https://joannenova.com.au/2022/04/japan-flips-on-nuclear-it-tried-to-go-green-without-it-but-now-wants-to-reopen-closed-plants/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=japan-flips-on-nuclear-it-tried-to-go-green-without-it-but-now-wants-to-reopen-closed-plants

Sounds like a good idea to me!

I mean reprocessing already spent nuclear waste. It totally exists and reduces the amount of waste to 1/10 its original amount, while providing more power from the waste. It also lowers the half life of the remaining waste. France and Japan both had plants which reprocess and we can do it also. The waste can be reprocessed several times also.

I see several regional reprocessing plants to reprocess fuel from surrounding plants, to keep shipping of waste to lower distances. So we should triple our nuclear plants from 100 to 300 and add about 8 regional reprocessing plants and we would have 60% of our power CO2 free while dealing with existing nuclear waste. Win win.

Here is an article about reprocessing nuclear fuel.

https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2012/12/its-time-reprocess-spent-nuclear-fuel/?gclid=CjwKCAjwloCSBhAeEiwA3hVo_e21GE4woBMWLnuHRzattwDhAwmFkrFK6xV2fJ_7u5MN7vTsQ845_xoCBygQAvD_BwE

Right, Mike, Fusion would be great, but right now there is a race for which one will become available first: Fusion or dilithium crystals.

But seriously, Fusion may well be a thing at the end of the present century. I don’t see utility scale fusion before then, if in fact it is possible.

Rare earth metals are used to make solar panels.

Google tellurium and solar panel, for example.

Nuclear power uses much less fuel – in terms of mass. Compare the amount of coal need to to generate a gigawatt of power versus nuclear:

“Thus, 1 kg natural uranium – following a corresponding enrichment and used for power generation in light water reactors – corresponds to nearly 10,000 kg of mineral oil or 14,000 kg of coal and enables the generation of 45,000 kWh of electricity.”

So not only does nuclear emit very little CO2 – but the mining is less and the transportation of the fuel is less. It also takes up much less space than renewable.

So nuclear should be tripled from 20% to 60% – or even bumped up to 80%. Over time that is the conclusion most scientists and policy makers will come to. The greater the concern over global warming the more incentive to go nuclear.

Sorry, that link was behaving badly, had to remove it. Please just finish your sentence. There is a good chance there is a misunderstanding on your part, as per usual. Perfectly innocent I’m sure! For example, yes, they are used in electric motors but they need not be, higher end car motors often don’t use them, and Tesla designed the REEs out of their process entirely. REEs don’t give you anything you can’t get with an electric magnet.

hmmm:

According to this link, rare earths are used . . .

Rare earths are not used in renewable energy. They are used in some electric motors, but for the most part are not really part of the technology.

For both Cobalt and Lithium, about half of the element that is used in the US is used for things other than batteries. In the case of Cobalt for sure, and may be Lithium, the non-battery uses are easily displaced. For example, Cobalt is used in alloys, but there are other non-Cobalt allies that are better, but the industry is not tooled up to make those. A bit of government spending there could help the industry shift over, and boom, there is twice the amount of Cobalt available.

Meanwhile, Cobalt and Lithium are used in batteries that don’t need to be light, fast, or have any of the other characteristics LiIon batteries have, such as the large batteries used at new solar peaker plants. Shifting the elements out of those uses frees up way more of them.

Both elements are … well, elements. They are easily recycled from battery uses. So we just add and add and add these elements as needed then the adding slows down and we are at equilibrium. That is attainable.

Meanwhile, over in the petroleum industry, Cobalt is used and some not recovered, as a catalyst. Not using petroleum frees up even more Cobalt.

Meanwhile, over in the Nuclear power industry, Cobalt is one of the metals used in the aforementioned alloys. I’ve yet to hear a pro-nuker complaining about Congolese child mining.

Then, we have this: Battery technology is developing at an amazing pace. There will be batteries that don’t use Lithium or Cobalt that are better than or equal to batteries that do, within a few years.

Finally, Lithium can be mined from water (and is in the US, that is our major source) and Cobalt has sea-mount extraction that would make the global supply go up something like 1000X.

That is all.

If we would build a couple of recycling nuclear reactors we could reprocess the spent nuclear waste and reuse 90% of the nuclear waste, leaving only 10% as a storage problem.

We could just store that onsite like we do now.

Nuclear power is the answer to carbon emissions, together with about 30% solar and wind (and 6% hyrdo).

I hope our policy makers figure that out and get started.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm3132

and here Bob MacDonald interviews James Tours from RIce on their work (listen to the 4th segment.)

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/mar-5-climate-change-and-health-the-biggest-bacteria-rare-earth-metal-recycling-and-more-1.6371197

I’m not opposed to nuclear fission as a method of generating electricity, but seriouslym, even with modular reactors I don’t see much in the way of addressing the storage of waste materials in a way that doesn’t cause long term damage to the environment, and right now the plan seems to be in the US to continue to push it onto reservation land.

Greg has shown me how we don’t need to replace all of the energy we use right now with renewables, due to the large percentage of energy used in extraction, refining, transport and disposal of non-renewable carbon sources of energy. I think there is a tendency in this discussion of how much we should expect to generate from renewables to leave out factors that can shed light in their favor.

Fusion seems to be going from always 50 years in the future to always being 30 years in the future, so I don’t know how much we can count on it solving the next generation’s problems.

100% renewable power cannot work and therefore nuclear power can and should be a great source of always available baseload power, for when it is dark and not windy.

We are learning more about the problems with mining lithium and the rare earth metals and the problems with disposal of wind farm equipment and solar panels.

Bottom line – wind and solar are good up to about 30% or so and then we need something else to provide baseload power. Could be hydro or nuclear. Without hydro or nuclear we have to fall back on fossil fuels to provide power. So more nuclear is good and shutting down nuclear is dumb.

Germany just changed its mind on shutting down its last nuclear power plants.

I think the future will be thorium based nuclear power and hope the USA goes that route.

As I have advocated before – I would like to see the USA triple its nuclear from 100 plants providing 20% of the power to 300 (providing 60%) or 400 (providing 80%).

Hopefully people will learn more about how safe nuclear is and we will have a good baseload non-carbon producing source of power in the future.

At least until fusion power is a reality (still 50 years away).

James Hansen was right!