US Senate votes 87 to 4 to promote advanced nuclear power and cut through NRC red tape
66 replies, posted
[QUOTE=J!NX;49659658]I wonder how many still actually think that nuclear plants go up in a mushroom cloud if they fail[/QUOTE]
probably most americans
[QUOTE=Incoming.;49664064]I don't doubt the science behind nuclear power, I doubt the people. It's easy to say "the United States will not make the same mistakes", but actually making people believe that is a whole other. A nation that pumps [URL="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/11/02/how-the-pentagon-spent-43-million-on-a-single-gas-station/"]43 million dollars[/URL] into a single gas station inspires no confidence, either, no matter how unrelated they may seem.[/QUOTE]
I've said the same thing for years, but a lot of people on this forum take anything short of willingness to lick the sarcophagus as anti-nuclear fearmongering, and then excuse disasters and accidents with 'human error', as if that's something that will go away with relaxed regulation and more widespread use.
Nuclear power is our best bet right now for addressing our enormous energy needs because renewables don't cut it, but the nuclear future will certainly not be accident-free and the ecological repercussions to accidents will be severe. That's the cost we need to accept. It's safer than coal and oil which kill thousands every year and have lead to widespread pollution all over the world, but 'safer than coal' doesn't mean 'harmless' and it doesn't mean we should drop renewables and just go nuclear like some seem to suggest.
[QUOTE=soulharvester;49662958]"The fission reaction in U-235 produces fission products such as Ba, Kr, Sr, Cs, I and Xe with atomic masses distributed around 95 and 135."
For reference fissible uranium has an atomic mass of 235, hence it's name.
Nuclear waste != nuclear fuel.
Granted, we shouldn't be strapping nuclear waste into rockets regardless. It's both a huge risk and a waste of resources.
I still don't understand why France is the only nation to burn the waste as more fuel. Just kind of makes sense to do so, doesn't it?[/QUOTE]
Spent fuel rods are 96% uranium.
[QUOTE=Headhumpy;49671153]Spent fuel rods are 96% uranium.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, it depends on the kind of reactor, but most spent fuel rods currently out there are almost entirely uranium, just saturated with enough nuclear poisons (ie nuclear byproducts that inhibit the reaction) that the fuel can't reach criticality within the reactor.
The solutions are to either conduct nuclear reprocessing to separate out all the bad stuff, which the Western world frowns upon because that's how you make plutonium (which is, not coincidentally, why we went with uranium reactors over thorium reactors in the 50s- gotta get that plutonium for nukes), build a reactor that can better use that fuel, or accept the loss of 90+% of the uranium as the cost of doing business and chuck the spent fuel down a well.
'Nuclear waste' is a very general term because it could mean anything from a chunk of mostly uranium bathing its container vessel in radiation to a chunk of mostly inert and relatively harmless byproducts.
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