in the ground. We have no solution for the high-level waste problem, I think that would be the point of the video. (But we do put low and intermediate waste to the ground in those tanks.)
thorium lsr....?
Fusion power is critical for two reasons OTHER than being a new energy source:
First, it makes helium as its waste product, and the other sources of helium on Earth, although abundant, are non-renewable (trapped in gas deposits, created over millions of years by alpha decay of uranium and the subsequent decay products); and second, the neutron flux can be used to speed up decay of existing nuclear waste.
Or dump it into a LFTR and make even more power out of it.
#LFTR4LIFE
OR, you know, thorium.
Agreed, Liquid Thorium!
How about using the long lived transuranic waste we already have before we start digging after more nuclear fuel?
Sebastian Svanström
they already tried that... in Fallujah. :-/
Yes we definitely should invest in nuclear energie and we should use nuclear energy until we have found a better alternative for it. Every alternatieve way of making energie is making more pollution than nuclear The math is simple!!!
What if the waste isn't waste? What if all the Fission products have other uses and the un-fissioned uranium and plutonium could be useful someday? Separating these components is costly and highly involved, but it's way better than putting this stuff in bullet-proof casks and leaving it in the parking lot. #MSR #LFTR #thorium
Uranium tank shells contaminate their target (not radiation wise but toxic metal wide) reducing salvageability. Sorry to bring this back to war... But this has actually been implemented.
I will watch the video when I get home.
They do utilize it. They put F12 and F14 in your food and water, so you shit and piss some of it out in your municipal water supply which passes it onto the next human, which has perpetuated the biggest cancer epidemic of human history, or more specifically fluoride has a 10,000 year half life. DRINK UP!
Cont. Makes me wonder why they would even conceive the idea that America was O.K. with putting a nuclear bomb in their nutrients, and that proof is in the pudding at the Nevada Nuclear test site and those Villiaumite(Goog it) rocks with a mohs hardness of 2.5 scattered across the desert landscape. Knowing that the big industry are responsible for the hexafluorascilic 'acid rain' that has egged on them perpetuating lies to cover their asses and blaming it on cows farting and humans breathing.. The >energy cartel< is why there isnt any free energy plan(Tesla.) You gotta take out the bullies who control the politicians/Wallstreet. But phase 1 is to eliminate the Fed Rez, which will forfeit the stock exchange(so no Wallstreet). We cant go picking fights we wont win, so each move is crucial. We have to take out the head of the snake. Which will collapse the WORLD market. Thats when citizens unite to take down government tyranny. Some really good hacker is gonna be labeled Anonymous, lol.
People should cut down on consumption at all things not just the using your car less but cut down on buying stuff that needs to be shipped 3 times around the planet. Eat less meat buy less clothes and other stuff we don't really need..
Cut down on consumption? Consumption has gone up year after year and is already exploding in developing countries. If your suggestion is to put a halt to progress, you need to rethink things...
RipleySawzen Mindless consuming isn't progress...
FullFledged2010
There's nothing mindless about it. Energy should be about 3 cents a kWh right now, and it's around 13 because people are afraid of progress. I'M not going to use less because idiots like you want me to.
RipleySawzen We will see who the idiots are in a few years ;) Atleast i don't have to liv in shame for the rest of my life when we totally screw up the earth...
FullFledged2010 I'm with you bro, renewable energy would be enough if we choose not to waste power with crap we don't need
There is EM nullification in theory as well. Why not pursue that method?
Blast the wastes into the sun.
KHAIRUL AZHAR KHOURUDIN that was whag I was just going to say!
do you think it's easy to send heavy stuff out of the gravitational pull of the earth? ruclips.net/video/RVMZxH1TIIQ/видео.html&ab_channel=Kurzgesagt%E2%80%93InaNutshell
send it to the moon :D or the sun
Too expensive to ship to the moon or sun. Not even Musk could do that.
looking at the date 2013 it is dated but still thorium cycle is way cheaper than a burner setup that does not recover heat to make electricity. you have to actively reduce the radioactive waste, setting around waiting for it to be safe is not an option.
wamsr, waste annihilating molten salt reactors. Burn up originally spent fuel .Thank you Google :)
maybe we can dump it on space? use big air balloon until its limit and use small rocket so it can enter space.my billion dollar idea
ellon musk if u read this. help the world dumping nuclear waste pls.
Yo Sup I had the same idea😂👌🏻
Yo Sup just fire it towards the sun or something 😂
Yo Sup Elon Musk has explicitly strayed away from any launching of dangerous nuclear substances to space.
I think we have shit enough in the space, because of the scrab of rockets,satellites, etc.
Or if you just use molten salt instead of solid fuel rods, you could just continuously reprocess the fuel utilizing all of the fuel rather than the 0.5% to 0.7% possible with solid fuel rods before they become structurally unsound and need to be stored as nuclear waste.
I read that placing the waste on a subduction zone can potentially solve the problem. It's a place where one tectonic plate slides under another, so theoretically any radioactive waste could be sent back into the Earth (radioactive material in the Earth is responsible for the heating and movement of the tectonic plates in the first place). I like the idea. One of the reasons being that since the problem is a long term one, the solution is fittingly long term as well (The plate carrying the waste sliding into the Earth moves very slowly).
Of course, there are the problems of logistics, cost, risk of leakage on the seabed and radiation exposure to any life that would live there, so I don't see it being viable soon.
How about both, renewables work super efficiently in sunny places like Arizona, Windy places like the north sea, Valcanic places like Iceland and Lakes like lake Victoria in Ghana
I think it should be made into radiant heating flooring for homes. Think about it. The floor will stay warm all year long. It would be perfect for the Canadians.
oh my god so true, it gets so cold here in the winter xD just have to worry about the excess ionizing radiation being emitted from the isotopes..
+Geothermal Gaming pshhh minor details 😂
Geothermal Gaming just in the winter? when I lived in Nova Scotia it certainly got cold in the winter, but the summer was also pretty cold at night. you pretty much have to be able to heat the house even in summer and that's going to decrease the effectiveness of a geothermal heat pump for year-round production.
Elliander Eldridge no one mentioned geothermal pumps? also I know it gets colder near the west and east coasts. that's oceans for you. radiant flooring is a good idea but you need to think about their half life and the best way to maintain the radiation that is still present. even though it's less dangerous it's still an isotope. so there is still the risk of radiation. maybe if there was an insulator in between the radiant material and the main floor that conducts heat but neutralizes radiation. that's the best way I can think but feel free to correct me or suggest a better idea.
We should put *short term research into Nuclear as we haven't even unlocked the power of Fusion* and spend *long term research into renewable energy* to supplement it and possibly replace it in the future. I think some *emphasis needs to definitely be put in the reducing of the mass of Nuclear waste and more research than either energy needs to be put towards finding a way to recycle/dispose of Nuclear waste effectively and easily*
Ive always been curious on one idea, the newly formed islands, that have slow magma tubes, would that not be a good way to destroy said waste?
Such as a heavy weighted object, like the concrete tubes they used for nuclear waste disposal, dropping one in a volcanic tube, surely it would sink quite a ways before breaking apart from the massive heat
I can suggest geothermal and hydro sources, mainly because that there is a metric but ton of energy from those two sources alone and you can keep it going essentially 24/7
It's not waist. It is fuel. And it can provide energy for thousands of years if we burn it in a MSR, Molten Salt Reactor. It's the best way to get rid of it.
If it's leaking into ground water then it's not buried deep enough or safe enough. Storing deep in the WV mountains would be a good idea. Deep enough to keep away all the radiation and in solid enough rock to get rid of leakage. Plus we already have tons of mines and trains to transport the waste here. There's very low seismic activity as well making it even safer.
Hi, Mack here:
I believe the future of nuclear waste will be separating all the different materials, and then putting the transuranic (anything with a higher z than uranium) into fast reactors. This will then go onto powering new reactors while getting rid of some of the longer lived waste
Nuclear reprocessing technology was developed to chemically separate and recover fissionable plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. With commercialization of nuclear power, the reprocessed plutonium was recycled back into MOX nuclear fuel for thermal reactors. The reprocessed uranium, also known as the spent fuel material, can in principle also be re-used as fuel, but that is only economical when uranium supply is low and prices are high.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
Renewables are already efficient enough if you use the right approach. For example, Japan's working on a typhoon turbine. if we used a similar technology in the Gulf of Mexico and harness the power of even a fraction of a single Hurricane a year we could power the entire country since the hurricane has enough kinetic energy to power the entire world two hundred times over. the only real issue is going to be storage of that energy because it's not continuous and that's the main limitation, but if we only needed one array of turbines in the Gulf of Mexico and no other power plants anywhere else we could easily use solar as a supplemental and basically set up a series of water pumps and turbines where the excess energy is pumped up and then used later to run a turbine when power is in demand which is actually what we already do in large-scale power storage locations.
the thing is even if you make nuclear waste easier to store it still needs to be stored long-term. if you're going to insist on using nuclear power make a switch to thorium which won't need to be stored as long. Any waste system that needs to be stored for longer than humans have existed as a species is a bad idea to begin with comma and although are many other pollution strategies are also bad they're not as bad when you consider that they're not going to be as long term if and when we clean them up. we've got carbon sequestration technology after all. If we went all energy green and had a surplus of power we could easily set up systems to scrub the atmosphere too.
wait, since when its more expensive to use sugar than industrial waste? I think theres some key info missing there.
I definitely think we haven't really looked into nuclear power enough to see all the benefits and all the things we can learn from this. Im sure along the way we will even find a way to take away all the negatives from nuclear power
Molten salt reactors allow the fuel to be more completely burned so there is about 1% as much waste and it decays a lot faster so storage doesn't have to be as permanently secure. Vitrification sounds like the way to go for that long term storage though.
id like to know what that 1% is and if we only use nuclear plants in time won't we run out of usable radioactive material? its not like its being renewed
The idea of using waste to minimize nuclear waste is appealing. I'm sure that one day we will find a use for nuclear waste.
Wind and solar are NOT base line power, Nuclear is baseline and cannot be ignored. We just need to minimize the waste and find other uses for the radiation which itself is a form of energy.
The simple answer to make nuclear really usable is to use a coolant other than water. Light water reactors are subject to explosions when the water inside, under pressure, splits into oxygen and hydrogen. Fukushima was a conventional hydrogen explosion that can happen with a car battery (on a much smaller scale) Light water reactors only use about 1% of the uranium in the fuel rods and they discard the rods. With a MSR closer to 98% of the fuel, in a liquid state, is used. PLUS the waste from LWR can be put into a MSR and be used up to a similar degree. Check out how much uranium and thorium is put into the atmosphere by coal energy facilities.
A good idea, but thorium is where it's at from both a cost and safety perspective. Also we can't rely on one source alone, a mix of efficient renewables and nuclear would be ideal
I have a question though. which is cleaner, a normal power plant that emits polution, or a nuclear power plant that emits radiation?
As others have mentioned, you are missing liquid salt thorium reactors. The direction we should go.
The biggest problem we have in regards to evolving our energy sources is how inexpensive fossil fuels still are. Because we keep finding more ways to extract these fuels and we have 150 years of experience and infrastructure based on petroleum energy, the urgency to find better and safer ways to utilize nuclear energy and renewables is just not there. We will most likely have no choice but to eventually make this jump. And in the short term finding safer, more efficient ways to harness nuclear energy would make that jump a little bit more gentle. There exist many advances over the last few decades in this area that could be tapped right now. Reusing spent fuel in the next generation of reactors would be a huge bonus. But we can't completely trust industry to regulate itself. We must create more strict guidelines to protect the public while we move forward.
Does the environment of orbital space (or "deep space") offer any advantages for processing/production/conversion of nuclear waste as an energy source?
( image space 'fuel stations", similar to SpaceX OMT orbital mega tanker).
Considering that spaceflight has become considerably more reliable, along with the billions spent to produce this material.. why not squeeze a few additional bucks out of the leftovers?
We have certainly pumped out enough carbon to feed electrolyzed water into hydrocarbons + oxygen as rocket fuel.
Is there any reason why we can't use reactor waste as the heat source in radioactive thermal generators?
while nuclear fusion knocks on the door we are like "hey, we don't need fusion, we can stay on old nukes" ...
Why not use Uranium waste as a fuel ???
i'm an aspiring nuclear engineer and i need to say that nuclear waste isn't even a problem, as it stands.
for 70+ years of power production, in our extremely inefficient pressurized water reactors, being incredibly wasteful of fuel, etc. ALL OUR WASTE would fit on a football field.
this is because nuclear is 10,000,000 times more energy-dense than fossil fuels.
have you ever seen a coal tailings pile?
it's a mound of toxic mercury and radium and radon and lead that just gets dumped into our environment.
nuclear produces 200x less waste per watt than solar panels, and nobody is worrying about that like it's a deal-breaker.
toxic heavy metals from solar panels also get dumped into the environment.
nuclear is the ONLY power source whose waste is entirely sequestered properly, BECAUSE IT'S SO LITTLE WASTE, it's possible to sequester.
the long-lived isotopes can even be burned in a fast-spectrum reactor, give us more power, and be converted to stuff that's only radioactive for 300 years.
it's a fake problem.
it's invented by fossil fuel companies to make people scared of transitioning to nuclear, because they know for a fact that our grid cannot run on solar/wind alone.
people will not tolerate constant rolling blackouts, and the fossil fuel companies understand that if we don't have nuclear, we are gonna be burning gas or coal to make up that difference.
What about burying it REALLY deep? Like under the continental crust deep.
For that we would need some new fancy drilling machines, the deepest we got today is 12 km in Kola (cca 1/3 of crust there) and drilling had to stop because of temperature down there. But there wouldn't be any concerns about leakages.
I think that the waste still have a big potential to generate power. As you just explained. There is a way to compress the waste in an other solid material. Now just finde the way to use the rest of the power that still in there.
Solar cells aren't good two. The heat that is being generated from one panel is imens. So we do not support the clima. If you use 80 panels that have 60 Celsius and the ground has 40 Celsius together with the airflow you will generate up to 50kw of heat at 10ms you can finde a calculator for that online.
Windgenerators aren't good as well. They stop the natural flow of air because they are to hi above the trees that normally wud stop the flow.
And again the co2 that is produced to build that alternative electricity source were no buddy thinks of correct. It's not only manufactured. It's installed and stored.
Thank you, a more efficient pathway for nuclear waste storage. You have answered your issue on my lasted comment. I still think a dry nonseismic location would be the best. We just now know how to do it even safer. Hopefully we reuse that waste in some manner like we reuse recyclables.
Thank you.
-JDB
I think we need to relentlessly pursue all avenues of energy with a heavy focus on all energy derived from atomic reactions while also relentlessly pursuing ways to make it cleaner, more efficient and reliable. The goal is ultimately to find a way to give everybody access to as much energy as they could ever need.
How radioactive is the nuclear waste after the vitrification process? Is it as lethal as it was before?
This helped me so much for a science project, thank you!
Both, needs more recources, but wind and solar needs mouch more. Acually storage technology needs the most investments, like batteries, hydro-pump stations using underground caves and the like, also kinetic storage systems using renewables to push trains up hills, and letting them regenerate the power back on their way down. These are all wery effective solutions for storage already, but they could be imporoved a lot still.
The spent fuel rods are not liquid waste. They are also not buried in a mountain. The spent fuel rods (in the US anyway) are stored on site at the power plants that used them.
Recycling! Molten salt reactors! Integral fast reactors!