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...Lesson for Nasa! US Airmail and Aviation
In article .com,
Hyper wrote: ...and the limits imposed on fission by uranium supply. Isn't the problem of supply obviated by using breeder reactors? If you build the breeder reactors, and the corresponding reprocessing plants; there are non-trivial political obstacles to doing so, not to mention some remaining technical issues with existing breeder designs. And what about the kilotons of U238 in storage? What about them? U-238 isn't a reactor fuel, not without breeding. Likely recoverable reserves of U-235 (not counting seawater and granite, both of which are very difficult to mine economically) correspond to about 300 TW-yr of energy. Unfortunately, world power demand is going to grow by tens of TW in the next half-century, so that just isn't enough to base a long-term energy infrastructure on. Breeding -- preferably U-233 from thorium rather than Pu-239 from U-238 -- would fix that, but it means restarting breeder-reactor technology work quickly, and then building a lot of breeder reactors and reprocessing plants in a hurry. -- spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | |
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