Yes, they can breed their own fuel but the total cost of doing it is wildly prohibitive.
You can get gold/uranium/lithium from Ocean water, try and do it at a price people will actually pay for it. You can get minerals from space, so long as the market rate of $10 million a ton is viable... etc.
As always, if I get proven wrong - that will be a great day!
By the time Breeder research by government was happening the anti-nuclear movement of the 70/80 was already in full effect and research money was being cut and very few nuclear plants were being built so there wasn't much reason invest in commercial breeders.
Specially because fuel isn't that expensive in the first place and waste isn't actually a big problem either.
There are still other good reason to create breeders and if we are gone develop next generation reactors, we might as well go in that direction.
eg: Oil was once extracted by sucking it out of a surface pool with a pump .. and now we are fracking for gas fractions.
These "there are XXX tones at YY ppm (or ppb) of Z in the crust or ocean" calculations are almost always impractical wishful thinking economically infeasible bullshit.
For example:
Have a shot at guesstimating the tonnage and value of Palladium (used in catalytic converters) in the near vicinity of road surfaces - it falls there as by product waste.
Now have a stab at the cost of ripping up and processing the central north american road surface to extract Palladium.
Worth it?
It'll be cheaper once we abandon cities and roads, of course.
You're being too generous. It's could theoretically not can. An actually closed fuel loop has never happened.
[1] https://www.asme.org/wwwasmeorg/media/resourcefiles/aboutasm...
If we don't run out of nuclear fuel in 200 years, then we'll never do.
And we certainly have enough uranium to not run out of it for 200 years, with the current technology. No breeder reactors, or anything fancy needed.
CANDU reactors run on unenriched uranium [1]. This instantly gives a multiplier of 10. If the current reactors can run for a few decades, then switching to CANDU reactors we'd have fuel for a few centuries.
Why aren't we switching to CANDU design? Some new builds are projected [2], but overall they appear to be too capital intensive, compared to the more traditional light water reactors. Still if fuel availability were a concern, we'd switch to CANDU reactors and stop having any scarcity for hundreds of years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
[2] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Romania-adopts-d...
They do varying amounts of breeding to produce up to 50% of their energy from Pu, but the fuel source is always U235. Leaving more U238 with it in a HWR doesn't change this.
> And we certainly have enough uranium to not run out of it for 200 years, with the current technology
At the current (insignificant) portion of final energy they produce. Increase it 10x for just the current electrical grid and it's <20 years. Switch to SMRs which are inefficient and it's <10.
If you want people to take nuclear seriously, try telling the truth about anything at all at least once, ever.
I'm not sure HN is the place for this type of language.
Check the average discharge burnup.
1. Radioactive with a half-life short enough to be dangerous (e.g., not bismuth-209) but long enough that waiting for it all to decay isn't a feasible way of getting rid of it (e.g., not francium)
2. Produced by nuclear reactors
3. Not usable as a fuel source in any breeder reactors
If not, then why is there such a thing as nuclear waste?
They're just a fiction used for marketing and to buy social license for the plutonium separation facilities.
I don't know, but to me "not usable" and "not economically usable" don't sound quite the same.
But of course this articles assume you would build new reactors over time.
Fuel recycling and alternate fuels such as thorium might reduce storage burden by being able to burn up plutonium waste from traditional nuke plants.
And if we are going to use nuclear for the long term, using that 'waste' as fuel is clearly the thing to do, and we can simply burn all that stuff up and the remaining fuel only needs to be stored for 300 years.
Thorium is not needed for this, just better reactors.
