Many challenges stand in the way of a ‘nuclear power renaissance’

COMMENT Isn't "challenge" a lovely word? Conjures up pictures of a tennis match, or some exciting venture. It's the word they use when they mean something more like "overwhelming frightening costs" " "worrying safety and proliferation risks", awful unsolved problem of toxic wastes" Is this nuclear power’s moment? Many challenges stand in the way of a‘nuclear power renaissance’. The nuclear power industry…

nuclear-news.net/2024/02/02/2-

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@NoelWauchope I’m sorry, but to put it bluntly, I think this is an awful take based more on fear mongering than fact.

Nuclear waste has been practically solved, as waste-based reactors dramatically reduce the necessary storage lifetime of their spent fuel.

Costs are being attenuated by building SMRs, and having more distributed, smaller reactors means a more robust power grid in the event of a plant outage or a malicious attack.

Not all fissile material can be or is used to make bomb material, and having a 0 carbon, highly scalable, and REGULATED WASTE STREAM method to generate power is amazing.

Solar panels are full of perovskites which contain lead, or other materials that contain cadmium or other highly toxic heavy metals. They are often shipped to 3rd world countries where they are eventually burned and cause disease and death to the “recyclers”. And coal ash puts out more radioactive waste into the air and environment than nuclear by multiple orders of magnitude to the point that thyroid and other cancers are dramatically more likely to occur in their vicinity. You could walk past a nuclear glass concrete storage and experience less radiation exposure than living near a coal plant.

All this to say: bombs bad, electricity good, and you can literally say this about nearly ANY power source. The US firebombed Japan before nuking them and the firebombs did more total damage throughout the war, does that mean we should be anti-gasoline, or anti jet fuel, or any other combustible material? Granted, nuclear is much more devastating with smaller amounts, but can also be used for good, and it should be or we have absolutely NO shot of tackling the climate issues we will be facing soon without it.

@johnabs Overall, small modular designs are inferior to conventional reactors with respect to radioactive waste generation, management requirements, and disposal options. news.stanford.edu/2022/05/30/s

@NoelWauchope This depends on the particular nuclear reactions selected, and whether multiple reactors on the same site can feed into each other (e.g. recycling fuel, and or using alternative fuel paths, or even using a different "virgin" fuel source like thorium salts).

Additionally, some people at my university are currently working on making these reactors passively cooled (I mentioned radiative sky-cooling to them as well) to further reduce demand on water for coolant and such.

So while yes, these may present a few challenges initially, the reduced startup costs, means more clean energy produced faster to get us to net-0 CO2 or even negative CO2 (consider just one SMR could power a fleet of carbon capture devices which could be converted into eco-fuel, graphene, etc) and I think the potential benefits far outweigh the drawbacks, especially when you consider how safe appropriately stored nuclear waste is.

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