Secondly, it can't expand. There's not enough Uranium. Add 100GW a year of PWRs for ten years and you can't fuel them for more than a couple of decades (MOX is an expensive scam that saves 20% at best and releases more radiation than fukushima and tmi combined as a matter of course). Breeders might be viable, but they don't centralise power to Urenco and Rosatom so they were abandoned.
You're spreading a lie designed by the fossil fuel industry to delay renewables.
The largest environmental group, Greenpeace, has literally invaded a number of nuclear plants to protest government plans to permit new plants.
>>Secondly, it can't expand. There's not enough Uranium.
There's enough uranium and thorium for 2.3 million years of humanity's total global energy consumption x 1000.
Breeder reactors extract something on the order of 100X more energy from uranium than 2nd generation nuclear power plants, and that's the standard by which you have to judge the sustainability of fission feedstock resources.
Have similar protests in coal mines or fracking or oil wells or on fuel tankers ever done anything to slow down the fossil fuel industry? Did they send state sponsored terrorists to bomb an EDF ship and get away with it completely other than throwing a couple of patsies under the bus?
Greenpeace's objections have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the permits go through and the very idea that they have more power than the French, Chinese, Russian, and US military and nuclear industries combined is utterly laughable. You cannot possibly think anyone would believe such a ludicrous lie.
It's actually kind of heart warming that you think environmentalists have so much power. Why do you think they chose not to use it to stop coal, plastic or beef?
> Breeder reactors extract something on the order of 100X more energy from uranium than 2nd generation nuclear power plants, and that's the standard by which you have to judge the sustainability of fission feedstock resources.
Not until one exists that actually runs in breeding mode on a commercial scale and that's what you're proposing building. Until then there's about 40 years with the current fleet and the suggestion of building enough PWRs to make a similar contribution to renewables means there would be 20 even after doubling the fuel economy.
Suggesting that you could scale uranium mining 5x to provide the first load for a couple of thousdand PWRs, complete them all by 2030, and then design and build five times as many breeders to keep them fueled in the 20 years you had left so as not to decomission all your freshly built reactors is a ridiculous farce. And that wouldn't even cover all electricity, let alone primary energy.
Your narrative doesn't line up with reality. In Germany, the primary political force behind the decision to shut down the country's nuclear plants was the national Green Party. A similar dynamic is seen across numerous countries in the EU.
Greenpeace and other environmental groups have significant influence on the leading left-leaning parties, and are the most responsible for so many governments stopping nuclear power expansion.
>>Not until one exists that actually runs in breeding mode on a commercial scale and that's what you're proposing building.
We'll have such reactors long before we run out of uranium. And once operational, they will be able to use the stored waste from the non breeder reactors as fuel.
The shunning of nuclear power at the behest of so-called green parties and environmental groups like Greenpeace is why it has not grown massively as an energy source. If permits for new plants were actually issued at the pace that the economy needs, and especially if that were combined with next gen nuclear tech got anywhere close to as much funding as solar/wind for deploying generation potential, the technology would have rapidly progressed, and today would dominate energy sources.
The reality is the PWR industry is just a bunch of liars, grifters and scammers that came into a cash cow as part of a program to force tax payers to fund weapons programs, and now they're crying because they didn't get to have a turn raping and destroying the planet and forcing every government on the planet to be subservient to Framatome, Urenco and Rosatom. Fossil fuel interests are amplifying their voice because they know every dollar spent on PWRs is a watt of fossil fuels that won't be replaced.
> We'll have such reactors long before we run out of uranium. And once operational, they will be able to use the stored waste from the non breeder reactors as fuel.
The most optimistic programs have breeders just barely producing a surplus in an experimental reactor in the late 2030s. You can't produce 100t of fuel for a PWR in a reactor that produces 30t and needs 28t for itself. PWRs are completely irrelevant for power generation and if your goal is to promote nuclear power rather than grift more money you'd be pushing for completely defunding all of the reactors in construction and planning and putting the money into breeder development.
> and especially if that were combined with next gen nuclear tech got anywhere close to as much funding as solar/wind for deploying generation potential, the technology would have rapidly progressed, and today would dominate energy sources.
It did. It's had trillions of dollars poured into it. Nothing happened. Noone in the nuclear industry wants it to happen because it would end the grift, and no-one in the military or government wants it to happen because any country with one can build bombs. China's probably the only exception because they mostly use their small minority of nuclear reactors for power (with a little bit of geopolitical domination on the side). The similar trillions poured into renewables created working power infrastructure the whole time, and now the cost is approaching the cost of just the steam generator portion.
You can disagree with them if you want, people are free to have their own priorities, but they correctly think that nuclear power is a hidden subsidy for nuclear weapons.
