MOPED ARMY

The spent fuel problem is exaggerated greatly here in the US and Canada where we use woefully inefficient single-cycle reactors that just extract the most easily accessible energy. Even European plants are like 3 times more efficient than ours, but they still don't compare to MSRs.

To give you an extremely-condensed version of a presentation I've given, minus the power point, flowcharts, and Geiger counter demonstration: When you run a water-cooled reactor on uranium you get four basic products:

1 - Depleted Uranium

2 - Long half-life, low radiation fission products

3 - Medium half-life actinides that are both very dangerous and long lived

4 - Short half-life, high radiation fission products

It's that #3 category that causes all the trouble, having to be buried and sealed away, assuming it even gets that far: it often doesn't, instead it just sits in a spent fuel pool, just waiting for some terrorist to turn the whole thing into a dirty bomb.

And it's that #3 category that molten-salt breeder reactors can "burn" to produce up to 1,621 times as much energy as you got out of the first cycle, leaving behind more of the useful #1, relatively safe #2, and short-lived #4.

Why don't we do that here? It's not as easy, and because politics: such reactors could, instead of burning actinides, be used to produce more of them for nuclear weapons. Which is fine for a government-owned facility in Russia or India, but not so fine for a private corporation. We'd have to nationalise or heavily regulate the energy industry, and oh god I can hear the conservatives polishing their pitchforks already so I'm gonna go and hide by getting back on topic...

Now that is an excellent point. E-motorcycles are only barely feasible in an urban area as it is, and completely useless in the country. Adding the burden of having to be able to drive back to its station is asking an awful lot for a scooter.

Hey, that's neat! For all my research, I've rarely talked with anyone who actually works on the things.

But, yeah, enriching and reprocessing, the more you do it, the more energy you can extract, but also the better the bombs you can build. I think the reactors Canada makes and sells to places like latin america run on unenriched uranium, so they pose the least proliferation risk, but, they're also similar in design to the infamous RBMK. As much as Canada says they've improved on the safety, I do wonder if they're trading proliferation risk for not only inefficiency and waste, but also meltdown risk.

I mean, you have a plant, it runs great for 30-40 years, there's nobody there who's even on edge anymore, push the buttons, ignore the warnings. that's when it gets scary, power companies trying to eke out every last dime and underpaying a short staff of employees to keep the thing safe and wahts worst is most of the time it works, until it doesn.t. And while obody likes regulation, regulation is probably a good way to keep nuclear safe. maybe? Yall seem to know It better than me.

We almost had our own in Ohio, almost pure luck that didn't end much worse

The one you were working on don.Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/04/19 10:57PM by silverside61.

Fukushima was another case. TEPCO was warned four times their plant had major vulnerabilities, but they never made changes due to the Japanese cultural obsession with saving face. Later they admitted to have knowingly abstained from safety improvements, fearing the consequences of public opinion. Now I get radioactive debris washing up on my beach!

Seriously, I've gone down to the beach with a Geiger counter and found plastic with Hiragana on it that sets it off.

Well, they had their generators sitting too low for one thing. Like they never get a tsunami there? Complacency.