A little detail in an earlier comment of mine.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?

" For example, the energy input required from mining and processing uranium ore to its use in a power plant that costs huge amounts of energy to build and operate cannot be offset by power production in a high growth scenario. "

Nuclear reactor fuel assemblies costs 0.485 cents per kWh in 2006.
Coal cost was 2.32 cents per kWh, 5 times nuclear.
Natural gas was 5.25 cents per kWh, 10.8 times nuclear.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

If it takes so much energy to make fuel assemblies, how can they make them so inexpensively.

If nuclear plants sell their electricity for 6 cents per kWh, which is a huge bargain compared to gas, the income to fuel cost  ratio is 12.4

Where is the spread sheet with the reference's  assumptions and calculations?


Things Everybody Should Know About Energy

While I will concede that the physics say it's possible to recycle and re-use 95% of spent nuclear fuel as new fuel and then, using heavy metal reactors, burn up the majority of waste but.......nobody's doing it.

Please tell me where this mysterious waste to fuel plant is that accepts waste and hands back new fuel rods for an affordable fee.

Point us to the molten-salt breeder reactor that avoids turning non-fuel components of nuclear reactors into more nuclear waste.

Show us any nuclear fuels re-processing site that isn't now a superfund cleanup site also. Or a site closed to independent audits or environmental inspection.

None of these things exist. We have nuclear waste sitting all over the damn place in monstrous swimming pools and a waste facility that sits atop an active volcanic zone. It's also a very active earthquake zone.

Please somebody explain to my why the proposed waste facility isn't in Texas where nature hasn't seen fit to make a hill since the oil was pond scum in a stagnant sea. I'm not sure that Texas even has anything that qualifies as a mountain.

Any answers?

Put the Carbon Back

Not really necessary. Existing reactor technology can provide our energy for a few hundred years.

Converting 5.4 ounces (0.34 lb) of Uranium to fission products will release enough heat to generate an 80 year lifetime supply of electricity for an average American with no CO2 emissions.

" We have nuclear waste sitting all over the damn place in monstrous swimming pools and a waste facility that sits atop an active volcanic zone. "

A nuclear plant can store 30 years of spent fuel in a medium sized swimming pool, so there is no pressing need for a permanent disposal site.

The Department of Energy estimates that there will be about 292,000 spent fuel assemblies by year 2040, containing about 557 million feet of fuel rods. Fuel rods are less than one half inch in diameter consisting of small non flammable non explosive ceramic pellets inside sealed metal tubes.

Each Americans share in 2040 will be 18 inches long, accumulated over 70+ years, about one fourth the volume of a Chap Stick cap each year.

Every year large quantities of uranium ore wash into the sea by erosion. That is why the ocean is saturated with 4.5 billion tons of uranium, half of which can support 10 billion people at the U.S. level for 400 years without breeders or recycling. Excess radioactive material precipitates out onto the seabed and is buried as time goes by.

As recently as 1,700 million years ago, a uranium deposit at Oklo, in Gabon Africa, supported at least 17 natural reactors that operated off and on when the ore was flooded with ground water, splitting a large quantity of uranium atoms. Studies show that the plutonium and most fission products remained very close to their point of origin despite the presence of moving water and the lack of engineered barriers.

If the last chain reaction at Oklo stopped exactly 1,700 million years ago, we can say with certainty that for the last 1,699.9 million years, that site has been less radioactive than it would have been if those reactors had not formed. That is because without those reactors, the uranium they destroyed would still be generating radioactive decay products and toxic lead.

In the same way man's nuclear power industry will leave the world less radioactive for most of its remaining life than it would have been without nuclear power.

We could take a lesson from nature and  accelerate the process by burying spent fuel under a few hundred feet of deep sea bed mud. It would be a tiny fraction of the naturally occurring radioactive material there now.

The point is that the disposal of fission products is not a particularly new or difficult problem, though we can make it as difficult and expensive as we choose.

Things Everybody Should Know About Energy

Wow, with just shy of 400m Americans projected for 2040, that's just 178,000km of waste; only half way to the moon; it could wrap around the world a measly 4 times.

So if you want to get a return on your equity investment, they don't make any sense, and never have.  If you want to just run them at the margin to keep power costs down and screw the folks who invested those billions in the plant, they can form a vibrant component of a low-electricity cost future.  (I am totally glossing over externalities here, of course.)

Bottom line is that the debate on both nuclear and coal has a pretty deep logical flaw.  Are they cheap?  Only if you can find an investor who doesn't want to get a return on their money.  (Hint: they don't exist!)  Are willing investors out there?  You bet - but only if the government is willing to guarantee equity returns, to ensure that they won't be cheap.

It is inconvenient for regulators or potential investors to confess that they aren't cheap, and so both have this goofy "we need cheap power, therefore we need expensive nuke and coal" nonsense.  But don't be fooled - it is nonsense, driven by reasons that ultimately have nothing to do with cheap, reliable, long-term electricity supplies.

While I will concede that the physics say it's possible to recycle and re-use 95% of spent nuclear fuel as new fuel and then, using heavy metal reactors, burn up the majority of waste but.......nobody's doing it.

... We have nuclear waste sitting all over the damn place in monstrous swimming pools and a waste facility that sits atop an active volcanic zone. It's also a very active earthquake zone.

I'm not worried about that; no technically competent person is. Why are you trying to change the subject?

JMG gave Grist exposure to a phony study, a rerun of the old lie to the effect that nuclear plants do not promptly pay back their invested energy. You wisely don't try to portray it as a non-lie, but seem to be trying to hustle it offstage. When you're done with that tactic, be sure and check it back in so the global warming deniers can use it.

Fun fact: spent fuel from commercial nuclear power stations has never figured in any country's acquisition of nuclear weapons. Some Gristmill commentators' insistence that future reactors must be proliferation-proof is a deceitful insinuation that existing ones haven't had a perfect record in this respect.

Let the baby play with matches in the fuel storage room!

Fun fact: spent fuel from commercial nuclear power stations has never figured in any country's acquisition of nuclear weapons. Some Gristmill commentators' insistence that future reactors must be proliferation-proof is a deceitful insinuation that existing ones haven't had a perfect record in this respect.

See, now I'm confused. First the nuclear advocates tell us that most of the "nuclear waste" isn't really waste at all but usable fuel with so called "poisons" in them i.e. "spent" fuel is not usually "spent." Then you tell me that "spent fuel from commercial nuclear power stations isn't a danger.

Meanwhile the US and Israeli government freak out at the concept of Iraqi and Iranian nuclear power stations. They are also very, very, unhappy at the fact that Pakistan and India both have nuclear weapons now. What could be the problem?

Could it be that once you have an effective reactor core you can yank those fuel rods from your pressurized water reactor, drop them into a cheap and dirty fast breeder reactor and pump some "depleted uranium" up to plutonium in just a few short weeks? Isn't plutonium the big scary stuff that makes the bombs go bang? Sure whoever did this would probably ruin those fuel rods for power generation but who cares, they've joined the club with the big boys.

Now before you go protesting too much explain how itty-bitty Israel managed to get enough pure fissile material to start making bombs if they didn't leverage it up from the "civilian" nuclear reactor that the US gave it. You wouldn't be suggesting that the US just gave them nuclear weapons?

Nobody in charge of preventing nuclear proliferation believes in "safe nuclear power." Not even for a minute. There are no barriers in physics that prevent somebody from turning even depleted uranium or thorium into a nuclear weapon. It's more expensive, it's dirty, it will have a lower yield, but it will still make a hell of a bang and dirty up your nice clean planet.

On the other hand, no amount of reprocessing of the components of a solar tower or geothermal power plant will ever, ever, ever make a nuclear weapon. Just the savings in security personnel between the two power production types should be sufficient to tip the balance for solar power.

Solar, no army required.

Put the Carbon Back

Israel's dedicated explosives-grade-plutonium production-reactor was built in secret by France.
google.com/search?q=israel+reactor+Dimona+heavy+water

By the way, it is considered polite to say "please," rather than simply demand that people do things for you.