It's kind of crazy, when you crunch the numbers coal puts it more radioactive waste per kwh than nuclear by a very large margin. We're talking orders of magnitude more, and that's not even touching all the other forms of harmful waste coal produces.
@@siege2928 Could you care to elaborate? The main issue with radioactivity produced by coal other than just pure quantity is that it is released into the atmosphere and inhaled. The last time anything like that happened with nuclear, it was a massive deal.
@@siege2928 Radioactive waste in coal are from condensed stable hevy metal isotopes that are here with us from the begining of the earth, they have much longer half life than any waste from nuclear plant.
@MatthewSmith-pv6gd cool story, however when nuclear plants have "uh-ohs" which absolutely happens it can wipe the face of the earth for a solid hundred miles. Given ita not often, but there isn't a coal plant on the earth could COULD do that even if you tried
Thor's not 100% right here.... Yes 90% is recyclable but you've depleted the fuel rod down to about 0.7%-1%. So, you wouldn't get 90 new fuel rods back. You'd need to add more uranium to meet enrichment requirements. Edit: adding below my reply on the maths breakdown. MOX fuel requires approximately 9% plutonium . Spent nuclear fuel only contains approximately 1% plutonium. So, if you we take 100 rods and "recycle" them with purex we'd be able to make 11 mox rods and ~33 new uranium rods (spent nuclear fuel still has an enrichment of ~1%) . This is assuming the standard enrichment levels required of 3% for pwr fuel (most common reactor type being built atm). In summary, even if you're "recycling" as much as you can you're only reaching ~44% "recycling" rate for new fuel. Not the 90% Thor stated, hence my comment.
@@ДмитроПрищепа-д3я MOX fuel requires approximately 9% plutonium . Spent nuclear fuel only contains approximately 1% plutonium. So, if you we take 100 rods and "recycle" them with purex we'd be able to make 11 mox rods and ~33 new uranium rods. This is assuming the standard enrichment levels required of 3% for pwr fuel (most common reactor type being built atm). In summary, even if you're "recycling" as much as you can you're only reaching ~44% "recycling" rate for new fuel. Not the 90% Thor stated, hence my comment. I'm unsure where you got the 1% efficiency comment from.
@@VespiansGraceAlso, mining radioactive materials is way cheaper than recycling spent rods. That's why we don't see as many recycling facilities for them.
I'm glad you brought up how radioactive coal ash is, which is significantly less regulated than SNF. Plus, that's not counting all of the cardiopulmonary diseases it can cause.
@@princeofrain1428 ah that makes sense, you’re definitely right then. Pretty sure I’ve heard before that living next to a coal plant exposes you to several times more radiation than living next to a nuclear plant, shit is barbaric
I'm a big sustainability guy and nuclear gets a bad reputation. A lot of misunderstanding and fear, but understandably so given the global disasters we have witnessed. I wish we had a good public comms team for nuclear
If people bring up Hiroshima/Nagasaki: they got bombed, causing them to fail. If they bring up Chernobyl: they let an inexperienced crew continue tests, while also ignoring just about every single safety measure
@@This_0ne_Personnot to mention Chernobyl was built using stolen american plans that were improperly translated by the soviets. And Fukushima is already down to normal background radiation levels. There was very very little radiation leakage
The real problem with coal is mercury. Did you know that prior to the industrial revolution you could eat fish every day and not get mercury poisoning? Yeah. As awesome as coal has been, it's the reason you have to watch how much fish you eat.
The real problem with this argument is that coal isn't the only alternative to nuclear power. On top of that, almost all the alternatives are faster to build out, compared to nuclear. And it's not just a question of political will, it's a matter of the humongous size and cost of the infrastructure. You can't just train up tens of thousands of nuclear engineers in a few years (civilian at least), and the construction of nuclear projects almost always takes close to a decade, it's always finished late, and always more expensive than projected. And you can't start building all the nuclear power we'll need right now (or at any single point in the future), also because of practical constraints on manpower, capital investment and infrastructure.
@@Andreas-gh6isAll forms of energy generation have drawbacks, and most of the problems you proposed can be attributed to other types. Other alternatives require vast amounts of land, are heavily reliant on weather conditions, and require extensive energy storage. Hydro and thermal power are exceptions to this, but those can only be built at a select few locations.
@@Lero_Po erm, nope, none of those alternatives have the disadvantage of just not being available fast enough. Renewables can stop climate change, nuclear can't because of its sluggishness. It would be much too late even in the most optimistic nuclear lobby projections. So I'll take the disadvantages you completely overstate any day over the basic impossibility of preventing climate change because of time.
If I'm not mistaken most pollution/contamination from nuclear power and recycling of spent fuel rods is created by secondary contamination, meaning containers, ppe and other stuff that picks up small radioactive particles. And that is literally orders of magnitude smaller level or pollution than an average coal plant. Nuclear energy gets a bad rep because of Chornobyl accident mainly.
and chernobyl was kept up very poorly, on top of that nuclear technology has improved 10 fold. it is cleaner , safer , more efficient, but if we really wanna get specific, almost all forms of power generation even through coal and nuclear is based on steam power.
Fukushima, Chernobyl, even Hiroshima and Nagasaki COMBINED are several orders of magnitude less death and destruction than the consequences of oil spills, refinery disasters, coal plant disasters, etc. It's really insane how much of a double standard there is.
Chernobyl and three mile island. Fun fact: when looked into, every nuclear disaster countries have had was because of user error. On three mile island, the workers got so complacent they stopped doing their rounds and figured since the security system didn't say there was a problem, there clearly wasn't one. Fukishima disaster they were cutting massive corners, to the point that they were literally duct-taping over cracks in the nuclear reactor when they found radiation leaking out of it... The story of Chernobyl involves people too impatient to handle the system correctly, and then panicking after their impatience led to complications. The radioactive man was working in a facility which were breaking rules that existed even at the time telling them not to do the very thing they were doing. I'm sure there's more incidents, but these are the ones off the top of my head. I wouldn't even say it's the incompetence of the very people who were interacting with it, such as with the radioactive man, his boss was the incompetent one telling them what to do.
Also lobbying from the coal industry. Nuclear energy would be a massive boon for all of humanity, but then businessmen wouldn’t be able to profit off it, so they go as hard as they can against it. They’re most successful in Germany
@@btf_flotsam478 That's Fusion. Thorium capable reactors are already a thing and have been for over 40 years now. They're just not worth the cost. Purpose built reactors that won't cost more to run than they produce should be coming online in the next couple years with multiple slated for completion in 2025-2030.
You can actually go there now it’s not dangerous. The only reason you can’t is well there’s a war happening. Ironically Fukushima is more dangerous to visit than Chernobyl and they have active tourism.
Yep. So frustrating. If the only two factoids that come to someone's mind when they think of nuclear are "Chernobyl" and "Fukushima", they shouldn't be allowed to speak about it. Oh noooo, Fukushima, the second worst nuclear disaster in history, which has caused over the past 13.5 years.... *Checks notes*... ZERO deaths. Yeah. Don't build in a tsunami zone and don't let Soviets run an ancient reactor design. Profit.
@@tubalord3693You can't there is a 20 mile exclusion zone that humans are forbidden to enter. You can get close but you can't actually enter unless you have an official Russian military guide take you through and even then its heavily restricted
Well it's a little more involved than that. The rocks boil water, and then a heat exchanger heats and boils another water pipe to make steam. The water with a bit of radiation is stored until it's back down to a safe level and released back into the wild.
I had no idea that fuel rods could actually be recycled - _that's awesome!_ Also had no clue coal ash was radioactive. I wonder how many bananas worth of radiation a gram of coal ash is...
Not so fun fact! Coal puts more radioactive isotopes in the environment by volume every year than all of the nuclear waste ever created by nuclear energy, including accidents.
Also if we switched to using thorium a lot of the waste would be reduced. Most of the waste of uranium reactors is from the enrichment process to get more of a certain isotope. The isotope that isn’t used is what is classified as depleted uranium, and that’s what a lot of the waste is. Thorium doesn’t need to be enriched, is found in much higher concentrations, is safer to mine (uranium releases fumes and thorium doesn’t), and produces over 100 times the power uranium does. And also, it only reacts in the presence of plutonium so you can easily make a failsafe system where if it overheats it’ll melt a lid and drain the thorium away from the plutonium. The only concern with nuclear reactors is that we really need to invest in the batteries to store the energy. If we produce too much power we won’t be able to store it, which is an issue with solar power in some areas because they’re getting too much solar energy. Switching to thorium which produces so much more energy could be a concern if we don’t take the precautions to store that kind of output.
@@submandarine6874 I mean if it’s being researched though that’s good. But if we’re gonna have a nuclear reactor it would be best to go for a safer option. Which really, the energy is the most risky part here. Thorium produces so much more than uranium that we’d need a lot of big batteries.
@@submandarine6874 yes but also the same problems do occur with wind and solar as well. The batteries will always be the most needed component. In Germany they had a problem where there was so much electricity generated from solar that they were running out of space to store it (which is dangerous because batteries can overflow and blow up)
@@22gunslinger21 but that is a grid problem which is actually not that bad with solar because you can dezentralisie it more. So why go for nuclear if there is no benefit and higher risk, greater cost and - in the end - also a dependance on a limited resource forcing you to switch again in the future anyways
even if you include Chernobyl and Fukushima and the few other incidents over the years, the human (and economic) cost isn't in the same world as the cost of pollution from fossile fuels and global warming. I'd wager more people die from pollution from fossile fuels in a month than have ever died from nuclear
yep, an estimate of deaths resulting from every single nuclear accident adds up to ~11,650. deaths from air pollution add up to around 6 to 9 million every year
The last big nuclear plant disaster in America was in 1979. Three-Mile Island near Harrisburg Pennsylvania partially melted down, forcing nearby citizens to evacuate, and even President Carter had to personally fly there and coordinate the cleanup (he used to work on nuclear power before the Presidency). Despite that, nobody was killed during or after the accident. One of the most LETHAL nuke plant accidemt in America is SL-1, a micro-nuke plant in early 1960s as a military experiment for cheaper alternatives to power forward operating bases abroad. It ended with all 3 personnel manning it dead, one of the poor men even being impaled by a control rod and stuck in the ceiling. In 67 years of nuclear power in America (first plant became operational in December 1957), the number of deaths from such incidents and accidents reaches a dozen. If you want to save lives, nuclear power is certainly the best way to do it.
@@zavienb1831 he got pinned to the roof like it was a thumb tack and a corkboard, pretty wild kyle hill has a really good video on the incident, if you want to learn more about it
The US Navy has been putting nuclear reactors on warships for 70 years. There's never been a single incident of unintentional radiation release. This includes Submarines. Things that move a lot. And sometimes run into things. Also, these reactors are mainly run by kids in their 20s with about a year's worth of training. No accidents. In 70 years.
buuuuut anywhere a nuclear accident took place, each time, at least several hundred square kilometers became inhospitable, inhabitable and dangerous for between 200 years TO 10k YEARS !! The number of deaths is irrelevant. Damage to our ecosystem, and the fact that all the catastrophies we had yet were NOT ultimate, is a very big subject of concern (and not counting military vulnerability, check what happened in Ukraine). Fission nuclear power will NEVER be safe. It can be used as a temporary measure, but not more.
nuclear power is not that cheap - building a new nuclear power plant costs around 21 to 33 billion euros. a comparable hydrogen powered gas reactor is only about 1-2 billion euros. the power price in france is just comparable cause the government is pouring in LOADS of money every year so the french people dont have to pay moon prices for their power
Thank you! I was lookin for that comment. Mostly agree with Thor especiialy if you compare it to Coal. But we dont just have a choice between coal and nuclear.. And Nuclear, even if you recycle, still has problems. Like storing waste or the pure cost of it all. Clean Energy will always stay the better solution. It's cheaper and has less waste. And an exploding wind plant wont kill thousand of people and make a small country inhabitably for centuries.
@@haeltacforce its just not well known in most parts of the world, if even thor doesnt talk/know about this it has to be really hidden. this is the first time i not 100% agree with smth thor has said. so i had to write smth about it here ^^
@TheAdmiralMoses That's depleted uranium, which is not the same as spent fuel. Depleted uranium is actually a byproduct of the original fuel-making process for reactors, and it's used in munitions due to its density, self-sharpening properties, and very low relative radioactivity (hence the "depleted" part of the name).
Well the US has a lot of uranium while France is trying not to import as much from the African countries that they're losing grip of, it's simply a matter of supply, the US might get there someday though.
@@TheAdmiralMoses Wrong. Our main uranium suppliers are Canada and Kazakhstan. The only African country we bought uranium from was Burkina Faso and it was only 5% of our supply.
@@AlshainFR More came from Niger than Canada, but it indeed seems I was wrong for the most part I will concede. I just learned about FranceAfrik recently and it was fresh in my mind.
Also another crazy thing is US made rods for soviet type reactors. Russian rods get recycled, but the US ones have to be stored in concrete for the time being, usually near the station. I really wonder now, why US rods don't get recycled. Like really why?
As a former Nuke, I feel the same. The US doesn't really need to re-use fuel, we have enormous stock piles from the Cold War. Also, spent fuel isn't typically discarded as waste. It is used in various means or stored(typically) until it is profitable to process it back into fuel (Only 700 million years until half of it goes bad, long shelf life). Though as with oil, we would rather use other countries' resources before ours, so the US buys mostly from Canada, Russia, or EU in one way or another. Shame Germany pulled out of nuclear energy, and I hope they change their mind. 😢
Feel like the main reason people think nuclear is more dangerous than coal is just because if nuclear goes bad, the bad happens all at once, while coal takes time despite being worse The Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukes are one of, if not the most well known part of WW2 and it's always criticized as one of the worst things people have done, despite the fact that when the total amount of innocents who died when the nukes dropped was less than a fifth of the innocents who died in the carpet bombing of Tokyo, and that happened in one night
It's a black swan thing. We are terrible at calculating teeny tiny probabilities of m*f*ing huge consequences. That already makes the risk from nuclear power impossible to calculate. But it's actually worse: The Black swan effect, also called fat tail distributions, doesn't even account for adversarial risk. Which means in order to even calculate any risk, you need to completely ignore that somebody may intentionally blow up that reactor or do anything with the fuel or waste or whatever. And it sounds far fetched, but nuclear reactors have a lifetime of around a century. And Ukraine is having this issue right now big time.
@@Andreas-gh6is while yeah, a black swan is an issue for anything The fact you can make a super dangerous virus in your garage for only the price of a new car makes me think that human intervention is something we should ignore if there's a chance to have a big boost for humanity's progress There's always going to be someone who just wants to ruin things just because they can, but overall I'd say it's worth the risk since it's better to try rather than do nothing at all "You miss all the shots you don't take" is a popular quote for a reason
@@Andreas-gh6is Honestly modern plants aren't even physically able to have meltdowns in the same way, the safety procedures to preevent it is incredibly advanced.
not just valuable. Its the only reason why people think it might actually have a future... People barely think about what happens in 10 minutes. This shit can be unsafe to interact with for thousands of years it will be in someones backyard at some point if the humans dont Blow themselves up before it.
@@johnard8831 But only three times per rod. That doesn't factor in the cost of demolition of the npp after its service life and the long term deposit. To add to the problems the two biggest suppliers are canada and russia.
@@RSFrROASUranium waste can be turned into plutonium fuel rods (which can be sunk). Plutonium waste can be turned into Ficsonium fuel rods (in tier 9) which produce no waste. Ficsonium is very late game, but plutonium is a pretty good intermediate step given its burn time.
And then what? Even if they did hear it, they'd say its propaganda or something to that effect. The average population on this planet is way to stupid to have a good life.
@@amiralirashedi8614 Though I still think, we should work on wind and solar first, because one its cheaper, two its easier to sustain and three can be build relatively locally, compared to rare radioactive elements.
@gonoroad2160 nuclear is cheaper than wind and solar. Both wind and solar are heavily reliant on location. Both are easily damaged and Both can't produce energy without an external force, wind or sun so Both require energy storage the cheapest being pumped hydro.
there's a US version of this powerplant design that was created for testing in 1980's that is 100% incapable of meltdown in the event of loss of all power and recycles 99% of the waste in an on site seed reactor. (while permanently storing the last 1%) It was called the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) and it was ended by politics in 1994 when Nuclear reactors became unpopular. A mere 3 years before the testing would have been completed at the Experimental Breeder Reactor II site in Illinois.
It wasn't politics that stopped it. It's because it turned out to be ridiculously expensive and was very likely to fail. We've had various types of breeders since the early 50'ies. We've spent billions on them. The military was very interested in putting them in subs and carries. So it's not like we haven't tried. What we've never had is a stable breeder. We've built at least 24 major experimental breeders. Four are operating today. None has been stable. It's just old tech on new bottles. Stil doesn't work though...
@@ridernameddeath6486 Erm what? The project was closed down by Bill Clinton ... for political reasons. It's all clearly documented if you care to look it up.
California is doing Nuclear and we get crazy earthquakes all the time as well. Earthquake resistant building technology is a lot better than it used to be.
@@maksymisaiev1828solar panels are one thing I wouldn’t worry about in an earthquake, they are pretty low to the ground and not that heavy compared to buildings. Hell, even if they fall off their stands the actual solar panel will probably be fine, and you can just put it back up there. I’d certainly rather be near a field full of solar panels during an earthquake than a nuclear plant, a coal/oil plant, or god forbid a gas plant that might start leaking explodable gas.
@@maksymisaiev1828You can. The difference being if a large earthquake hits a solar grid it isn't going to explode and irradiate the outer area. Nuclear energy is incredibly safe but if hit with any form of natural disaster the consequences could be dire. It just isn't suitable in NZ due to this.
France state energy company is 50 billion in dept because they keep the energy price for the citizens low and they run into the problem that almost all of there reactors need to be renewed in the next year's, costing them when more billions. Nuclear should help us get rid of Fossile fuel, but after that it should also be good by nuclear power
Per kwh coal puts out about 100x radioactive waste compared to nuclear. It's mostly in the form of radioactive sulfur, uranium and thorium. There is no such thing as clean coal.
Yeah, coal has trace amounts of radioactive materials in it. When all the carbon in the coal is burned, the radioactive materials are consolidated more and so coal ash is radio active. The ambient level of radioactivity around a coal power plant is higher than a nuclear one oddly enough.
@@legomacinnisinc It's not odd, makes sense. They don't take it into consideration because they don't have to and it would make construction more expensive
France has trouble to cool the plants in hot summers (I think 2023 summer was one of those) which would have fcked the euro Powergrid in parts if neighbor countey didnt kick in gas power plant (with suck ass in almost everyway) I didnt know the recycling part which sounds good, but there is still the problem of how to store the nuclear waste that is produce Also most countries still need to push wind, solar and water power because building new nuclear plants takes to long to get carbon neutral fast enough But interesting food for thought
Solar panels take mercury and other toxic materials to produce, and are lacking for clean disposal and recycling. Wind turbines ruin the value of the real estate around them and take significant mechanical maintenance... but water power? Yeah, water power's great; you can't go wrong with separating oxygen from hydrogen. Those two elements are supremely useful. Even if you only kept the hydrogen and released oxygen into the atmosphere, that oxygen will just bond with carbon emissions for the plants to breathe in.
@@klownservative3934 To my knowleage, nuclearbwaste has to be stored for hundreds of years until it isnt radioactiv anymore That sound really expensive and more importantly really dangeroures
Oh, governments would love to just recycle their spent fuel. That would solve one big problem of this technology. But it's too expensive and impractical. It's been around for fifty years, it will take decades to develop and scale it up, even if it were practically viable which it probably isn't.
@@Kai_-ys9jj right now, most spent fuel is stored next to the plants. Which is quite secure... But that assumes nothing is going wrong and nobody intentionally makes things go wrong. So you need to safeguard the waste, for example from people trying to steal it for building dirty bombs. Or by driving a huge truck with a fertilizer bomb onto the premises. That won't happen - as long as there is an appropriately sized security force to guard it. But you need to guard that fuel forever, or until you move it someplace else, so you better pick a location that is geographically stable, politically stable and won't be held hostage by an enemy (see Ukraine...) and all that for the next century or so.
Oil, coal, and natural gas companies have spent quite literally billions of dollars in open campaigns against nuclear. People bring up the very few nuclear meltdowns the have happened, but with the different nuclear fuel sources we have, and the literal decades of safety standards raising, the chances of accidents are very slim. Even then, oil, coal, and gas kill more workers on average per year than nuclear energy has
It's the fact that the rods are so "hot" that it takes 5 years to do anything with them. 5 years is a long time to wait nobody wants to do that. Also, it's the other waste that's a pain. Tools, cloths, and other random junk is the majority of waste. Nobody wants to recycle/reuse that stuff.
The difference is that tools, clothes and other random junk is almost always low level waste, which stops being radioactive much quicker than than waste fuel. As for waiting 5 years, it's really not a big deal considering the low number of nuclear rods you actually have to deal with.
Yes, but the common metric that's used is that ALL of the nuclear waste generated since the 1950s can fit in a single football field at a depth of 10 feet. Storage for 5 years from any reactor to cool down would be like a shelf on a warehouse, a single facility could easily handle the entire country. And the clothes and such are low level waste. They are only hot for 30 years or so before they can be tossed or recylced.
@@jeffcastor9509 That argument is idiotic on so many counts. For one thing, nuclear waste is actually no kidding dangerous to transport around, which makes it very expensive to move around with all the shielding and precautions. So even if you could store it all on a football field, you can't bring it all to one location. And you can't move it elsewhere quickly, when, not if, anything goes wrong in the next few centuries with that location. That's why long term storage is such a big deal. You don't want it getting into the ground water. You don't want a natural disaster blowing it away. You don't want a terrorist driving a truck with fertilizer onto the football field. You don't want anybody to sneak in, get some material and build a dirty bomb. So even this small volume of waste is already unmanageable right now.
@@Andreas-gh6is Now wait a minute that is just wrong the dry cask storage is nearly indestructible and it won't open that easily it can be hit by a train and shrug it off without any damage to that cask not to mention you can move it quite easily and it won't get destroyed by the crash.
@@benediktaspovilaitis1660 Nope, that's an illusion. Ok, maybe it can't be destroyed by a train crash, at least at the extremely slow speed the caskets are transported at, but that's not all the waste that is stored that way and a train crash it's not the same as a massive explosion, or a large plane full of fuel crashing into it. Or some determined terrorists coming into the place and just opening those caskets before blowing them up. At least in Germany, most of the waste is stored above ground, and it's already leaking. The containers have a safe lifetime of about fourty years, and many are past that. It also means you have to continuously move the waste once the caskets are too old. Also, those caskets are now radioactive waste themselves. And if anything goes wrong near that site, you'd have to move all that stuff somewhere else, which you can't because it's expensive and difficult to move... We already can't properly deal with the waste we have - as little in volume as it may seem - it would be reckless to produce more of that.
The U.S. doesn’t recycle nuclear waste because we have such a large supply of Uranium so for the time being it is more affordable to just refine new fuel versus recycle old fuel. The main issue with that logic is because no one is mandating the long term cost of storage and maintenance of that waste. The French do insist that this cost is takin into account and thus they have a massive fuel recycling industry. I hope that the push by cloud hosting providers for energy companies to provide them long term carbon neutral power will lower the barriers for the power industry to get back into building out infrastructure again. That’s kind of the idea with the Microsoft deal, that they will pay for the total cost to upgrade and get the TMI reactor re-certified and then constellation gets to use the extra power for themselves and re-invest those costs into building a future larger nuclear plant at a different location. If a few more deals like that happen the United States may climbing once again from the near bottom of the nuclear expertise list.
There is some reprocessing facilities starting in the USA now, alongside the new fuel enrichment plants; all because the gov finally decided America should become fuel supply chain independant and banned all new fuel imports (starts this year), so once the old contracts are done deliveries, America only has its stockpile to buffer the transition so I assume NPP operators stocked up to give them plenty of breathing room.
@@Estigy Much of it is just stored on-site at nuclear power plants. It's safe and secure, as they are kept in reinforced dry casks. We were never able to find a place to bury our several football fields worth of nuclear waste as a country. Another benefit of recycling it is it greatly cuts down how long the waste is dangerous for from thousands to only a few hundred years.
Before people started to complain about how Japan started dumping nuclear waste into the ocean and causing issues with our fish and other seafood supply chains. Do you know why the US kept practically quiet about the whole ordeal while other countries are going batshit crazy? That is because the US ignited so many nuclear warheads into the ocean, many for testing... And those fish have been eaten for generations. Do we have any issues?
There are sea turtles over in bikini atoll (which is a thriving ecosystem) which have radioactive material in their shells from the dozen or so nukes that were dropped there.
If you're referring to the contaminated water they've been releasing for the past four or five years, the fish are fine. The only reason it has caused issues with seafood supply chains, is because of unfounded fears. The water is radioactive, but not dangerously so. All the radioactive contaminants that can be removed have been, and the remaining tritium has been diluted to the point of radiological insignificance. So to call it nuclear waste is at best misleading.
I love your content, but this is the first time I‘m gonna have to disagree with you. Recycling is nice, but there are still tons of nuclear waste, that will be harmful for thousands of generations. No one really wants to be responsible for it and bury it in the ground. Also, nuclear energy is super expensive. Electricity in France is only cheap, because it‘s heavily subsidized. Maybe being profitable reffered to the recycling process, but nuclear energy is not. Renewable energy sources are much more profitable in the long run and don‘t produce harmful waste for millions of years❤
Agree with you on the price. Nuclear has THE highest upfront price. As for the waste, at least with nuclear being highly regulated as it is, the nuclear waste will most likely be confined to a small area. Unlike coal, where the NORM (Naturally-occurring radioactive material) is dispersed throughout the area surrounding a coal plant from the fly ash, to the point that the radioactivity level is higher than what is allowed from a nuclear plant.
@@noctis_rune you‘re absolutely right. Coal is not an alternative to nuclear power. I also think, the concept of keeping the waste to a small area underground is probably the best solution we have. But in Germany, where I‘m from, no one wants to bury that stuff in the ground…
@@randomcanadaguy32 I don’t think that’s the case in fact I looked it up(Wikipedia “Levelized cost of electricity”). Maybe 20 years ago solar power was expensive but right now nuclear power is in fact the most expensive power source. In addition to that if you would want to build a nuclear power plant, it would be impossible to get insurance, since no company on earth could pay the damages if something would happen. And nuclear power plants are also very expensive to build and since nobody wants a nuclear power generator in their backyard, it is also very hard to find investors or even a place to build it. Furthermore leads the mining of uranium to immense environmental damage and health problems for the workers. At the end, I would say that nuclear power plants are just very impractical
The radiation does of living within a 1 mile radius of a modern Nuclear Fission reactor is less than the average radiation does you'd receive from sleeping 8 hours a night, in the same bed as another human. Nuclear power is really effective, really recyclable, really safe, really reliable, really expensive to set up but really cheap per kwh. We've been scared by the three major nuclear accidents of the last 45 years, however the total death toll of those accidents is only in the order of hundreds in the history of nuclear power. Meanwhile, oil and gas EXTRACTION numbers at about 100 per year. Then you add in the poluting effects and it become smuch more nasty. It is worth noting that some environmental groups suggest figures of close to 1 million dead from nuclear events, however much of the research that is done for this is questionable and is funded by the petrochemical industry making it not so trust worthy to say the least.
Kinda, I mean, it's better than coal waste simply because every shred of nuclear waste is contained and tracked throughout its lifetime, meanwhile coal is storing its waste safely in our atmosphere and lungs, so...
Because there's no incentive. Other than France, all other Western countries are insanely decommissioning their nuclear power, so there's nothing to recycle fuel for.
Isn’t the downside of recycled nuclear rods that it produces weapons grade material as a byproduct? The Savannah river site does this and it’s owned by the Government, the only site in the country with that type of reactor
Lol, no. RepU (the industry standard term for reprocessed uranium) usually has a purity around 0.5-1% depending on the method, while most first stage reactors need 3-5%. Some experimental ones use up to 20% enriched, but even this is a far cry from the 90+% that is considered officially weapons grade.
The biggest difference between fuel rods and weapons grade are the reaction poisons put into the rods (that allow for more fuel to be put in the rod without causing issues). The base "fuel" is the same in both. So no, breeder reactors recycling fuel rod materials do not have any more dangerous a by-product than the original fuel rod had the first time round.
@@TheAdmiralMoses Ok ... What is the difference between "weapons grade" and "reactor grade"? Because atomically they are the same thing ... Uranium and Plutonium in a breeder reactor are there to go from naturally occurring to fissile material. The exact same fissile material that makes weapons. It's just a matter of purity (IE poisons) like I said It isnt a BYPRODUCT its the entire point of the breeding.
Wait until you learn about all the problems in thefrench nuclear sector : welding problems on the old reactors primary and secondary circuits, high hactivity nuclear waste storage which is inexistent, enormous delay of 20 years and additional cost (30 billon euros) for the flamenville EPR .
Modern nuclear isn't nearly as explosive since we've switched to thorium instead of uranium. The biggest concern in nuclear plants is the plutonium needed to start the reaction. Of course older plants haven't switch yet, but that kind of stuff takes time.
@@Dumland I don't think we have "switched" to thorium yet. On wikipedia there seems to be a good handful of experimental ractors in different phases of planning/building/testing, but we aren't quite there yet.
Only problem is it's never going to be remotely reliable enough to viably provide a majority of power until we start working on a Dyson swarm. That and they're everything but environmentally friendly to build.
The biggest problem with solar is initial cost and maintaining it. Solar panels are very expensive and need proper anchors because they need to withstand harsh weather, so we can't just put them anywhere unfortunately. And for solar to be effective they need to be cleaned regularly which on a large scale is harder to maintain. I think that small scale solar is great and definitely viable like on your house or a small scale solar farm. But on a large scale solar isn't a great solution because of the cost.
and I've heard this argument over 10 years ago... wish we had built them back then... I will also hear this argument in 10 years from now... But hey, let's keep fighting it so we can get a few solar panels out and wind turbines and offset what they can't do with oil, natural gas, and coal.
Fossil power kills 100s of thousands of people every year according to WHO estimations, because of lung issues caused by fine dust emissions of the plants. Nuclear power has EVER only killed a handful of people. Fukushima has literally not caused a single casuality, because it was so well-contained and cleaned. Of course there is still a lot of research to be done and infrastructure required, but from a pure cleanliness point-of-view, nuclear power is amazing and very safe. It's pretty much the same fallacy as people being afraid to fly a plane, but ride their car for hours each day. Humans just suck at understanding risks.
It's called distorting the issue. Coal power is not the only alternative to nuclear power, it's not the only fossil fuel, and nuclear power is no alternative to replace fossil fuels. It just doesn't work. The infrastructure is humongously expensive and sluggish. There's a reason why most countries didn't invest in that technology for the past few decades, and it's not just the little political problems of citizens wondering about a few too many impossible accidents happening. Nuclear projects are always finished late and way over budget. And even if we started building all the nuclear plants we need to go carbon neutral RIGHT NOW, it would be too late. But you can't start all of them immediately, or at any single date, because those projects are humongously expensive, difficult to plan and require specialized manpower and infrastructure. Nuclear has no future with the current technology, and the next generation of technology is decades away from commercial scaling.
So you send 100 rods, get 90 back, then send those 90 spent ones back, get 81 back, then send back those when spent, get 72/73 back...and it goes on and on. That's incredibly efficient.
And it's pointless. Nuclear fanboys act like coal is the only alternative to nuclear power, or the other way around, whatever is convenient to their arguments. But that's not the case. In fact, nuclear is no alternative at all to go carbon neutral. Right now, the global nuclear industry can't even keep pace with maintaining the generation power, much less extend that. It will take a decade to even START building enough new reactors, and then a decade to finish them. By that time, renewables will be a lot cheaper (nuclear tech is frozen from the time of planning onward), and it will have replaced almost all of the fossil fuel.
I would like to point out though, that one of the reasons this is so profitable for France is because they’ve been cutting shit deals for Nigeria for years getting uranium from them and making bank while so many Nigerians live in poverty. I still like nuclear energy too, but we shouldn’t screw over poor people to get our stuff.
And yes, corrupt leadership in Nigeria is also largely to blame, hence why there was a coup, but France has tried to crack down hard on that from what I’ve heard.
So, nuclear power is actually not all that profitable for France. They have, at this point, incredibly outdated nuclear reactors and the only reason why nuclear power is affordable in France is because it is MASSIVELY subsidized by the government. Additionally, just in general, building these plants is both much more expensive and takes a lot more time than compareable renewable energy sources.
@@TheReal_Antrey Germany actually has a ton of taxes on electricity. So I wouldn't say all over Europe. It is true that France does it the other way around. They pump a ton of tax money into their nuclear power plants to keep electricity cheap.
In South Australia we have alot of renewable power and dont need nuclear power. I do like the thought of using nuclear though if we didnt have the renewables in place.
My main concern with nuclear is what inevitably happens if it gets over-used. If the company making reactors ever decides “Hey we’re low on budget. Let’s cut costs” then we have crappy disasters-waiting-to-happen as reactors. As long as their use is regulated, carefully maintained, and monitored; they remain a very safe power source.
and thats why you dont let soviets or capitalists build nuclear power plants. the soviets build it badly because theyve been at war their entire existance and have a maniacal leader who doesnt care. the capitalist will build it badly because the only way theyre gonna want to build it is cheaply and with as little overhead as possible, especially when competing with other capitalists who are gonna do the same thing.
Also, haven't we changed the kind of uranium we're using in nuclear power to something far far less volatile than the fuel sources for Chernobyl and Fukushima?
it doesn't even matter, the entire world ceasing nuclear power options is like if we all stopped using fire because some monkey burned their house down.
If your country can have modest to good solar output, then you should go for solar farm + energy storage like pumped hydro. Nuclear is.. well, it is risky. And to maintain all the risk the cost of a new nuclear power plant has gone way up. Invest in a solar farm and it can return your capital investment back in a decade. Nuclear power plant does not have that much ROI. Hence we are seeing less new nuclear plants each decade. Money dictates everything.
Energy storage infrastructure and technology doesn't exist on a scale large enough to solely rely on storing power from inconsistent renewables nuclear is safe, consistent and efficient
@@Nolifecoffeeaddict they have developed pumped hydro system to store extra energy generated from nuclear power plants. My point is that some form of technology already exists to store energy. We need more ways to store energy. Hey, we see how phones went from landlines to bendable smartphones, I am confident that someone will discover a more efficient way to store energy created from solar.
I feel like if he strung together every one of his clips and made them into an audiobook, you'd fall asleep to it and wake up a genius. This guy is nothing but digestible knowledge and encouragement and I'm grateful this man exists ^.^
In Slovakia is project to 100% recyclation. We think that whole nuclear waste can be once reused completelly. From what I get, what France doing is clear the Uranium from elements into which Uranus decays. Which from what I know is different how much it is according to the reactor and France reactors are old.
Fun fact! Nuclear Power is just boiling water with extra steps! Basically it's just a slow, controlled reaction that gives off a shit ton of heat. That we dunk in a big tank of water and use the steam generated by the heat boiling the water to turn turbines. So when you see a big cloud come out of a nuclear reactor that is JUST the steam
What they also don't tell you is that the problem of disposing of nuclear waste is entirely a function of not having done anything about it, mostly because of nimbyism and ignorance-derived fear. All it takes to shield from neutron radiation is putting enough electrons in the way. Sticking it back in the ground would work really well.
Yeah, it's a good way to say we use 1% of every uranium rod. Problem is, we refuse to use the 99% left because we never built the facilities that let us do it. We had one ready but the ecologist made it close down. I think it has been torn down too.
I’d love to do nuclear too bad our corporate electric companies want to maximize profit and nuclear is not profitable enough. Why do you think think they want to push electric vehicles?
The types of reactors that are able to "recycle" used nuclear fuel are called fast breeder reactors (FBRs). These reactors have been around for a long time, but they are considerably more expensive to build, operate, and maintain than regular nuclear reactors (most use liquid metal as coolant). Also, uranium is relatively cheap to produce, reducing the incentive to switch. However, the biggest concern is their potential for nuclear weapons production. FBRs can extract fuel in the middle of the burn process without cooling or stopping the reactor (which normally takes days). So, one is able to extract plutonium, the material primarily used for nuclear weapons, which is why FBRs haven't proliferated much, despite the technology being available for around 70 years. Fascinating world the nuclear energy one Source: Mechanical engineer with a master's in nuclear energy.
I would argue that nuclear power is *THE* cleanest, *THE* safest and *THE* most sustainable consistent source of energy available. - Wind is not consistent (wind doesn't always blow), further the blades are made of expensive plastics, they aren't sustainable (they wear out and end up in the trash when they are swapped out), require clear-cutting for placement and cause quite a bit of harm to surrounding nature (especially bird populations) - Solar is not consistent (it's not always sunny), further the processes to extract and process the required ores for photovoltaic cells extremely toxic and damaging to the environment...and that's before getting into the issues of the laborers in that process...or dealing with used cells (assuming they can be recycled in the first place). - Hydroelectric isn't available everywhere and excess/wanton damming can cause lots of harm to local water tables and severely impact things downstream. - Geothermal, while clean and consistent, just isn't viable everywhere (nevermind the implied risks of living in or near a geologically active area) The biggest issue with nuclear power is dealing with the materials that can't be recycled, such as the control rods and any contaminated water.
Yeah the only problem is we still don't have a good solution for that to do with the radioactive water used to cool it all. That stuff still gets shipped up into the tundra and put in a bunker.
I think that’s completely false. The nuclear waste last for 40.000 GERNERATIONS!! All because 3 generations thought its a good idea 😂😂😂 Jesus is 81 generations apart from us 40.000 That’s a million years
No what he said is completely true spent fuel rods can be reprocessed to be used again different types of nuclear waste decay at different rate the stats show nuclear is the safest energy source
It might be true. But its the dirtiest energy source. Just because u can’t see the radiation doesn’t mean it’s not there 😂😂 The waste is the problem An u can NOT recycle 90% of the waste. Just 90% of the rods. The byproducts are much more and can’t be recycled
The problem is not if it works and if its better then the alternatives. The problem is that this is a fact. The monopolies that control nearly everything and give the "big guy" 10% do not want us to have cheap abundant energy because that equals prosperity. Its far easier to control people who are crippled in debt.
Nuclear power is better than fossil fuels, but it is a lot more expensive than renewable energy. It should be a priority to give up energy production from fossil fuels, but nuclear energy is not the solution at max it is an intermediate. New electric infrastructure should be built around supporting 100% renewable in the future.
@@amadeusjohanssonyeah ten years until ITER is built but unfortunately that's not large scale energy production it's not even energy production at all really it's a test bed were not even close to fusion being a viable power source unfortunately
Not practical we don't have that much time as exciting as fusion advancements have been realistically were at least 40 years until fusion is commercially viable while 5 million people die a year from fos fuels
Theres a nuclear plant around us, they generate power for northern il and chicago. Im pretty sure i live far enough away that if in the slight chance it were to meltdown i could survive, but on a clear day in a higher building, you can see the clouds and maybe the cooling towers if you have a good zoom on your phone
I didn’t realize coal ash was radioactive, my dad used coal in our wood stove and one day he used too much and the house reached 90 and stove was glowing red lol
You know google exists, right? Like how to use it, too? Something like "nuclear fuel recycling" or something. Idk I bought this book, Googleing For Dummies, and I think I'm getting the hang of it. I'll let you borrow it when I'm done.
Can you elaborate i only speak in Microsoft paint
It might help if you specify what you want elaboration on.
*draws squares*
@@fhdjhshxjdk9653 Instructions uncl-
Wait, no, we have someone drawing squares; instructions crystal clear, 10/10.
@@fhdjhshxjdk9653 Holy %@#^ I get it now!
@@fhdjhshxjdk9653 I UNDERSTAND NOW
It's kind of crazy, when you crunch the numbers coal puts it more radioactive waste per kwh than nuclear by a very large margin. We're talking orders of magnitude more, and that's not even touching all the other forms of harmful waste coal produces.
Issue is the half life though.
@@siege2928 Could you care to elaborate? The main issue with radioactivity produced by coal other than just pure quantity is that it is released into the atmosphere and inhaled.
The last time anything like that happened with nuclear, it was a massive deal.
@@siege2928 Radioactive waste in coal are from condensed stable hevy metal isotopes that are here with us from the begining of the earth, they have much longer half life than any waste from nuclear plant.
@@siege2928 half life? that doesnt mean anything here. Nuclear fuel is very stable, its not a nuclear bomb.
@MatthewSmith-pv6gd cool story, however when nuclear plants have "uh-ohs" which absolutely happens it can wipe the face of the earth for a solid hundred miles. Given ita not often, but there isn't a coal plant on the earth could COULD do that even if you tried
Thor's not 100% right here.... Yes 90% is recyclable but you've depleted the fuel rod down to about 0.7%-1%. So, you wouldn't get 90 new fuel rods back. You'd need to add more uranium to meet enrichment requirements.
Edit: adding below my reply on the maths breakdown.
MOX fuel requires approximately 9% plutonium . Spent nuclear fuel only contains approximately 1% plutonium. So, if you we take 100 rods and "recycle" them with purex we'd be able to make 11 mox rods and ~33 new uranium rods (spent nuclear fuel still has an enrichment of ~1%) . This is assuming the standard enrichment levels required of 3% for pwr fuel (most common reactor type being built atm). In summary, even if you're "recycling" as much as you can you're only reaching ~44% "recycling" rate for new fuel. Not the 90% Thor stated, hence my comment.
they are recycling spent uranium and plutonium rods into MOX fuel and this process has far greater efficiency than 1%.
@@ДмитроПрищепа-д3я MOX fuel requires approximately 9% plutonium . Spent nuclear fuel only contains approximately 1% plutonium. So, if you we take 100 rods and "recycle" them with purex we'd be able to make 11 mox rods and ~33 new uranium rods. This is assuming the standard enrichment levels required of 3% for pwr fuel (most common reactor type being built atm). In summary, even if you're "recycling" as much as you can you're only reaching ~44% "recycling" rate for new fuel. Not the 90% Thor stated, hence my comment. I'm unsure where you got the 1% efficiency comment from.
I can recycle 100% of my water bottle by reusing it. But the water inside is gone after 1 use
@@VespiansGraceAlso, mining radioactive materials is way cheaper than recycling spent rods. That's why we don't see as many recycling facilities for them.
@@ДмитроПрищепа-д3я you can't recycle that infinite amount of times. It's not a sustainable solutions
I'm glad you brought up how radioactive coal ash is, which is significantly less regulated than SNF. Plus, that's not counting all of the cardiopulmonary diseases it can cause.
@@princeofrain1428 what’s snf?
@@kosmickalamity7071 Just googled it, 'Spent Nuclear Fuel' as in the used up fuel rods that Thor is talking about in the video
@@kosmickalamity7071 Spent Nuclear Fuel
@@kosmickalamity7071 spent nuclear fuel
@@princeofrain1428 ah that makes sense, you’re definitely right then. Pretty sure I’ve heard before that living next to a coal plant exposes you to several times more radiation than living next to a nuclear plant, shit is barbaric
I'm a big sustainability guy and nuclear gets a bad reputation. A lot of misunderstanding and fear, but understandably so given the global disasters we have witnessed.
I wish we had a good public comms team for nuclear
If people bring up Hiroshima/Nagasaki: they got bombed, causing them to fail. If they bring up Chernobyl: they let an inexperienced crew continue tests, while also ignoring just about every single safety measure
Soviet Russia did it so wrong one time, and now the entire industry has a bad rep. It honestly might be their most successful piece of disinformation.
Big oil is backing the "renewables" movement and Nuclear Energy gets a bad rap because of a incidents
@@This_0ne_Personnot to mention Chernobyl was built using stolen american plans that were improperly translated by the soviets.
And Fukushima is already down to normal background radiation levels. There was very very little radiation leakage
@@This_0ne_Person They also put off regular maintenance, and made every wrong decision they could right before and during the meltdown.
The real problem with coal is mercury. Did you know that prior to the industrial revolution you could eat fish every day and not get mercury poisoning? Yeah. As awesome as coal has been, it's the reason you have to watch how much fish you eat.
sulfur
The real problem with this argument is that coal isn't the only alternative to nuclear power. On top of that, almost all the alternatives are faster to build out, compared to nuclear. And it's not just a question of political will, it's a matter of the humongous size and cost of the infrastructure. You can't just train up tens of thousands of nuclear engineers in a few years (civilian at least), and the construction of nuclear projects almost always takes close to a decade, it's always finished late, and always more expensive than projected. And you can't start building all the nuclear power we'll need right now (or at any single point in the future), also because of practical constraints on manpower, capital investment and infrastructure.
@@Andreas-gh6isAll forms of energy generation have drawbacks, and most of the problems you proposed can be attributed to other types. Other alternatives require vast amounts of land, are heavily reliant on weather conditions, and require extensive energy storage. Hydro and thermal power are exceptions to this, but those can only be built at a select few locations.
@@Lero_Po erm, nope, none of those alternatives have the disadvantage of just not being available fast enough. Renewables can stop climate change, nuclear can't because of its sluggishness. It would be much too late even in the most optimistic nuclear lobby projections. So I'll take the disadvantages you completely overstate any day over the basic impossibility of preventing climate change because of time.
and selenium, cadmium, chromium, arsenic, ruthenium, radium, uranium, and probably more.
If I'm not mistaken most pollution/contamination from nuclear power and recycling of spent fuel rods is created by secondary contamination, meaning containers, ppe and other stuff that picks up small radioactive particles. And that is literally orders of magnitude smaller level or pollution than an average coal plant. Nuclear energy gets a bad rep because of Chornobyl accident mainly.
and chernobyl was kept up very poorly, on top of that nuclear technology has improved 10 fold. it is cleaner , safer , more efficient, but if we really wanna get specific, almost all forms of power generation even through coal and nuclear is based on steam power.
Fukushima, Chernobyl, even Hiroshima and Nagasaki COMBINED are several orders of magnitude less death and destruction than the consequences of oil spills, refinery disasters, coal plant disasters, etc. It's really insane how much of a double standard there is.
Chernobyl and three mile island.
Fun fact: when looked into, every nuclear disaster countries have had was because of user error. On three mile island, the workers got so complacent they stopped doing their rounds and figured since the security system didn't say there was a problem, there clearly wasn't one.
Fukishima disaster they were cutting massive corners, to the point that they were literally duct-taping over cracks in the nuclear reactor when they found radiation leaking out of it...
The story of Chernobyl involves people too impatient to handle the system correctly, and then panicking after their impatience led to complications.
The radioactive man was working in a facility which were breaking rules that existed even at the time telling them not to do the very thing they were doing.
I'm sure there's more incidents, but these are the ones off the top of my head.
I wouldn't even say it's the incompetence of the very people who were interacting with it, such as with the radioactive man, his boss was the incompetent one telling them what to do.
Also lobbying from the coal industry. Nuclear energy would be a massive boon for all of humanity, but then businessmen wouldn’t be able to profit off it, so they go as hard as they can against it. They’re most successful in Germany
@@antirevomag834 Not surprised, although i will say thank you for sharing, Quite interesting
Need some THORium plants
They've been 20 years away since well before I was born.
@@btf_flotsam478 That's Fusion.
Thorium capable reactors are already a thing and have been for over 40 years now.
They're just not worth the cost.
Purpose built reactors that won't cost more to run than they produce should be coming online in the next couple years with multiple slated for completion in 2025-2030.
@@Infernoblade1010 thorium plants are a pipedream
China’s opening one next year in the gobii desert, they have had a working prototype since 2021
“Thorium, he’s only got one leg. Piss him off he takes a swing at you, just push him over and your good” -Sam o nella
"But But But But But But CheRnOBlE"
You can actually go there now it’s not dangerous. The only reason you can’t is well there’s a war happening. Ironically Fukushima is more dangerous to visit than Chernobyl and they have active tourism.
Yep. So frustrating. If the only two factoids that come to someone's mind when they think of nuclear are "Chernobyl" and "Fukushima", they shouldn't be allowed to speak about it.
Oh noooo, Fukushima, the second worst nuclear disaster in history, which has caused over the past 13.5 years.... *Checks notes*... ZERO deaths.
Yeah. Don't build in a tsunami zone and don't let Soviets run an ancient reactor design. Profit.
@@tubalord3693You can't there is a 20 mile exclusion zone that humans are forbidden to enter.
You can get close but you can't actually enter unless you have an official Russian military guide take you through and even then its heavily restricted
@@defconbois You're right but those are Ukrainian guides, not Russian as Chornobyl is located in Ukraine.
Slavs were too stupid to boil water lmao
That’s it? That’s nuclear power? That’s just boiling water.
@@bobjhon7391 yup
Well it's a little more involved than that. The rocks boil water, and then a heat exchanger heats and boils another water pipe to make steam. The water with a bit of radiation is stored until it's back down to a safe level and released back into the wild.
@burkino7046 basically a fancy kettle wirh extra steps
Haha turbine goes spin spin
Yessir nuclear plants are basically the world's most expensive kettles
I had no idea that fuel rods could actually be recycled - _that's awesome!_ Also had no clue coal ash was radioactive. I wonder how many bananas worth of radiation a gram of coal ash is...
Not so fun fact! Coal puts more radioactive isotopes in the environment by volume every year than all of the nuclear waste ever created by nuclear energy, including accidents.
Not only is it radioactive, living near a coal plant gives you a much higher radioactive dose then being near a nuclear one
Also there are reactor designs that run on the spent fuel they can't use anymore.
Ah based on such a democratic form of measurement, I can tell you’re a fellow American. I can assure you it’s many many bananas
Fuel rods have been recycled for decades. So the question you should ask yourself really is: Why didn't you know this?
Also if we switched to using thorium a lot of the waste would be reduced.
Most of the waste of uranium reactors is from the enrichment process to get more of a certain isotope. The isotope that isn’t used is what is classified as depleted uranium, and that’s what a lot of the waste is.
Thorium doesn’t need to be enriched, is found in much higher concentrations, is safer to mine (uranium releases fumes and thorium doesn’t), and produces over 100 times the power uranium does. And also, it only reacts in the presence of plutonium so you can easily make a failsafe system where if it overheats it’ll melt a lid and drain the thorium away from the plutonium.
The only concern with nuclear reactors is that we really need to invest in the batteries to store the energy. If we produce too much power we won’t be able to store it, which is an issue with solar power in some areas because they’re getting too much solar energy. Switching to thorium which produces so much more energy could be a concern if we don’t take the precautions to store that kind of output.
There are no active commercial Thorium reactors today as of my knowledge, only research reactors and plans for commercial ones.
@@submandarine6874 I mean if it’s being researched though that’s good. But if we’re gonna have a nuclear reactor it would be best to go for a safer option. Which really, the energy is the most risky part here. Thorium produces so much more than uranium that we’d need a lot of big batteries.
@@22gunslinger21 maybe just use the safest option which is wind and solar. Its also cheaper
@@submandarine6874 yes but also the same problems do occur with wind and solar as well. The batteries will always be the most needed component. In Germany they had a problem where there was so much electricity generated from solar that they were running out of space to store it (which is dangerous because batteries can overflow and blow up)
@@22gunslinger21 but that is a grid problem which is actually not that bad with solar because you can dezentralisie it more. So why go for nuclear if there is no benefit and higher risk, greater cost and - in the end - also a dependance on a limited resource forcing you to switch again in the future anyways
even if you include Chernobyl and Fukushima and the few other incidents over the years, the human (and economic) cost isn't in the same world as the cost of pollution from fossile fuels and global warming. I'd wager more people die from pollution from fossile fuels in a month than have ever died from nuclear
yep, an estimate of deaths resulting from every single nuclear accident adds up to ~11,650. deaths from air pollution add up to around 6 to 9 million every year
Maybe compare it with renewables. They are available and cheaper.
@@zyexal nuclear would be way better still. I'd actually buy an electric car if they had nuclear batteries and not chemical/mineral batteries.
@@nickmajor8107I like where this is going. Next is power armor
@@nickmajor8107 oh now I know you are trolling. Thanks for letting me know.
The last big nuclear plant disaster in America was in 1979. Three-Mile Island near Harrisburg Pennsylvania partially melted down, forcing nearby citizens to evacuate, and even President Carter had to personally fly there and coordinate the cleanup (he used to work on nuclear power before the Presidency). Despite that, nobody was killed during or after the accident.
One of the most LETHAL nuke plant accidemt in America is SL-1, a micro-nuke plant in early 1960s as a military experiment for cheaper alternatives to power forward operating bases abroad. It ended with all 3 personnel manning it dead, one of the poor men even being impaled by a control rod and stuck in the ceiling.
In 67 years of nuclear power in America (first plant became operational in December 1957), the number of deaths from such incidents and accidents reaches a dozen.
If you want to save lives, nuclear power is certainly the best way to do it.
IMPALED? wtf?
@@zavienb1831 he got pinned to the roof like it was a thumb tack and a corkboard, pretty wild
kyle hill has a really good video on the incident, if you want to learn more about it
They're actually recommisioning part of TMI almost exclusively to power AI processes for Microsoft.
The US Navy has been putting nuclear reactors on warships for 70 years. There's never been a single incident of unintentional radiation release. This includes Submarines. Things that move a lot. And sometimes run into things. Also, these reactors are mainly run by kids in their 20s with about a year's worth of training. No accidents. In 70 years.
buuuuut anywhere a nuclear accident took place, each time, at least several hundred square kilometers became inhospitable, inhabitable and dangerous for between 200 years TO 10k YEARS !!
The number of deaths is irrelevant. Damage to our ecosystem, and the fact that all the catastrophies we had yet were NOT ultimate, is a very big subject of concern (and not counting military vulnerability, check what happened in Ukraine). Fission nuclear power will NEVER be safe. It can be used as a temporary measure, but not more.
nuclear power is not that cheap - building a new nuclear power plant costs around 21 to 33 billion euros. a comparable hydrogen powered gas reactor is only about 1-2 billion euros. the power price in france is just comparable cause the government is pouring in LOADS of money every year so the french people dont have to pay moon prices for their power
Look what happened to the flamanville EPR : budget gone from 3.3 bilion euros to 20 bilion and it still hasnt even started to produce elecrricity 😅
@@nilius90 thanks, had to scroll waaaay too far down for this point to be made.
Thank you! I was lookin for that comment. Mostly agree with Thor especiialy if you compare it to Coal. But we dont just have a choice between coal and nuclear.. And Nuclear, even if you recycle, still has problems. Like storing waste or the pure cost of it all.
Clean Energy will always stay the better solution. It's cheaper and has less waste. And an exploding wind plant wont kill thousand of people and make a small country inhabitably for centuries.
@@haeltacforce its just not well known in most parts of the world, if even thor doesnt talk/know about this it has to be really hidden. this is the first time i not 100% agree with smth thor has said. so i had to write smth about it here ^^
@@noahlemeillour8731 That's only because of multiple failures at multiple levels of the planning and building process.
The other cool thing is the 1 in 10 spent rods has uses other then waste. Big in pharma industry
And military, lol
@TheAdmiralMoses
That's depleted uranium, which is not the same as spent fuel.
Depleted uranium is actually a byproduct of the original fuel-making process for reactors, and it's used in munitions due to its density, self-sharpening properties, and very low relative radioactivity (hence the "depleted" part of the name).
"No, we can use that in produ..."
"Hypersonic rods goes BRRR"
So wait..
90% recyclable.
1 in 10 has uses other than waste.
That's all of it covered then, DONE!
@@camerapasteurize7215 Oh, fascinating, I see, thank you for enlightening me.
I work in a nuke plant in the U.S, sucks we cant enrich spent fuel here
Well the US has a lot of uranium while France is trying not to import as much from the African countries that they're losing grip of, it's simply a matter of supply, the US might get there someday though.
@@TheAdmiralMoses Wrong. Our main uranium suppliers are Canada and Kazakhstan. The only African country we bought uranium from was Burkina Faso and it was only 5% of our supply.
@@AlshainFR More came from Niger than Canada, but it indeed seems I was wrong for the most part I will concede. I just learned about FranceAfrik recently and it was fresh in my mind.
Also another crazy thing is US made rods for soviet type reactors. Russian rods get recycled, but the US ones have to be stored in concrete for the time being, usually near the station. I really wonder now, why US rods don't get recycled. Like really why?
As a former Nuke, I feel the same. The US doesn't really need to re-use fuel, we have enormous stock piles from the Cold War. Also, spent fuel isn't typically discarded as waste. It is used in various means or stored(typically) until it is profitable to process it back into fuel (Only 700 million years until half of it goes bad, long shelf life).
Though as with oil, we would rather use other countries' resources before ours, so the US buys mostly from Canada, Russia, or EU in one way or another.
Shame Germany pulled out of nuclear energy, and I hope they change their mind. 😢
Feel like the main reason people think nuclear is more dangerous than coal is just because if nuclear goes bad, the bad happens all at once,
while coal takes time despite being worse
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukes are one of, if not the most well known part of WW2 and it's always criticized as one of the worst things people have done, despite the fact that when the total amount of innocents who died when the nukes dropped was less than a fifth of the innocents who died in the carpet bombing of Tokyo, and that happened in one night
It's a black swan thing. We are terrible at calculating teeny tiny probabilities of m*f*ing huge consequences. That already makes the risk from nuclear power impossible to calculate. But it's actually worse: The Black swan effect, also called fat tail distributions, doesn't even account for adversarial risk. Which means in order to even calculate any risk, you need to completely ignore that somebody may intentionally blow up that reactor or do anything with the fuel or waste or whatever. And it sounds far fetched, but nuclear reactors have a lifetime of around a century. And Ukraine is having this issue right now big time.
@@Andreas-gh6is while yeah, a black swan is an issue for anything
The fact you can make a super dangerous virus in your garage for only the price of a new car makes me think that human intervention is something we should ignore if there's a chance to have a big boost for humanity's progress
There's always going to be someone who just wants to ruin things just because they can, but overall I'd say it's worth the risk since it's better to try rather than do nothing at all
"You miss all the shots you don't take" is a popular quote for a reason
No, one of the by products from recycling is plutonium. America banned recycling because of weapons. I think Bush signed the law
@@Andreas-gh6is Honestly modern plants aren't even physically able to have meltdowns in the same way, the safety procedures to preevent it is incredibly advanced.
Watched a video on nuclear recycling, it’s extremely expensive and lengthy process but very valuable for long term sustainability
not just valuable.
Its the only reason why people think it might actually have a future...
People barely think about what happens in 10 minutes.
This shit can be unsafe to interact with for thousands of years it will be in someones backyard at some point if the humans dont Blow themselves up before it.
which is why macron pretty much shot down the project development
which is sad
It is expensive but the cost effective is actually profitable. Most recycling is at a net loss. Nuclear is a net gain and a large one!
@@johnard8831 But only three times per rod.
That doesn't factor in the cost of demolition of the npp after its service life and the long term deposit.
To add to the problems the two biggest suppliers are canada and russia.
Expensive for now, but it's less expensive than a wind or solar farm in terms of land usage.
Me playing satisfactory after they added ficsonium
I just started again, is that the new tier 9 stuff? lol
@@krispy_kornflake Yes, nuclear is now 100% recyclable
@@JustQerqbut isn’t that really late game? Even so that is amazing
@@RSFrROASUranium waste can be turned into plutonium fuel rods (which can be sunk).
Plutonium waste can be turned into Ficsonium fuel rods (in tier 9) which produce no waste.
Ficsonium is very late game, but plutonium is a pretty good intermediate step given its burn time.
Damm, so me recycling fuel rods in Barotrauma isn't impossible
Based takes. More people need to hear that nuclear power is safe and clean
And then what? Even if they did hear it, they'd say its propaganda or something to that effect.
The average population on this planet is way to stupid to have a good life.
@@amiralirashedi8614 Though I still think, we should work on wind and solar first, because one its cheaper, two its easier to sustain and three can be build relatively locally, compared to rare radioactive elements.
@@gonoroad2160 you don't even understand the propaganda you regurgitate.
It's not clean at all
@gonoroad2160 nuclear is cheaper than wind and solar. Both wind and solar are heavily reliant on location. Both are easily damaged and Both can't produce energy without an external force, wind or sun so Both require energy storage the cheapest being pumped hydro.
there's a US version of this powerplant design that was created for testing in 1980's that is 100% incapable of meltdown in the event of loss of all power and recycles 99% of the waste in an on site seed reactor. (while permanently storing the last 1%)
It was called the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) and it was ended by politics in 1994 when Nuclear reactors became unpopular. A mere 3 years before the testing would have been completed at the Experimental Breeder Reactor II site in Illinois.
Has there been any push to bring it back yet?
@@pumpkins0 Really hoping for this.
out nuclear program is for making weapons not energy. Thats why those plants dont exist.
It wasn't politics that stopped it. It's because it turned out to be ridiculously expensive and was very likely to fail. We've had various types of breeders since the early 50'ies. We've spent billions on them. The military was very interested in putting them in subs and carries. So it's not like we haven't tried.
What we've never had is a stable breeder. We've built at least 24 major experimental breeders. Four are operating today. None has been stable.
It's just old tech on new bottles. Stil doesn't work though...
@@ridernameddeath6486 Erm what? The project was closed down by Bill Clinton ... for political reasons. It's all clearly documented if you care to look it up.
And yet here we all are, hating big oil, but still serving it...
sometimes nuclear *isnt* viable. Such as here in New Zealand. constant earthquakes and awkward geography NZ just cant do it.
Fair enough id say most of the world could use nuclear fairly easily though
which is the problem for renewables as well. You can't build a field of solar panels if there are earthquakes as well.
California is doing Nuclear and we get crazy earthquakes all the time as well. Earthquake resistant building technology is a lot better than it used to be.
@@maksymisaiev1828solar panels are one thing I wouldn’t worry about in an earthquake, they are pretty low to the ground and not that heavy compared to buildings. Hell, even if they fall off their stands the actual solar panel will probably be fine, and you can just put it back up there. I’d certainly rather be near a field full of solar panels during an earthquake than a nuclear plant, a coal/oil plant, or god forbid a gas plant that might start leaking explodable gas.
@@maksymisaiev1828You can. The difference being if a large earthquake hits a solar grid it isn't going to explode and irradiate the outer area. Nuclear energy is incredibly safe but if hit with any form of natural disaster the consequences could be dire. It just isn't suitable in NZ due to this.
W take
France state energy company is 50 billion in dept because they keep the energy price for the citizens low and they run into the problem that almost all of there reactors need to be renewed in the next year's, costing them when more billions. Nuclear should help us get rid of Fossile fuel, but after that it should also be good by nuclear power
Im sorry coal is WHAT?
lots of things are radioactive that you don't know about. like bananas.
Per kwh coal puts out about 100x radioactive waste compared to nuclear. It's mostly in the form of radioactive sulfur, uranium and thorium. There is no such thing as clean coal.
Yeah, coal has trace amounts of radioactive materials in it. When all the carbon in the coal is burned, the radioactive materials are consolidated more and so coal ash is radio active. The ambient level of radioactivity around a coal power plant is higher than a nuclear one oddly enough.
@@legomacinnisinc
It's not odd, makes sense. They don't take it into consideration because they don't have to and it would make construction more expensive
All the studies were taken from power plants. No studies I found were done on home sources of ashes
France has trouble to cool the plants in hot summers (I think 2023 summer was one of those) which would have fcked the euro Powergrid in parts if neighbor countey didnt kick in gas power plant (with suck ass in almost everyway)
I didnt know the recycling part which sounds good, but there is still the problem of how to store the nuclear waste that is produce
Also most countries still need to push wind, solar and water power because building new nuclear plants takes to long to get carbon neutral fast enough
But interesting food for thought
Solar panels take mercury and other toxic materials to produce, and are lacking for clean disposal and recycling. Wind turbines ruin the value of the real estate around them and take significant mechanical maintenance... but water power?
Yeah, water power's great; you can't go wrong with separating oxygen from hydrogen. Those two elements are supremely useful. Even if you only kept the hydrogen and released oxygen into the atmosphere, that oxygen will just bond with carbon emissions for the plants to breathe in.
What do you imagine nuclear waste looks like?
@@klownservative3934
To my knowleage, nuclearbwaste has to be stored for hundreds of years until it isnt radioactiv anymore
That sound really expensive and more importantly really dangeroures
Oh, governments would love to just recycle their spent fuel. That would solve one big problem of this technology. But it's too expensive and impractical. It's been around for fifty years, it will take decades to develop and scale it up, even if it were practically viable which it probably isn't.
@@Kai_-ys9jj right now, most spent fuel is stored next to the plants. Which is quite secure... But that assumes nothing is going wrong and nobody intentionally makes things go wrong. So you need to safeguard the waste, for example from people trying to steal it for building dirty bombs. Or by driving a huge truck with a fertilizer bomb onto the premises. That won't happen - as long as there is an appropriately sized security force to guard it. But you need to guard that fuel forever, or until you move it someplace else, so you better pick a location that is geographically stable, politically stable and won't be held hostage by an enemy (see Ukraine...) and all that for the next century or so.
Oil, coal, and natural gas companies have spent quite literally billions of dollars in open campaigns against nuclear. People bring up the very few nuclear meltdowns the have happened, but with the different nuclear fuel sources we have, and the literal decades of safety standards raising, the chances of accidents are very slim. Even then, oil, coal, and gas kill more workers on average per year than nuclear energy has
It's the fact that the rods are so "hot" that it takes 5 years to do anything with them. 5 years is a long time to wait nobody wants to do that.
Also, it's the other waste that's a pain. Tools, cloths, and other random junk is the majority of waste. Nobody wants to recycle/reuse that stuff.
The difference is that tools, clothes and other random junk is almost always low level waste, which stops being radioactive much quicker than than waste fuel. As for waiting 5 years, it's really not a big deal considering the low number of nuclear rods you actually have to deal with.
Yes, but the common metric that's used is that ALL of the nuclear waste generated since the 1950s can fit in a single football field at a depth of 10 feet. Storage for 5 years from any reactor to cool down would be like a shelf on a warehouse, a single facility could easily handle the entire country. And the clothes and such are low level waste. They are only hot for 30 years or so before they can be tossed or recylced.
@@jeffcastor9509 That argument is idiotic on so many counts. For one thing, nuclear waste is actually no kidding dangerous to transport around, which makes it very expensive to move around with all the shielding and precautions. So even if you could store it all on a football field, you can't bring it all to one location. And you can't move it elsewhere quickly, when, not if, anything goes wrong in the next few centuries with that location. That's why long term storage is such a big deal. You don't want it getting into the ground water. You don't want a natural disaster blowing it away. You don't want a terrorist driving a truck with fertilizer onto the football field. You don't want anybody to sneak in, get some material and build a dirty bomb. So even this small volume of waste is already unmanageable right now.
@@Andreas-gh6is Now wait a minute that is just wrong the dry cask storage is nearly indestructible and it won't open that easily it can be hit by a train and shrug it off without any damage to that cask not to mention you can move it quite easily and it won't get destroyed by the crash.
@@benediktaspovilaitis1660 Nope, that's an illusion. Ok, maybe it can't be destroyed by a train crash, at least at the extremely slow speed the caskets are transported at, but that's not all the waste that is stored that way and a train crash it's not the same as a massive explosion, or a large plane full of fuel crashing into it. Or some determined terrorists coming into the place and just opening those caskets before blowing them up. At least in Germany, most of the waste is stored above ground, and it's already leaking. The containers have a safe lifetime of about fourty years, and many are past that. It also means you have to continuously move the waste once the caskets are too old. Also, those caskets are now radioactive waste themselves. And if anything goes wrong near that site, you'd have to move all that stuff somewhere else, which you can't because it's expensive and difficult to move... We already can't properly deal with the waste we have - as little in volume as it may seem - it would be reckless to produce more of that.
The U.S. doesn’t recycle nuclear waste because we have such a large supply of Uranium so for the time being it is more affordable to just refine new fuel versus recycle old fuel. The main issue with that logic is because no one is mandating the long term cost of storage and maintenance of that waste. The French do insist that this cost is takin into account and thus they have a massive fuel recycling industry.
I hope that the push by cloud hosting providers for energy companies to provide them long term carbon neutral power will lower the barriers for the power industry to get back into building out infrastructure again.
That’s kind of the idea with the Microsoft deal, that they will pay for the total cost to upgrade and get the TMI reactor re-certified and then constellation gets to use the extra power for themselves and re-invest those costs into building a future larger nuclear plant at a different location. If a few more deals like that happen the United States may climbing once again from the near bottom of the nuclear expertise list.
There is some reprocessing facilities starting in the USA now, alongside the new fuel enrichment plants; all because the gov finally decided America should become fuel supply chain independant and banned all new fuel imports (starts this year), so once the old contracts are done deliveries, America only has its stockpile to buffer the transition so I assume NPP operators stocked up to give them plenty of breathing room.
Where does the U.S. store their nuclear waste then?
@@Estigy Much of it is just stored on-site at nuclear power plants. It's safe and secure, as they are kept in reinforced dry casks.
We were never able to find a place to bury our several football fields worth of nuclear waste as a country.
Another benefit of recycling it is it greatly cuts down how long the waste is dangerous for from thousands to only a few hundred years.
@@Estigy For the most part at the Nuclear Power Plants, in an open field, in dry storage casks.
you also don't recycle it because Regan blocked reprocessing and set back the industry decades
And the fissile fuel in nuclear weapons can also be used in a CANDU style reactor
The world needs more of a CANDU attitude.
Ba dum tss.
Before people started to complain about how Japan started dumping nuclear waste into the ocean and causing issues with our fish and other seafood supply chains. Do you know why the US kept practically quiet about the whole ordeal while other countries are going batshit crazy? That is because the US ignited so many nuclear warheads into the ocean, many for testing... And those fish have been eaten for generations. Do we have any issues?
There are sea turtles over in bikini atoll (which is a thriving ecosystem) which have radioactive material in their shells from the dozen or so nukes that were dropped there.
I'm pretty sure the US did most of it's nuclear warhead testing in Nevada. _France_ I know did tons of testing in the South Pacific.
@@KyleDavis328 They detonated almost two dozen on Bikini Atoll
"Do we have any issues?" Have you seen the republican party in the past decades?
If you're referring to the contaminated water they've been releasing for the past four or five years, the fish are fine. The only reason it has caused issues with seafood supply chains, is because of unfounded fears. The water is radioactive, but not dangerously so. All the radioactive contaminants that can be removed have been, and the remaining tritium has been diluted to the point of radiological insignificance. So to call it nuclear waste is at best misleading.
Crazy fact but the difference in coal related deaths to nuclear power related deaths is astonishing. Nuclear by comparison is extremely healthy
The rods are only part of the issue. The uranium is the core issue
@@monkeyabc123 the fuel rods are the uranium?
I love your content, but this is the first time I‘m gonna have to disagree with you. Recycling is nice, but there are still tons of nuclear waste, that will be harmful for thousands of generations. No one really wants to be responsible for it and bury it in the ground. Also, nuclear energy is super expensive. Electricity in France is only cheap, because it‘s heavily subsidized. Maybe being profitable reffered to the recycling process, but nuclear energy is not. Renewable energy sources are much more profitable in the long run and don‘t produce harmful waste for millions of years❤
Agree with you on the price. Nuclear has THE highest upfront price. As for the waste, at least with nuclear being highly regulated as it is, the nuclear waste will most likely be confined to a small area. Unlike coal, where the NORM (Naturally-occurring radioactive material) is dispersed throughout the area surrounding a coal plant from the fly ash, to the point that the radioactivity level is higher than what is allowed from a nuclear plant.
The problem with nuclear is the waste for generations. The problem with the rest is that there won't be any generations to suffer.
@@noctis_rune you‘re absolutely right. Coal is not an alternative to nuclear power. I also think, the concept of keeping the waste to a small area underground is probably the best solution we have. But in Germany, where I‘m from, no one wants to bury that stuff in the ground…
But nuclear power is also one of the most expensive energy sources
and?
it’s similar it price to wind which is a lot more expensive than hydro and a lot cheaper than solar.
"Erm, b-but..." ✋️🤓
@@randomcanadaguy32 I don’t think that’s the case in fact I looked it up(Wikipedia “Levelized cost of electricity”). Maybe 20 years ago solar power was expensive but right now nuclear power is in fact the most expensive power source.
In addition to that if you would want to build a nuclear power plant, it would be impossible to get insurance, since no company on earth could pay the damages if something would happen.
And nuclear power plants are also very expensive to build and since nobody wants a nuclear power generator in their backyard, it is also very hard to find investors or even a place to build it.
Furthermore leads the mining of uranium to immense environmental damage and health problems for the workers.
At the end, I would say that nuclear power plants are just very impractical
@@RepstarVixen nothing .just a fun fact
The radiation does of living within a 1 mile radius of a modern Nuclear Fission reactor is less than the average radiation does you'd receive from sleeping 8 hours a night, in the same bed as another human.
Nuclear power is really effective, really recyclable, really safe, really reliable, really expensive to set up but really cheap per kwh.
We've been scared by the three major nuclear accidents of the last 45 years, however the total death toll of those accidents is only in the order of hundreds in the history of nuclear power. Meanwhile, oil and gas EXTRACTION numbers at about 100 per year. Then you add in the poluting effects and it become smuch more nasty.
It is worth noting that some environmental groups suggest figures of close to 1 million dead from nuclear events, however much of the research that is done for this is questionable and is funded by the petrochemical industry making it not so trust worthy to say the least.
I’m here for this but the issue is most countries aren’t recycling at 90% efficient…. So we end up with lots of toxic waste.
Kinda, I mean, it's better than coal waste simply because every shred of nuclear waste is contained and tracked throughout its lifetime, meanwhile coal is storing its waste safely in our atmosphere and lungs, so...
It's not that much waste and it has a ton of uses past energy production
Because there's no incentive. Other than France, all other Western countries are insanely decommissioning their nuclear power, so there's nothing to recycle fuel for.
Which can be Stored safely for a few Decades before you need to do something with it
You end up with waste that has a much higher toxicity if you recycle. That's one of the reasons most countries don't do it.
Isn’t the downside of recycled nuclear rods that it produces weapons grade material as a byproduct? The Savannah river site does this and it’s owned by the Government, the only site in the country with that type of reactor
Lol, no. RepU (the industry standard term for reprocessed uranium) usually has a purity around 0.5-1% depending on the method, while most first stage reactors need 3-5%. Some experimental ones use up to 20% enriched, but even this is a far cry from the 90+% that is considered officially weapons grade.
The biggest difference between fuel rods and weapons grade are the reaction poisons put into the rods (that allow for more fuel to be put in the rod without causing issues). The base "fuel" is the same in both. So no, breeder reactors recycling fuel rod materials do not have any more dangerous a by-product than the original fuel rod had the first time round.
No. Power generator reactors are not breeder reactors.
@@Blink-Ensu No, the biggest difference is the magnitude of enriching you have to go through for weapons grade uranium.
@@TheAdmiralMoses Ok ... What is the difference between "weapons grade" and "reactor grade"?
Because atomically they are the same thing ... Uranium and Plutonium in a breeder reactor are there to go from naturally occurring to fissile material. The exact same fissile material that makes weapons. It's just a matter of purity (IE poisons) like I said
It isnt a BYPRODUCT its the entire point of the breeding.
Wait until you learn about all the problems in thefrench nuclear sector : welding problems on the old reactors primary and secondary circuits, high hactivity nuclear waste storage which is inexistent, enormous delay of 20 years and additional cost (30 billon euros) for the flamenville EPR .
Also, if it explodes u get new game genre like stalker, metro and fallout
Modern nuclear isn't nearly as explosive since we've switched to thorium instead of uranium. The biggest concern in nuclear plants is the plutonium needed to start the reaction. Of course older plants haven't switch yet, but that kind of stuff takes time.
@@Dumland I don't think we have "switched" to thorium yet. On wikipedia there seems to be a good handful of experimental ractors in different phases of planning/building/testing, but we aren't quite there yet.
@chrdal that would make sense as most current nuclear plants have been around for a while and are still setup for uranium
I prefer solar. I wish more places would just put them up above open parking lots... So many wasted space...
Only problem is it's never going to be remotely reliable enough to viably provide a majority of power until we start working on a Dyson swarm. That and they're everything but environmentally friendly to build.
Nuclear is significantly better than solar. Not to say we should abandon solar, but nuclear is just orders of magnitude better.
The biggest problem with solar is initial cost and maintaining it. Solar panels are very expensive and need proper anchors because they need to withstand harsh weather, so we can't just put them anywhere unfortunately. And for solar to be effective they need to be cleaned regularly which on a large scale is harder to maintain. I think that small scale solar is great and definitely viable like on your house or a small scale solar farm. But on a large scale solar isn't a great solution because of the cost.
They also take ten years to build and thirty years to take down, so theres that
and I've heard this argument over 10 years ago... wish we had built them back then... I will also hear this argument in 10 years from now...
But hey, let's keep fighting it so we can get a few solar panels out and wind turbines and offset what they can't do with oil, natural gas, and coal.
until you findout you live near a dump and the corruption scandals come out
Fossil power kills 100s of thousands of people every year according to WHO estimations, because of lung issues caused by fine dust emissions of the plants. Nuclear power has EVER only killed a handful of people. Fukushima has literally not caused a single casuality, because it was so well-contained and cleaned. Of course there is still a lot of research to be done and infrastructure required, but from a pure cleanliness point-of-view, nuclear power is amazing and very safe. It's pretty much the same fallacy as people being afraid to fly a plane, but ride their car for hours each day. Humans just suck at understanding risks.
It's called cognitive dissonance.
It's called distorting the issue. Coal power is not the only alternative to nuclear power, it's not the only fossil fuel, and nuclear power is no alternative to replace fossil fuels. It just doesn't work. The infrastructure is humongously expensive and sluggish. There's a reason why most countries didn't invest in that technology for the past few decades, and it's not just the little political problems of citizens wondering about a few too many impossible accidents happening. Nuclear projects are always finished late and way over budget. And even if we started building all the nuclear plants we need to go carbon neutral RIGHT NOW, it would be too late. But you can't start all of them immediately, or at any single date, because those projects are humongously expensive, difficult to plan and require specialized manpower and infrastructure. Nuclear has no future with the current technology, and the next generation of technology is decades away from commercial scaling.
So you send 100 rods, get 90 back, then send those 90 spent ones back, get 81 back, then send back those when spent, get 72/73 back...and it goes on and on. That's incredibly efficient.
Thor is wrong. You get less than 50% back.
You can get into a massive discussion of "what is the worst part of coal" and not have consensus other than "it's very bad"
And it's pointless. Nuclear fanboys act like coal is the only alternative to nuclear power, or the other way around, whatever is convenient to their arguments. But that's not the case. In fact, nuclear is no alternative at all to go carbon neutral. Right now, the global nuclear industry can't even keep pace with maintaining the generation power, much less extend that. It will take a decade to even START building enough new reactors, and then a decade to finish them. By that time, renewables will be a lot cheaper (nuclear tech is frozen from the time of planning onward), and it will have replaced almost all of the fossil fuel.
I would like to point out though, that one of the reasons this is so profitable for France is because they’ve been cutting shit deals for Nigeria for years getting uranium from them and making bank while so many Nigerians live in poverty.
I still like nuclear energy too, but we shouldn’t screw over poor people to get our stuff.
And yes, corrupt leadership in Nigeria is also largely to blame, hence why there was a coup, but France has tried to crack down hard on that from what I’ve heard.
So, nuclear power is actually not all that profitable for France.
They have, at this point, incredibly outdated nuclear reactors and the only reason why nuclear power is affordable in France is because it is MASSIVELY subsidized by the government.
Additionally, just in general, building these plants is both much more expensive and takes a lot more time than compareable renewable energy sources.
Energy production is subsidized by the goverment all across europe. Isnt the case with US too?
@@TheReal_Antrey Germany actually has a ton of taxes on electricity. So I wouldn't say all over Europe.
It is true that France does it the other way around. They pump a ton of tax money into their nuclear power plants to keep electricity cheap.
In South Australia we have alot of renewable power and dont need nuclear power. I do like the thought of using nuclear though if we didnt have the renewables in place.
I imagine your climate is also a lot more preferable to renewables, that's one issue we have in the States
It's cleaner and more efficient to burn spent tires than it is to burn coal.
My main concern with nuclear is what inevitably happens if it gets over-used.
If the company making reactors ever decides “Hey we’re low on budget. Let’s cut costs” then we have crappy disasters-waiting-to-happen as reactors.
As long as their use is regulated, carefully maintained, and monitored; they remain a very safe power source.
and thats why you dont let soviets or capitalists build nuclear power plants.
the soviets build it badly because theyve been at war their entire existance and have a maniacal leader who doesnt care.
the capitalist will build it badly because the only way theyre gonna want to build it is cheaply and with as little overhead as possible, especially when competing with other capitalists who are gonna do the same thing.
Also, haven't we changed the kind of uranium we're using in nuclear power to something far far less volatile than the fuel sources for Chernobyl and Fukushima?
it doesn't even matter, the entire world ceasing nuclear power options is like if we all stopped using fire because some monkey burned their house down.
If your country can have modest to good solar output, then you should go for solar farm + energy storage like pumped hydro.
Nuclear is.. well, it is risky. And to maintain all the risk the cost of a new nuclear power plant has gone way up. Invest in a solar farm and it can return your capital investment back in a decade. Nuclear power plant does not have that much ROI. Hence we are seeing less new nuclear plants each decade. Money dictates everything.
Energy storage infrastructure and technology doesn't exist on a scale large enough to solely rely on storing power from inconsistent renewables nuclear is safe, consistent and efficient
@@Nolifecoffeeaddict they have developed pumped hydro system to store extra energy generated from nuclear power plants. My point is that some form of technology already exists to store energy. We need more ways to store energy. Hey, we see how phones went from landlines to bendable smartphones, I am confident that someone will discover a more efficient way to store energy created from solar.
I feel like if he strung together every one of his clips and made them into an audiobook, you'd fall asleep to it and wake up a genius. This guy is nothing but digestible knowledge and encouragement and I'm grateful this man exists ^.^
You have a lot of common things with radiation
I'm lost without the handdrawn squares, sorry
In Slovakia is project to 100% recyclation. We think that whole nuclear waste can be once reused completelly.
From what I get, what France doing is clear the Uranium from elements into which Uranus decays.
Which from what I know is different how much it is according to the reactor and France reactors are old.
As a French guy, I'm proud of my country for the way it handles nuclear energy, it's genuinely one of the best decisions we've made in recent times
It would’ve helped me understand better if he had drawn two squares and an arrow
Fun fact! Nuclear Power is just boiling water with extra steps!
Basically it's just a slow, controlled reaction that gives off a shit ton of heat. That we dunk in a big tank of water and use the steam generated by the heat boiling the water to turn turbines.
So when you see a big cloud come out of a nuclear reactor that is JUST the steam
What they also don't tell you is that the problem of disposing of nuclear waste is entirely a function of not having done anything about it, mostly because of nimbyism and ignorance-derived fear. All it takes to shield from neutron radiation is putting enough electrons in the way. Sticking it back in the ground would work really well.
Yeah, it's a good way to say we use 1% of every uranium rod. Problem is, we refuse to use the 99% left because we never built the facilities that let us do it.
We had one ready but the ecologist made it close down. I think it has been torn down too.
Plus the amount of radioactive easte that is produced once every 20 years or so, is so little that it would take a thousend years to fill a house.
I’d love to do nuclear too bad our corporate electric companies want to maximize profit and nuclear is not profitable enough. Why do you think think they want to push electric vehicles?
We should have made the switch 40 years ago, you know when we knew those carbon emissions would come back and bite us in the A..
Elctric engineer , and nuc here . YES
The types of reactors that are able to "recycle" used nuclear fuel are called fast breeder reactors (FBRs). These reactors have been around for a long time, but they are considerably more expensive to build, operate, and maintain than regular nuclear reactors (most use liquid metal as coolant). Also, uranium is relatively cheap to produce, reducing the incentive to switch. However, the biggest concern is their potential for nuclear weapons production. FBRs can extract fuel in the middle of the burn process without cooling or stopping the reactor (which normally takes days). So, one is able to extract plutonium, the material primarily used for nuclear weapons, which is why FBRs haven't proliferated much, despite the technology being available for around 70 years.
Fascinating world the nuclear energy one
Source: Mechanical engineer with a master's in nuclear energy.
I would argue that nuclear power is *THE* cleanest, *THE* safest and *THE* most sustainable consistent source of energy available.
- Wind is not consistent (wind doesn't always blow), further the blades are made of expensive plastics, they aren't sustainable (they wear out and end up in the trash when they are swapped out), require clear-cutting for placement and cause quite a bit of harm to surrounding nature (especially bird populations)
- Solar is not consistent (it's not always sunny), further the processes to extract and process the required ores for photovoltaic cells extremely toxic and damaging to the environment...and that's before getting into the issues of the laborers in that process...or dealing with used cells (assuming they can be recycled in the first place).
- Hydroelectric isn't available everywhere and excess/wanton damming can cause lots of harm to local water tables and severely impact things downstream.
- Geothermal, while clean and consistent, just isn't viable everywhere (nevermind the implied risks of living in or near a geologically active area)
The biggest issue with nuclear power is dealing with the materials that can't be recycled, such as the control rods and any contaminated water.
US don't like recycling. latest is solar panels how will we recycling them? they are glas morrons. tiny amount of other stuff???
Angry rock boil water
Yeah the only problem is we still don't have a good solution for that to do with the radioactive water used to cool it all. That stuff still gets shipped up into the tundra and put in a bunker.
In related news, Britain has just closed its last coal power plant today.
I think that’s completely false.
The nuclear waste last for 40.000 GERNERATIONS!!
All because 3 generations thought its a good idea 😂😂😂
Jesus is 81 generations apart from us
40.000
That’s a million years
The answer is the sun
No what he said is completely true spent fuel rods can be reprocessed to be used again different types of nuclear waste decay at different rate the stats show nuclear is the safest energy source
It might be true.
But its the dirtiest energy source.
Just because u can’t see the radiation doesn’t mean it’s not there 😂😂
The waste is the problem
An u can NOT recycle 90% of the waste.
Just 90% of the rods.
The byproducts are much more and can’t be recycled
@@Nolifecoffeeaddictwhy is the sun not safer?
@@jetztstaubts I'm assuming by the sun you mean solar which is actually roughly on par with nuclear in terms of safety
France is the only place in europe that has the equipment to recycle
Just when I think I can't respect a man any more
The problem is not if it works and if its better then the alternatives. The problem is that this is a fact.
The monopolies that control nearly everything and give the "big guy" 10% do not want us to have cheap abundant energy because that equals prosperity. Its far easier to control people who are crippled in debt.
Nuclear power is better than fossil fuels, but it is a lot more expensive than renewable energy. It should be a priority to give up energy production from fossil fuels, but nuclear energy is not the solution at max it is an intermediate. New electric infrastructure should be built around supporting 100% renewable in the future.
How is that recycling process fueled buddy?
ITER should be online soon
"Don't worry large scale fusion power is only 20 years away" - nuclear researchers for the past 60 years 😢
@@Nolifecoffeeaddict 10 years now
@@amadeusjohanssonyeah ten years until ITER is built but unfortunately that's not large scale energy production it's not even energy production at all really it's a test bed were not even close to fusion being a viable power source unfortunately
Coal isnt as radioactive as the waste produced by nuclear power dude.
They also have the "BN-800" Breed reactor in Russia where they recycle / second life used rods.
Bonjour oui your welcome for recycling the cancer rods 🙃
Praise Be to Thor! Preaching the Truth about Nuclear
We can also talk about the remaining 10%
Don't you think we should just put all research into fusion power?
Not practical we don't have that much time as exciting as fusion advancements have been realistically were at least 40 years until fusion is commercially viable while 5 million people die a year from fos fuels
Theres a nuclear plant around us, they generate power for northern il and chicago. Im pretty sure i live far enough away that if in the slight chance it were to meltdown i could survive, but on a clear day in a higher building, you can see the clouds and maybe the cooling towers if you have a good zoom on your phone
You can see the steam? Cool!
Considering only about 50 people have ever died from a nuclear meltdown, I'm glad you consider yourself safe!
how is it clean? u just ignore the last 10%!
Wait till some cool guy, make nuclear fusion practically useable
The irony that nuclear power is really good and coal is very radioactive.
yes, I wrote a whole paper on this when I was in high school and explained to multiple people how much better it is as a form of energy
I didn’t realize coal ash was radioactive, my dad used coal in our wood stove and one day he used too much and the house reached 90 and stove was glowing red lol
Its political issues that sits upon it
Its political issues that sits upon it
That's good because "this is not a place of honor" is complete and utter shortsighted bullshit.
But methods of mining it is bad
I hate nuclear but because the Goblin Lord say it's good then it's good
Here we go again…
Love how EVERY TIME someone spews this stuff, they conveniently leave out WHAT IS BEING DONE WITH THE ORDER 10% of RODS!
You know google exists, right? Like how to use it, too? Something like "nuclear fuel recycling" or something.
Idk I bought this book, Googleing For Dummies, and I think I'm getting the hang of it. I'll let you borrow it when I'm done.