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NovaVeles | 3 years ago

Do not mistake technical viability with economic viability. The 1st Breeder reactor went into service in 1962, there have been many after and they have all meet the same fate.

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!

discuss

order

panick21_|3 years ago

The reason for this is that commercial adoption happened with PWRs and after that the nuclear companies had no need to commercialize anything else.

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.

josephcsible|3 years ago

It might be cost-prohibitive now, but is there any reason to think that it can't get cheaper?

defrost|3 years ago

The entire history of mineral and energy extraction tells us that once dense deposits are exhausted extraction costs substantally increase even in the face of more sophisticated technology.

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.

Schroedingersat|3 years ago

> Yes, they can breed their own fuel but the total cost of doing it is wildly prohibitive.

You're being too generous. It's could theoretically not can. An actually closed fuel loop has never happened.