schroedingershat @ schroedingershat @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Not sure what you're even trying to say with the first bit. It's completely irrelevant

No breeder reactor has ever produced enough fuel to run on and extracted it. Breeder programs get as far as half of a proof of concept and then run out of funding on the actually hard part.

Monocrystalline solar doesn't involve rare earths at all, idiot.

If you want to pearl clutch about them, pearl clutch about gadolinium in nuclear plants.

The simple chemistry is pretty specific and doesn't work very well (it usually makes a semiconductor instead, and even when it does work, it's a few tiny impure specks most of the time).

Why is it unbelievable?

All of these exist are being deployed at much larger scale much more quickly than nuclear ever has.

Take your two decade obsolete coal propaganda somewhere else.

Germany's primary energy is about 4.5kW per person.

Without the waste heat inherent in using thermal generation this is about 2.4kW per person.

The worst actually populated parts of europe have about 1kWh/m^2/day of solar resource in mid winter and current gen PV captures a quarter of this.

So that's 240m^2 per person for everything or about 5% of the land.

Any amount of transmission or seasonal demand shifting or storage or wind or hydro or not being in northern ireland reduces this to just the inhabited areas and agriculture that actively benefits from agrivoltaics. Currently commercialising tech is also better.

So you may have repeated the lie over and over, but that doesn't make it true.

A mid-sized EV driven the German average consumes 300-400W averaged over the year or about the same amount of energy as a mercury street light bulb.

Additionally Solar alone has a much higher limit than any other generation method.

All thermal generation will cause direct global warming via waste heat if used to excess.

Fossil fuels have an order of magnitude or two more thermal forcing via GHG, so it's largely irrelevant there, but solar can produce a couple orders of magnitude more energy than the world uses now without significant land use. As such fusion (with the exception of p-B or He3 direct conversion with no steam engine which is a bit more scifi) hits thermal limits before solar hits land limits.

Intuitively you can frame this as "a small fraction of the amount of sunlight that hits the planet is the amount of energy that changes the planet's temperature" which is basically a tautology.

You're still trying to spread the "90% of nuclear waste is recyclable" myth, but now you've retreated to the bailey of "getting 10% more energy is technically getting something out of it so saying it is recyclable is totally true even though this has no impact on mining or the dangerous parts of waste!!" You're also pretending it magically makes the Pu240 and Am241 go away.

Reprocessing yields a small fraction of leftover fissile material. It is in no way characterisable as recycling.

The strategy is a very boring and tiresome propaganda move that is part of the Duke Energy and Rosatom astroturfing playbook. As is the "who me? I couldn't possibly be slyly trying to imply nuclear waste is actually fuel" act.

The answer is trivial.

Stop spending billions on a "war on drugs" and make sure people have houses and healthcare (including mental health) unconditionally with no ridiculous hoops or welfare traps 10 years before they become a street junkie.

Just because some places misused a bunch of money doing very stupid things with it doesn't validate ignoring the solution.

There's moderate consensus that there's a theoretical basis that this material should be an interesting candidate for a high temperature superconductor but is not a favourable output of the recipe used to make it.

Additionally there are now 4 independent reports (including the original and a highly prestigious chinese university) of it exhibiting diamagnetic properties (with no theoretical basis for non-superconducting diamagnetism).

This is more than enough evidence to say that the most reasonable interpretation is a room temperature superconducting material that sucks and is hard to make.

Upgrading that to a high confidence claim that the original research is reproduced will take a few weeks at least, so no super excitent yet, but the claim is fairly solid.

Ah. So intentional then. You're trying to pretend extracting the <0.7% left over U235 and Pu239 (for a 10-15% increase in U235 fuel economy) is somehow fissioning U238.

Except those reactors are off 30-50% of the time due to shoddy construction, €1.5/W in 2023 money is pure fiction, and overnight costs with free capital aren't real costs once you adjust for inflation and stop cherry picking the first reactors before negative learning rates kicked in.

You can't amortise your capital if just the variable operating and maintenance is more than replacing the reactor with firmed renewables. This is not the case yet, but betting that renewables won't halve in price one more time in 30 years is a pretty stupid bet.

Mean and median lifetime of a nuclear reactor is well under 30 years. Closer to 20 if you count all the ones that produced for 0 years.

Burning all actinides is pure scifi. Nothing close to it has ever happened.

Nor has a full fuel cycle of a thorium reactor burning the primary fuel (U233) to similar burnup levels as a traditional U235 reactor hecause the waste is so much harder to handle and the salts are so corrosive.

Thermal Fusion is much more limited than solar as an energy source. It may be useful for niche applications, but waste heat alone limits it to a tenth of the power available from solar on just the built up areas.

SMR's are even worse than the big ones. With no breeding and small, lower temperature steam generators they'd be undsr half as efficient as a traditional LWR. The fuel costs (which will only go up as the easy uranium is tapped out) alone would exceed the current all-in cost of renewables (which are still dropping rapidly).

You're conflating leftover dregs of Pu-239 (about a 10-15% boost in energy per fuel input) with non-fissile material like U238. Breeder reactors required to use the second have never been used commercially in breeding mode.

You've either fallen for or are intentionally spreading a lie.

LWR fuel is incredibly limited without a massive fleet of breeders (and no breeder has ever run a full fuel cycle, nor has second generation MOX ever been used. First generation MOX is also incredibly polluting and expensive to produce).

The industry is already on to tapping uranium ore sources that are less energy dense than coal, and this is to provide a few % of world energy for a handful of decades.

Which is fucking bizarre because the coal mines they're dredging it for provide a small fraction of the jobs the tourism industry in that area does.