I argue with merit & empirical facts that fission energy reactors with fuel breeding & fuel reprocessing are an essential non-carbon renewable energy technology important now & especially in the future when the Earth's crude oil & natural gas resources are significantly more depleted than today!
I promote nuclear energy on my Twitter channel @cosmicinglewood & as a college educated scientist believe with evidential support, the both nuclear fission & fusion are essential grid energy production technologies needed for the decarbonization of electrical energy production, especially to charge electric vehicle batteries & to provide a stable base-load generating capacity to stabilize grid energy system where intermittent renewable energy sources such as rooftop solar PV & wind power system are utilized domestically by home owners & business to generate renewable energy.
Many of the worlds leading scientists & many Nobel Prize winners support Nuclear Energy technology because it has very compact tightly controlled well contained waste, offers great uptime of up to 18 months with 24/7 power production that can be throttled to match changing grid loads, known as load following.
Today, electrical energy generated with a mix of cheap natural gas, coal, oil, hydroelectric, wind power, geothermal, wave & tidal energy, micro-hydro, solar PV, solar thermal, concentrated solar, kinetic energy capture, low energy nuclear reactions, classified ZPE & pre-commercial nuclear fusion reactor in the developmental & research stage on a path towards overparity or net energy return on investment, nearing the point when a commercial fusion reactor will produce more electricity than is consumed in its operation.
Fission reactors technology, as applied in the real world, has plenty of progress yet to be realized. Specifically many of the existing nuclear energy reactors are 2nd gen. units paid for by government funding, while state of the art 4th Gen. technology offers better neutron economy, actinide burn-up, low level nuclear waste & much less waste production, far better fuel economy, up to 94% of the fuel energy used to produce thermal energy to spin turbines to make electricity. Higher labor costs markets like America struggle to build older large scale nuclear reactors, going behind schedule & vastly over budget, with costs soaring to $6000 per installed MW, some 20x more than natural gas, the cheapest tech that can throttle power output quickly, as indicated by peeker natural gas generators that turn on to provide evening lighting & oven use energy.
Utility companies like natural gas reactors, because a natural gas burning co-gen turbine generator relative reliable, cheap to build & maintain, very efficient & clean burning & offers a lower capital cost initial outlay attractive to investment with faster ROI that other competing technologies.
Wind Power might be cheaper per kWh produced, but wind energy variable, only works when & where the wind happens to be blowing, intermittently & thus has poor capacity factor & poor load following. The same can be said about the weaknesses of rooftop solar PV systems on homes. They are often making energy, during the summer, when less energy needed in some locals, & where the home utility customers energy use timing does not align with when the panels are making power. Net metering with the utility can help with up to 1% of the grid energy coming from home owner rooftop solar PV arrays, but really to make good use of it at home, a big energy storage system (battery, needed to save the solar PV energy for later use when the electricity more useful, at night, for computers & TV's & lights & bulbs & appliances, or early in the morning before the sun rises enough to strike the PV panels.
Renewables really the main idea here. Nuclear fuel cycles that convert fertile elements to fissile elements & that can take existing nuclear waste from older reactors & make it into cleaner burning fuels for newer reactors & the ability to breed nuclear fuel elements with applied nuclear physics technology, it offers the ability to make tracer elements for medical imaging techniques, RTG fuel elements for drones & rovers & space probes at NASA.
You have to look beyond Nuclear Energies higher LCOE or leveled cost of installed capacity. The grid power system is not the stock market, & next quarters energy product does not need to be constantly increased to meet demand in mature markets like America, at least no in the short run. Yes, we need more electricity to improve human life on Earth for more people in more places & sadly a lot that energy coming from burning carbon & making air pollution.
Look at the long term ROI for existing nuclear energy reactors, 9000% or more. Sure, the funding has to be caught up in the reactor build & fueling & tuning & getting it online, for up to 20 years, to pay for everything including nuclear waste management. Thats why private capital nearly a dead end, except with passionate billionaire angle investment to build out capacity where government unwilling, especially SMR arrays & new intrinsically safer nuclear reactor technologies that are light years ahead of the common gen. 2 reactors operating worldwide today.
The pentagon, significantly in the navy, funds & manufactures company nuclear thermal & energy reactors for nuclear submarines & aircraft carriers. Using highly enriched uranium, these defense sector reactors are tiny with great output & only require refueling every 2 years & work 24/7 that whole time to make warm air, hot water, steam, electricity & heat energy for other processes like thermal sterilization. SMR development today kind of like the city scale reactors or large neighborhood reactors in terms of power output, less than 300 MW electrical. VSMR can be as small as 3KW thermal & 1 KW electrical as NASA proven in their Kilo-power system for the Artemis program, moon colony development thats upcoming, emergent, trending & popular with the general public. I am hopeful that this will enhance the nuclear renaissance or renewed worldwide interest in Nuclear Energy Reactors!
Burning up dangerous long lived nuclear waste as fuel in newer reactors offers a solution to the stockpile of built up nuclear waste. Even the C14 rich graphite thats a good portion of existing nuclear waste, can be burned up in reactors designed to use it as fuel or neutron contributing moderators.
I can hear the academics from the nuclear industry crying fuel about nuclear fuel recycling or reprocessing because of its toxic radioactive chemical elements as liquids, gases & solids, salts & acids & bases / yes - thankfully the governments of USA & France & Japan already invented ways to reprocess spent fuel from operating nuclear reactors & how to make new fuel & energetic materials for nuclear weapons manufacturing.
We do not have to reinvent the wheel here, just apply what is already know & get the NRC to fast track some 4th Gen. IFR integral fast reactor *(breeder reactors) that benefits from an over parity fuel cycle that makes more fuel than it consumes in its energy generating operation. Using the fuel breeding technique, applied broadly, in thousands of nuclear reactors, could make renewable electricity for 10 billion people for millions of years, thus making it renewable in the traditional sense of long term energy potential.
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