top | item 39923216

(no title)

tyler569 | 1 year ago

The best part about using nuclear for fuel generation is that you get to sidestep the biggest problem with nuclear - when you build a power plant you want to build it near people (who may object on safety grounds), but you can build a DAC fuel generator way out in the middle of nowhere.

Even better, you could build your nuclear DAC fuel generator in an old natural gas field, where there's ready-made transportation infrastructure for your product to where it's needed!

discuss

order

Kon5ole|1 year ago

>The best part about using nuclear for fuel generation

The main point of this operation is to utilize free surplus energy from solar and wind to store fuel for days where solar and wind can't produce enough. Free-as-in-beer surplus, since the energy would otherwise be wasted or sold at negative prices, like what we have been seeing lately in certain markets.

Nuclear can always produce electricity, so converting to fuel has no benefits it's just a loss compared to using the electricity directly. Also, nuclear electricity is never free but always very expensive because you need a large amount of very highly educated people and expensive infrastructure to deal with it.

>you can build a DAC fuel generator way out in the middle of nowhere.

If things go very badly with a nuclear reactor, there's no such thing as a "middle of nowhere" that's far enough away. The fallout from Chernobyl made certain foods as far away as the arctic circle unsuitable for human consumption.

lofenfew|1 year ago

Nuclear can always produce electricity, but spinning plants up and down takes time. More importantly, a nuclear plant has a design lifetime, and most of the cost comes from building the plant in the first place, not from the fuel. It therefore costs a lot of money to let a nuclear plant sit idle. Furthermore, building a small nuclear plant is almost as expensive as building a large one, because of the regulatory hurdles and the effort needed to design it. So not building a nuclear plant as big as you possibly can has a cost as well. The difficulty is that you then need a consumer capable of using all that excess power, which necessitates putting it next to large population centers, who are likely to complain about the risk of nuclear. Being able to build a large reactor out in the middle of nowhere, and be able to rely on always having a consumer for its power even if at a very low price would make it much more viable.