Nuclear Renaissance??

[Professor S]

TerraPower is working to create nuclear reactors that generate hyper-fast nuclear reactions able to eat away at the dangerous nuclear waste.

This has a number of potential benefits, Gilleland said. Among them:

• The Uranium isotope that's food for the new nuclear reactors doesn't have to be enriched, which means it's less likely to be used in atomic weapons.

• The fission reaction in the new process burns through the nuclear waste slowly, which makes the process safer. One supply of spent uranium could burn for 60 years.

• The process creates a large amount of energy from relatively small amounts of uranium, which is important as global supplies run short.

• The process generates uranium that can be burned again to create "effectively an infinite fuel supply."

If this works, it changes everything...


Source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/17/bill.gates.nuclear/index.html?hpt=C1

[Vampyr]

Jeeze, how awesome would that be.

[manasecret]

Yeah I just read about this. It reminds me of a Wired article on Thorium.


http://www.wired.com/magazine/wp-content/images/18-01/ff_new_nuke3_f.jpg Uranium-Fueled Light-Water Reactor
Fuel Uranium fuel rods
Fuel input per gigawatt output 250 tons raw uranium
Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $50-60 million
Coolant Water
Proliferation potential Medium
Footprint 200,000-300,000 square feet, surrounded by a low-density population zone

http://www.wired.com/magazine/wp-content/images/18-01/ff_new_nuke4_f.jpg Seed-and-Blanket Reactor
Fuel Thorium oxide and uranium oxide rods
Fuel input per gigawatt output 4.6 tons raw thorium, 177 tons raw uranium
Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $50-60 million
Coolant Water
Proliferation potential None
Footprint 200,000-300,000 square feet, surrounded by a low-density population zone

http://www.wired.com/magazine/wp-content/images/18-01/ff_new_nuke5_f.jpg Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
Fuel Thorium and uranium fluoride solution
Fuel input per gigawatt output 1 ton raw thorium
Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $10,000 (estimated)
Coolant Self-regulating
Proliferation potential None
Footprint 2,000-3,000 square feet, with no need for a buffer zone




http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/1

And the upside is, thorium reactors are being made right now. In fact, they were first made some four decades ago. The only reason the U.S. went with uranium over thorium is because you need the enriched by-products of uranium reactors to create nuclear bombs, and the U.S. at the time was very interested in making such bombs.