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tf wrote that title.. nuclear is defacto renewable
No, it's zero emission but not renewable.
Nuclear fission is actually by definition the least renewable energy source. Even coal and oil are renewable on long enough time scales. But there will never be more uranium than there is right now.
We actually don't have that much of it if we consider the long term future, only a thousand years or so. So nuclear is intended to be a bridge to eventual full renewable power generation and storage, an essential component in the present day but it's still a bridge.
Another thing to consider is that nuclear is the only power source that works in deep space away from the Sun. So if we're serious about exploring the solar system or further, we'd be best not to burn up all of our fissionable material right away.
Its not even zero emission...
What are the emissions, aside from waste heat?
The production of the uranium fuel, the gigantic building itself, the transport (the fule gets shipped around the world), the storage after its depleted.
Its definitely better than any Combustion fuels, but not at all better than actual renewables.
When considering these externalities for nuclear, you have to do the same for renewables as well. i.e. scrap turbine blades, concrete in dams, weathered PV panels, land use taken up by panels and turbines.
Remember that the materials used in most renewable generation are also shipped around the world and many have very dirty refining processes.
I'm a firm renewable energy supporter but you have to be fair to both processes.
You neglect the problem that the stuff from a nuclear reactor is literally unusable forever and becomes Special waste while the remains of renewables are recyclable, yes even turbine blades, there is just not enough market for it to attract a business so far, that will change of course with time, also the stuff is not toxic or radioactive...
Depends, newer version of the stuff don't need rare earths, or much less, meaning the dirtiest of it falls out of the equation.
I am fair, nuclear is just not future proof for large scale usage. It also takes to long to be "effective" 10 years to build one powerplant, and is waaaay to expensive. you could build more actually renewables for less money in the same time and the electricity from it is basically free as there are almost no operational costs.
Okay.
Make a PV system out of a strict subset of the materials in the reactor.
Put the PV system over top of Inkai mine.
Get more power than the uranium from the mine would produce for longer.
The 40 year guaranteed lifetime of the panels is longer than the 30 year lifetime of the average nuclear plant at shutdown.
Your materials can be recycled after.
The ground around the mine isn't poisoned with heavy metals permanently,
This all assuming everything goes perfectly for the nuclear plant and waste disposal.
have you seen how large wind turbines are ?
I have like 20 in visible range from my window, yes, whats your point?
how did they got there is my point. to build anything there are emissions.
Incredibly well quantified emissions that are in total lower than the emissions from mining uranium (except for two or three cherry picked mines which are supposed to be representative), or the emissions from building and decomissioning a nuke if you take real lifetimes and load factors.
wait per energy output? that seems wrong. also what about nukes?
Most uranium ore is lower energy density than low grade coal. Digging it up with diesel equipment after removing twice as much overburden with explosives in a coal powered country and then milling it with 10s to 100s of litres of sulfuric acid is incredibly dirty. All of the "representative" lifecycle studies use Ranger (which used a specific much cleaner more expensive process only suitable for some specific ores on ore 30-70x as concentrated) or Cigar lake which is 1000-2500x as concentrated.
Even after that nuclear is still relatively low carbon, but about 10x a modern wind turbine. It is largely irrelevant (the best llw carbon technology is the one that deploys soonest), but that doesn't stop the shills constantly lying to try and delay decarbonisation.
Most of those costs are similar for renewables...rather than a building it's the production and installation of fields of solar panels, for example.
In both cases I'm pretty sure it's a negligible fraction of the lifecycle emissions compared to energy generated.
The problem is reliability, Europe sees more and more droughts building energy facilities that turn useful water into useless steam makes little sens when there are other options.
Also nuclear makes Sweden dependant on a country thaz exports nuclear fule.
And for solar the costs are shrinking and shrinking, the newest and most efficient panels don't even need rare earths anymore and are recyclable. Btw Sweeden would be better suited for Hydroelectric dams and Wind wich have even less such problems.
Sweden?
Drought?
Anyway I'm not a civil engineer or geologist or renewable energy engineer or anything, so I won't pretend to know what the best path is. I'm just hoping they did their studies correctly and are picking the best option.
But even if they're not, it's good they're moving away from fossil fuels, whichever direction they move in.
Well no, that's the thing. They've replaced moving away from fossil fuels now with promising they're going to in 2045
But if you go according the strict physical principle every energy source is non-renewable
The sun fuses a finire amount of hydrogen, earth has a finire amount of latent heat, the moon a finire amount of gravitational inertia etc.
And there's a little paradox if you think about it, how can fusion be non-renewable but solar, that use radiation from the sun fusion, be renewable?
A bit of a stretch maybe, but I'm considering us to be discussing whether an energy source is renewable on Earth. The Sun is not renewable, but by the time that it's no longer viable the Earth will be long gone as well! So as long as the Earth exists, I would say that solar PV and other solar driven processes like wind and hydro are renewable.
By these standards yes, deep geothermal and tidal are "not renewable" either.
Fission and fusion are two different things.
Will have more when the sun explodes.
"Renewable" typically means renewable on human time scales, so fossil fuels don't count.
Biofuel would be renewable.
If you consider fusion to be "nuclear", that's renewable. But yeah, not fission.
It is zero emission though.
You are probably refering to thorium-based nuclear power plants. Until this day, there isn't such a power-plant in a production-ready state. Because it's far from simple, not only because of technical challanges, but also potentially catastrofic environmental impact. I encourge you to read more if you are intrested.
I'm sorry what? How do you renew fissile material?!?
It's a little bit complicated and I don't want to write a wall of text but: Waste fuel can be recycled, if your reactor has a breeding ratio higher than 1 then it has net positive production of fissile materials. Potentially all uranium and thorium of the planet could be used.
The argument being, if you consider the word "renewable" in the strictest sense, no energy source is renewable, entropy can only increases: solar depends by the sun burning a finire amount of hydrogen, geothermy depends by earth inner heat which is a finire amount ecc.ecc. The common usage of renewable is along the line of "immensely big proportional to human consumption" and in this sense there's a strong argument to consider nuclear renewable.
Calling an LWR renewable because somebody somewhere might run a closed fuel cycle eventually is like calling oil renewable because you can make hydrocarbons by electrolyzing CO2 and water.
It's and absurd and ridiculous lie.
With the same argument calling solar and wind renewables just because, hypothetically someone somewhere can fully recycle turbines and panels without having to extract new raw materials is an absurd and ridiculous lie (?)
Except it has happened at least once at >99% yield.
And happens regularly commercially at >70% yield.
So you continue to repeat stupid and absurd lies.
Could you back your claims up?
Because in Europe and US the recycling rate if solar panels is around 10% and that without considering we might being miscalculating their real impact
Otherwise, first fast reactor has been built in 1946, we're basically done and there's absolutely no more industrial research needed as it happened at least once /s
You're now trying to misdirect with an unrelated statistic. The current market saturation of recycling isn't the amount of a panel that can be recycled.
Breeding some fissile fuel is not closing the fuel cycle. No reactor has ever prodiced the same material it ran on. Closed cycle nuclear is not even proof of concept.
The current market for nuclear reprocessing isn't the amount reprocessable either. But to adhere to your argument, it's the probability for a given panel to be recycled; if there isn't an economic rationale, because recycled materials from panels is more expensive than vergin materials, then it's called being out of market, not market saturation.
In reality we aren't recycling solar panels.
This happen routinely even in non breeder reactors, industrial nuclear nuclear reprocessing is a thing and many reactors in the world run on MOX fuel with plutonium extracted from spent LWR fuel. You only need a breeding ratio higher than 1 because otherwise fissile content will keep diminishing. Arguably there's no more base research needed, both breeding and nuclear reprocessing are time tested process. What we need is industrial scale up, which is a little bit further than a proof of concept
Unfortunately most reactors are not breeders and we are trying our best to lock the waste away forever which ruins any chance of recovery when we finally do migrate to breeder cycles. I like to compare our current reactors to burning just the bark off of logs and then tossing the rest in a smoldering heap, with 95-99% of the energy still retained in the waste.
Breeder reactors would indeed extend the long term viability of nuclear fission immensely, we should be using them exclusively.
you do not need a breeder to recycle most of it. also that 95% is still there for future us to use when we are able to.
No it's not. That's just delusional. All the ideas of a sustainable uranium fuel cycle are based on non-existent technology. Uranium is a finite resource and we have nowhere near enough of it to power the world, even if you ignore all the other problems.
there is enough U238 to last until we get there. except if you think fusion is more than 500 years away (yes, that number is out of my ass)
U238 is not fissile so that's not very useful.
......
Wtf no.