Charlie Stross on the future of nuclear power
Charles Stross has made an interesting point on the view that there is only a very short supply of useable nuclear fuel:
firstly, the supply of known uranium deposits will only last 80-100 years if we don’t recycle it and start burning MOX. I’d like to note that today’s light water reactors are horribly inefficient — they only extract 3% of the available energy from their fuel before it is considered “spent” and reclassified as waste. If we use high burn-up reactors such as the EPR, we can get a whole load more energy out of the same amount of fuel. And if we use fast breeders and run a plutonium cycle we can convert U238 into Pu239 and burn that instead of U235: there’s 500 times as much U238 lying around.
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Secondly, we haven’t even tried to build a thorium reactor yet, although we’ve got good reason to believe it would work — and thorium is considerably more abundant than uranium.
As I have mentioned before, nuclear really should be part of the future energy mix of any industrialised country. Renewables can provide a large chunk (depending on local availability) of our energy needs but that still leaves a gap that needs to be plugged with something reliable and non-carbon-dioxide emitting.
David JC MacKay has more on nuclear power in his excellent free online textbook Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air.
August 19th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
there’s a good google talk on molten salt (i.e. thorium) reactors here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F0tUDJ35So&feature=channel
August 19th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Sustainable energy has to happen; the senators and congress have to put aside their stakes in oil companies and get it done, or all the money in the world won’t matter when they’re sitting in a dark house with no gas to go anywhere in their car.
January 5th, 2010 at 12:00 am
The CANDU reactor can burn unenriched natural uranium as well as MOX and thorium, so technically there are at least 29 thorium reactors they just aren’t burning thorium.