.png)
Well, I’m just about to hop on a plane to Russia to visit for a week — destination Moscow. This is part of my duties as a member of the International Awards Committee for the Global Energy Prize (see here for details).
Whilst in the heart of the former Soviet Union, I’ll hook up with Tom Blees (President of SCGI) and Evgeny Velikhov (President of the Kurchatov Institute), among others. It’s going to be my first trip to the country, and although I’ll only get to see Moscow this time around, I’m returning to the country in again June (partly for the GEP awards ceremony, after which I go directly to the U.S. for lots of other exciting activities); on the June trip, I’ll go to the wonderful old city of St Petersburg. Lucky me, eh?
Anyway, I hope to be able to post one or two updates on BNC during the trip, provided I can hook up to the internet from time to time.
In the meantime, here is something that will be of interest to many readers, given recent discussions on the blog. Apologies if you’ve seen it before.
————-
Economic/Business Case for the Pyroprocessing of Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF)
Read entire article (This is a large file. Please be patient while it loads.)
Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear, Uncategorized
I just started reading “The Rise of Nuclear Fear” by Spencer Weart. Already I found out that it started thousands or millions of years ago with the fear of witches, jins, etc.
That link is quite good. Thank you.
I hope that your trip to Russia is productive.
Meanwhile, I suggest that people visit the following web site and post appropriate comments:
http://2greenenergy.com/
I’ve posted comments on the following page of the website, using FRE as my ID:
http://2greenenergy.com/another-nuclear-power-plant/22020/
Hello Frank. Couple of comments. I think if you talk to mining geologists they will tell you that we are a very long way from running out of Uranium. I like this article, but I’m sure you can find others.
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.aspx
Also you have a typo in your note. We don’t use only 0.01% of energy, it’s 1%.
Of course that doesn’t mean we should not be looking to advanced technologies that use it all. (LFTRs, IFRs).
SteveK9,
Thanks for the additional information and the link. I’m glad that you made a post to the web page to which I provided the link; perhaps others will also.
However, I do question one thing in the linked-to article. According to the article, our present nuclear technology makes use of only the U235. It was my understanding that some of the U238 is transmuted to plutonium and that most of the plutonium is then fissioned. If my understanding is correct, then our present reactors actually do some limited breeding.
P.S. – My degree is in business administration so actually I shouldn’t even be able to understand any of this.
Frank: I’m a scientist but there are people on this site much more knowledgeable than I am. From what I have read we do get some limited breeding in a PWR. So, with natural U at 0.7% U235, we get a good portion of that in the enrichment to ~5% U235 for fuel (and throw away some), then we get some addtional energy from Pu production from U238 and overall obtain about 1% of the energy in the original U compared to fissioning it all.