My impression is that this is a PR push, designed to avoid having to invest in renewables, and let them keep on burning gas and coal, rather than something likely to come to fruition.
My impression is that this is a PR push, designed to avoid having to invest in renewables, and let them keep on burning gas and coal, rather than something likely to come to fruition.
How is that FUD? A fuel rod lasts about 3-5 years. And there is no permanent storage place in the US (or any other countries for that matter) or reprocessing technology being developed anywhere. So in a decade, if they are running several reactors, they’ll have a bunch of rods sitting in giant pools with nowhere safe to put them.
If you… say so.
Are you sure?
Stop FUDing, i’ll stop feeding the troll,
Your links proved my point, not the opposite.
France doesn’t have a storage place and desperately needs one. Same with Japan or the Fukushima disaster would have been much less impactful. They are closer to having one, but many scientists say their solution is not going to work permanently due to corrosion and earthquakes. Similar reasons to why the US stopped building their own storage facilities. They aren’t permanent enough and eventually will probably leak and require expensive, dangerous maintenance or abandoning the land, among other issues and cost overruns.
As for reprocessing, the basic science is there, and has been for a long time. But it never has been and likely never will be profitable thus the headline using the word “could” and no one having built a prototype reactor. Fusion tech is closer to a usable state than these and different reactors produce different waste that requires different reactors to reprocess partially. Then to further process, a different reactor is required, etc. It’s not a simple process and the energy it produces might pay for maintaining the facilities, but not for the development costs to turn theoretical technology into workable engineering designs or the construction costs.
Renewable energy is much more profitable when you include the cist of storage or reprocessing of nuclear waste, so as soon as companies have too much to store, they’ll leave the rest to taxpayers and move on.