this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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The oil and gas industry switched to the other side of that battle decades ago when they realised there was nowhere near enough high concentration U235 to make a difference and the alternative involved wind and solar thermal eating at least half their business (as wind and PV did, very nearly immediately, within 12 years of finally getting a tiny fraction of thebsubsidies nuclear recieved).
Coal power barons were on the other side from the second they started scamming tax payers to buy nuclear plants for them to have a monopoly on.
you don't need U-235 for nuclear power. In fact a Liquid Thorium-Fluoride thermal breeder reactor would be a more industrially useful nuclear design and Th-232 is available to power our civilization for a billion years (assuming no growth in energy consumption)
Sure, just like you don't need sunlight for PV because the ground emits IR at night (except the latter has actually been tested to completion at least once and works so is merely impractical rather than also fictional). No remotely viable breeding program has existed and no reactor has ever even run on the same material it transmutes from a non-fissile element.
Distractions about completely unrelated and completely technically and politically untenable technogies with half a proof of concept of the easy part don't change the fact that U235 limits the application of LWRs (the only reactor type anyone ever suggests building) to a small side-niche.
The breeder part is the production of U-233 (which is then fissioned and used to provide the neutrons for converting Th-232 into U-233 (with a chemical separation and decay storage step in between)) which although has a tight neutron economy is viable.
Working reactors for such designs were funded by the US airforce and they did operate as expected.
If you wish to argue that one will need U-235 as a startup fuel or that there are technical problems in large scale energy production it is not yet able to address, I would definitely agree on that; the technology needs more research before we depend upon it and that Uranium light water reactors are likely to be the running standard until such time and needed investment occurs. But we have enough U-235 in nuclear waste stockpiles to fuel our civilization for a thousand years to work out the details.
I know the theory and all the half-experiments. None ran a full load of fuel or reached steady state isotope mixture. None ran on what they bred. None even pretended to have a sustainable or economical separation process. It's scifi.
Accessible (ore as or more more energy dense than low grade lignite that isn't buried so deep it can't be extracted without emittingnmore than just using fossil gas) U235 resources assumed to exist (not found) are years to a couple of decades for the world's 2030 energy needs. Developing every known resource now would have zero impact on a net zero timescale. Even at current costs the raw uranium to run an SMR is at price parity with the module part of a PV installation.
Stop with the damn lies.