hmmm, the entire article excludes the words 'weapons' and 'waste'.
all nuclear reactors produce long lived radioactive wastes which are left for humanity to manage well beyond the forseeable future. Here in Australia, we've come up with a state-of-the-art answer to our own burden of nuclear waste (arising from 30 years of experimentation and research reactors) - we're building a road out to a remote desert location, building a shed and dumping the unwanted problem on the tribal lands of a disempowered, de-funded indigenous community. Real reassuring, huh?
As for weapons, although the old cold-war powers continue to slowly reduce the huge numbers of conventional nuclear weapons they hold, they're also building new ones. And at the same time as the total number of nuclear warheads in the world is slowly decreasing, the total number of actors holding those weapons is greater than ever, with the proliferation of nuclear materials and technologies spreading despite all rhetoric and pantomime surrounding the NPT. As Former US Vice President Al Gore said in 2006: "For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal ... then we'd have to put them in so many places we'd run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale."
finally, to the question of renewables :
I totally reject the repeated assertions that renewables can't provide scalable or baseload power. Here in sunny Australia, we're following the lead of nations like Spain and building a few large grid connected solar-thermal and solar-hybrid plants, that compare well with the capacities of old fossil and hydro plants. Already, large remote communities in my part of the country are powered entirely by solar concentrator arrays.
So I say, stick your nuclear power reactors where the sun doesn't shine.
> all nuclear reactors produce long lived radioactive wastes which are left for humanity to manage well beyond the forseeable future.
That's just flat-out wrong. The "waste" from current nuclear reactors is perfectly fine as fuel in newer reactor designs, you can burn the fuel again to get more energy out of it, and reduce the half-life of it significantly. I'm confident that that process can be repeated again, and again, and again, so that at the end we won't have any waste left that needs to be stored.
Yet the public at large is still convinced that what was true in the 70's has to be true today, despite decades of research and technological innovation...
Finally, if you have waste of any sort that you want to keep away from humans (A large amount of chemical waste would also seem to fit this bill), where else would you put it, aside from the centre of the most geologically stable continent on earth? Thousands of kms from habitation, far from any groundwater, and most likely on a large sheet of granite given the geology of the outback. Assuming it was properly built underground, I can't think of a better place to put it.
Solar power is interesting, but it has two properties which make it less useful then it would first seem.
* First you need to find a place that is very hot and very dry. That generally requires that you move far inland and far north and away from the coastline. This then means that you somehow need to transfer the power to the major cities, which are built almost entirely on the coastline, causing massive amounts of energy loss.
* Secondly on any non-equitorial latitude you have the problem of seasons affecting your baseload capacity. This then means that trying to manage any power grid that derives a substantial amount of its power from solar thermal plants is going to be, well, an interesting problem.
* Finally you will always have the problem of trying to manage these types of power plants, ie. you can't simply "turn up" a solar thermal or photovoltaic plant like you can a gas fired or coal fired plant. This then causes issues when you have a sudden need for power.
Overall though, it is a very interesting source of renewable energy.
thorium? maybe. but all of the reactors currently dotting the globe, and any of those which may be built in the near future, all use uranium. I'd hate for us to make the mistake of basing decisions about whether or not to retire existing aging uranium reactors on the promises of theoretical thorium models. We certainly shouldn't keep building dangerous uranium reactors simply because, one day, hopefully, there might be thorium models that might be safer. Like I said : this industry's been promising more than they can deliver since Go.
waste: out of sight / out of mind? not good enough: this material should remain prominent in the eyes and minds of the technological wizards who created it.
Solar: these sound like valid concerns, and I don't know enough to answer them, but I'm pretty sure that there's a lot more to build before we hit those constraints.
The candu reactors are thorium. As was AVR... Last I heard there were reactors in india/china using thorium.
All the gen IV reactors I remember are thorium based, however keep in mind that most of the gen IV reactors can be made with uranium, it's just that thorium is a rather nice fuel. Well, if you don't need to build any more nukes, that is.
To be perfectly honest, once you've mined out all of the nuclear materials out of nuclear waste, what you're left with is a fairly standard bundle of heavy metals that we deal with all the time in chemeng. (ie. what do you do to the Cad in Nicads?)
Anything that's fertile can be converted into fuel. Anything that's fissable is fuel. Anything that is usefully radioactive can be used either directly in a reactor or indirectly in betavoltaics and related.
One major problem at the moment is that it's not politically viable to reprocess waste anywhere near completely, and even though waste storage is basically solved in much the same way that the waste storage of garbase is basically solved (Where do you think the toxins go when you throw something else out?), we can't really do either and so you end up with waste just piling up in places where it honestly shouldn't be.
candu say they can do thorium, but no-one's actually doing it. Yeah maybe india and china have each experimented, but I don't think anyone's using thorium for power.
there's a huge, rich thorium deposit down the road from me, but they're planning to bury it all again after extracting the associated REEs.
Like I said, maybe one day we'll be making decisions about thorium reactors, but here and now it's uranium reactors (most of them GenII) that deserve our focus, because these are the ones which are operating or scheduled for construction.
As for weapons, although the old cold-war powers continue to slowly reduce the huge numbers of conventional nuclear weapons they hold, they're also building new ones. And at the same time as the total number of nuclear warheads in the world is slowly decreasing, the total number of actors holding those weapons is greater than ever, with the proliferation of nuclear materials and technologies spreading despite all rhetoric and pantomime surrounding the NPT. As Former US Vice President Al Gore said in 2006: "For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal ... then we'd have to put them in so many places we'd run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale."
finally, to the question of renewables : I totally reject the repeated assertions that renewables can't provide scalable or baseload power. Here in sunny Australia, we're following the lead of nations like Spain and building a few large grid connected solar-thermal and solar-hybrid plants, that compare well with the capacities of old fossil and hydro plants. Already, large remote communities in my part of the country are powered entirely by solar concentrator arrays.
So I say, stick your nuclear power reactors where the sun doesn't shine.