Reply #15: Nuclear fuel costs and supply [View All]

[AuldLochinvar]

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), which in April 1986 proved itself immune to meltdown from operator neglect, consumed its own long-lived radioactive products, and required only an initial load of enriched uranium to enable it to use ²³⁸U for the rest of its life (50 years or more), would make the supply of raw uranium last for 140 times as long, and could equally well use thorium. There is enough of these in the ash from a year's worth of coal combustion in a 1000 MW (electrical) power generator to run a 1000 MW IFR for at least three years.

There is enough uranium and plutonium cluttering up dump sites to supply power at the present rate for hundreds of years, and the fission-product-only waste from a reactor that does on-site reprocessing disappears in hundreds of years, not hundreds of millennia.

see http://web.archive.org/web/20071009064447/www.nuc.berkeley.edu/designs/ifr/anlw.html
or http://skepticva.org/EnergyIndependence.html
or http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html