- Nuclear – not as bad as most Australians might think
- I’m not against nuclear – for those countries that might need it
- But sadly energy is a tribal thing
- Where nuclear may still be needed
- Nuclear power is safe!
- Chernobyl, Fukushima, Radiation – Oh my!
- Linear No Threshold model
- What about nuclear bombs?
- Nuclear fuel is abundant because breeder reactors eat nuclear waste, getting 90 times the energy!
- Integral Fast Reactor
- Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) — my favourite reactor!
- The MCSFR – my favourite reactor – the reactor that cannot “melt down” because it’s already a liquid that wants to ‘freeze up’.
- America’s nuclear waste worth $30 TRILLION!
- Fuel from seawater for a billion years!
- Uranium from seawater is the forever machine!
- Close Yucca Mountain and build Energy Parks out in the desert.
- Movie “Pandora’s Promise” 1 hour 23 minutes
Nuclear – not as bad as most Australians might think
I’m not against nuclear – for those countries that might need it
The world’s leading climatologist, Dr James Hansen, thinks nuclear power is entirely essential:
“Can renewable energies provide all of society’s energy needs in the foreseeable future? It is conceivable in a few places, such as New Zealand and Norway. But suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”
Dr James Hansen – essay at Columbia University – 2011
More at his Science Council for Global Initiatives (SCGI)
When someone of James Hansen’s calibre says something like this – well – who am I to disagree? He’s the grandfather of modern climate science. (I’m just a guy with a background in Social Sciences!) Back in 2010 when I became a fan of nuclear power – renewables were about 10 times more expensive than they are now. I had read various models that showed we would need to Overbuild Australia’s electricity grid maybe twice in capacity to guarantee supply – and then there were all the storage and powerline costs. And that was just our electricity grid – and did not include transport and replacing oil. Let alone industrial heating which is about half the energy we use! Overbuilding a renewable grid might have been technically feasible – but everything I read back then made it seem economically impossible.
Everything I read back then. But I changed my mind in June 2022. A Vox piece and some other overwhelming data I was reading at the time finally showed that the high turnover of small modular solar panels and wind turbines over decades had both improved the technology and reached economies of scale that swept aside all the previous economic objections I had read. Renewables were now back on the table. In fact – they were cleaning the table!
Indeed, the economics of it so hacked the system that Overbuild to get through intermittency and winter was no longer a bug, but a feature of the new reality! See my notes on Superpower. Keep in mind that modern HVDC powerlines are so efficient their electricity losses are tiny. They only lose 1.6% per 1000 km. That means solar power from the equator (where there IS NO winter!) could reach the poles and only lose 16%. That means a global super-grid is possible!
But sadly energy is a tribal thing
Because big oil has funded climate denial and renewables denial for so long – the whole energy debate has gone feral. Social media’s divisive algorithm keeps people locked in their own confirmation biases. Renewables are cheap. Renewables are doubling every 4 years. The extra powerlines and storage costs are affordable. So why is someone like Dr James Hansen still sceptical about renewables? Fundamentally I think many Americans perceive renewables to be some kind of woke pinko fad. It’s political. We can be a very tribal species.
Where nuclear may still be needed
Basically now that HVDC is so amazing – and wind and solar overbuild so cheap – I can only imagine nuclear power being needed in those countries that for geopolitical reasons do not want to rely on their neighbours. Also, we’ll need nuclear power in Space and on Mars. (If I were settling Mars – I would NOT want to rely on renewable power when a global dust storm could cut access to sunlight for months.)
Nuclear power is safe!
I used to be quite frightened of it – but I would live in a nuclear Australia – if wind and solar were not going to do the job so much faster and cheaper and with less protest.
Chernobyl, Fukushima, Radiation – Oh my!
The radiation at nuclear disaster zones is actually not that bad.
Linear No Threshold model
What if a little radiation is actually GOOD for you? The weirdness of the LNT!
What about nuclear bombs?
Nuclear fuel is abundant because breeder reactors eat nuclear waste, getting 90 times the energy!
Today’s Light Water Reactors only use 0.6% of the energy in the uranium, leaving it ‘hot’ for 100,000 years! What we call nuclear waste today is mostly unused fuel, which is why it stays ‘hot’ for 100,000 years. Imagine nuclear ‘waste’ is like wet firewood, full of potential energy but still ‘wet’. You could dump it in the fire, but that would put the fire out. Instead, you put it around the edge of the fire so it collects heat and dries out, and is ready to burn. There are special reactors that operate much like this. Old fuel rods are set up around the nuclear ‘fire’ in the core to absorb neutrons and transmutate into new fuel. They ‘breed’ more fuel than they use, and so are called breeder reactors. The bottom line? Nuclear ‘waste’ becomes an abundant energy source. There is already so much nuclear waste that the UK has enough ‘waste’ to run her for 500 years, and America has enough to run her for 1000 years!
Note: after breeding all that waste into fuel there is a final waste product, but it burns itself back to safe levels within 300 years. That’s easy to store! The two main categories of breeder reactor:-
Integral Fast Reactor
For a deep dive into IFR’s download the free book from the SCGI, Prescription for the Planet by Tom Blees.
Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) — my favourite reactor!
The MCSFR – my favourite reactor – the reactor that cannot “melt down” because it’s already a liquid that wants to ‘freeze up’.
America’s nuclear waste worth $30 TRILLION!
Now that we understand that nuclear waste is mostly unused fuel, we can learn some startling new facts: America has enough waste to run her for 1,500 years and this has been estimated to be worth $30 TRILLION dollars! The United Kingdom has enough waste to run her for 500 years. When we finally run out of today’s waste in 500 years my guess is we might not even need fission reactors any more.
Fuel from seawater for a billion years!
Barry Brook:… So instead of getting less than 1% of the energy out of uranium, these fast reactors get about 99.8% of the energy out of it which means they’re incredibly more efficient in terms of using the uranium resource. And actually we’ve mined enough uranium already to run the whole world in these reactors for about 500 years.
Robyn Williams: So the old argument about running out of uranium isn’t on any more?
Barry Brook: We may run out in 50,000 or so years if we powered the whole world by uranium, but then we’ve got about four times as much thorium to use as well. So the argument that we’ll run out of uranium is a dead duck.
Dr Barry Brook – ABC Science Show – 2009
Sources: The Integral Fast Reactor – Summary for Policy Makers
Uranium from seawater is the forever machine!
- We can extract uranium from seawater at $300 a kilogram.
- This is about the size of a golf ball and could power your entire life, cradle to grave. That includes all the electrical power to recharge all the boron we’d ever need to replace oil. See Prescription for the Planet. All the fuel for that, from seawater, for just $300 per human lifetime! (The reactors themselves are the more expensive bit, the fuel is dirt cheap. In fact, I just recently did some major gardening in my front yard and spent far more than that on dirt!).
- As mountains rise and continents move the weather grinds uranium dust back down into the ocean faster than we could use it. This is how Gen4 nukes could run the world for a few hundred million years on the uranium in sea-water.
- The wiki on uranium from seawater documents a number of new technologies for collecting uranium from seawater in bulk. But right now that’s simply not our problem. Getting uranium from seawater is a problem we can look at in 50,000 years, and who knows what kind of space-based civilisation and solar energy systems we might have by then?
Close Yucca Mountain and build Energy Parks out in the desert.
Yucca Mountain and other similar schemes worldwide are now a complete waste of money. Yucca Mountain is like digging up our sweetest crude, refining it into the highest octane jet fuel — only to bury it again for 100,000 years! It’s absurd. We should burn it instead! Then there is a final waste product that is only radioactive for 300 years. We melt that down into ceramic blocks and store in a bunker in the nuclear energy park grounds. Argonne Labs – 4 minutes.
Movie “Pandora’s Promise” 1 hour 23 minutes
Eclipse Now 
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