
New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD - xhrpost
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/22/oceanic_uranium_mining_tech/
======
rauljara
"Since the Fukushima meltdown - as a result of which, not a single person is
set to be measurably harmed by radiation - we know that nuclear power is
safe."

It seems to me like the primary danger from radiation like that leaked from
Fukushima would be an increase in cancer. I think it's a little early to be
claiming that Fukushima will cause no increase harm to humans. There is
already evidence that it caused harm to the surrounding environment, though
butterflies are admittedly much more fragile than humans.

[http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/14/13274288-study...](http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/14/13274288-study-
japan-nuclear-disaster-caused-mutated-butterflies?lite)

~~~
jellicle
Hah. The Register takes the IAEA statement, which says "To date no health
effects have been reported in any person as a result of radiation exposure
from the nuclear accident.", and turns it into the very different statement
that no one WILL be harmed. I would give that a classification of Liar, Liar,
Pants on Fire.

Even though probably not very many people will get cancer that is traceable to
the Fukushima disaster, it comes at a price -

[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LdLr5QPqPgI/Tukyjp5ZdRI/AAAAAAAAOL...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LdLr5QPqPgI/Tukyjp5ZdRI/AAAAAAAAOLo/oq69MDZiFi8/s640/Fukushimazone.png)

\- permanently abandoning several large towns.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I agree that the Register, and Lewis Page in particular, tend to roll some
what fast and loose, but that is why I don't go to them for authoritative
news, mostly for puns.

That said, this is inaccurate:

 _permanently abandoning several large towns._

As part of the process this risk is being evaluated, and while there are spots
where some isotopes have concentrated (and will be cleaned up) the amount of
radiation in all of the towns of Fukishima Prefecture is still less than the
radiation the residents of Denver receive [1] [2]. So once the towns have been
surveyed people will be allowed to move back. Reading the Economist the
biggest challenge is that the Government would like to coalesce some towns to
save money but that is causing complaints.

[1] <http://www.epa.gov/radtown/cosmic.html>

[2] <http://isis-online.org/risk/tab7>

------
anigbrowl
I'm pro-nuclear, but I can't take this writer's hand-wavey dismissal of the
risks seriously.

~~~
ZoFreX
Honestly, I don't think it's that hand-wavey when nuclear has killed less
people ever than coal does every year.

~~~
anigbrowl
People are more frightened of things they don't understand, so effective
advocacy of nuclear power requires making the effort to bridge the information
gap. Also, people find concentrated acute harm more scary than dispersed
chronic harm, which is why the idea of a plane crash is more disturbing than
the larger number of people killed in road accidents.

~~~
baq
i think that the biggest problem is the potential for making places on our
planet unsuitable to live in forever (for all practical purposes). people look
at chernobyl and see a place that will be dangerous to all life long after
they're dead. they don't want that to happen again. fukushima is potentially
the next such place, albeit on a lower scale.

the fact that radiation doesn't hurt doesn't help either. if our civilization
ever falls, chernobyl will be a place cursed by gods.

~~~
rbanffy
I don't think there are any Chernobyl-like reactors in operation today. Even
if the design of reactors like ones at the Fukushima plant may be considered
horribly flawed (they _should_ be able to cool themselves passively, with no
external power input whatsoever, after someone hits the scram button) the
magnitude of the disaster is much smaller.

An article posted here a couple days back mentions the hot zones around
Fukushima are 3x less radioactive than downtown Denver. This is something to
think about.

Also, we must consider what other options we have for power generation. Can
solar, wind and hydro generate all the power we need? How long until we can
build economically viable fusion plants?

~~~
wazoox
> _An article posted here a couple days back mentions the hot zones around
> Fukushima are 3x less radioactive than downtown Denver. This is something to
> think about._

Radiation is like cancer: one word to describe many different, related
phenomenons. Denver radioactivity comes from radon, which is a relatively
harmless gas as long as you allow it to disperse rapidly. OTOH pollution from
nuclear accidents mainly comes from caesium which mimics calcium and get
fixated on bones, thus provoking long, continuous, deep exposition to
radiation.

~~~
rbanffy
The numbers quoted in the article were, IIRC, about cellular damage and aren't
dependent of the isotope the person was exposed to. I agree some radioactive
materials are much more dangerous than others and a noble gas has less chances
of ending up in important molecules inside your body, but if the scale
measures damage, not exposition, I assume they are equivalent.

------
DanielBMarkham
Let's reverse the logic. Instead of talking about how much radioactive
material we're pulling from the ocean, how much could we put in?

Am I mistaken in saying that we could put back in every bit of radioactive
material we'd use until 5000AD and only double the natural background
radiation amount?

I know the math isn't exact -- it's not a symmetry -- but on a rough-order-of-
magnitude basis, is that a reasonable conclusion?

~~~
ars
> but on a rough-order-of-magnitude basis, is that a reasonable conclusion?

No. Uranium is barely radioactive. In contrast the waste from a power plant is
very radioactive.

Radioactivity is directly related to half life: The longer the half life, the
less radioactive, and the reverse as well.

Uranium 235 has a half life of close to a billion years, and 238 (the much
more common kind) of nearly 5 billion years. So it's barely radioactive.

Once you "cook" it in a reactor you generate all sorts of isotopes with much
shorter half lives (so none exist naturally in any quantity). Those isotopes
are also much more radioactive. The good thing is that the very powerful ones
don't last long.

The "worst" isotopes are the medium lived ones. Short enough to be
radioactive, long enough to last for centuries. Of those Strontium-90 and
Caesium-137 are the main ones.

Now you also know why nuclear fuel reprocessing is a great idea. The uranium
left behind after a pass through a reactor has not been changed (it's not any
more radioactive than it was before it started) - you can isolate it
chemically and use it again (only a small amount actually burns each time).
You still need to deal with the dangerous stuff, but the quantity is massively
reduced. (Technically you can burn that as well in a reactor to other shorter
lived isotopes, and essentially destroy any hazard, but I don't believe anyone
does that.)

Just to respond to your actual idea, there are proposals to bury waste in
subduction zones. You can find more about it via google
<https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+subduction+zone>

~~~
ChuckMcM
The DoE actually did extensive research into subduction encapsulation and
while expensive (you are working at depths that crush most stuff we build up
here) was technically quite acceptable (their design ended up essentially
drilling what amounted to bore holes 5000' below the surface and dropping in
waste from the top until its half full then covering it up and moving on. The
advantage was that containment was expected to be lost but the material would
diffuse into the mantle. In terms of cost though is was a couple of decimal
orders of magnitude higher than Yucca Mt.

Why folks wont let engineers reprocess it and use a fast breeder to incinerate
it is simply fear. (well and the fast that a fast breeder can also make stuff
you don't want made)

~~~
ericd
So we'd essentially need a very tightly controlled fast breeder reactor or 20
that handle the world's less pleasant nuclear byproducts? It seems that if the
breeder reactor is cohabitated with the reprocessing facility, most of the
danger would be nullified (I imagine that transport is the riskiest part). Or
perhaps people simply don't want those things to exist in concentrated form,
ever, to eliminate the risk of someone getting their hands on it.

~~~
DennisP
Argonne National Laboratory tested a cohabited breeder called the Integral
Fast Reactor. The reprocessing would happen on-site, using a process similar
to electrolysis which never separates plutonium from the other transuranics.
The material would never be in a form usable for bombs, and making it bomb-
ready would be more difficult than just enriching uranium. But the fast
neutrons in the reactor would easily burn up those transuranics.

What's more, they had very good passive safety. Fukushima had problems because
it lost external power. Argonne shut off the power to their test reactor, and
it just quietly shut down with no damage, simply due to the physics of the
fuel and coolant.

They had it just shy of production ready when Clinton shut it down in 1994.
But GE-Hitachi has a design derived from it, called the PRISM. The NRC has
approved it for a demonstration reactor, and they're currently trying to sell
it to the U.K. to destroy their plutonium stockpile.

Since the reactor can use U238, it's about a hundred times as efficient with
uranium. Combining that with seawater extraction gives us fuel for a very long
time: <http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/01/nuclear-options/>

A pretty good book on all this was just put online for free, here:
[http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescription-for-the-
planet...](http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescription-for-the-planet.html)

There's also a new book by two lead researchers from the Argonne project,
called Plentiful Energy, by Till and Chang. That one goes into quite a bit
more technical detail. Another good online source is here:
[http://bravenewclimate.com/integral-fast-reactor-ifr-
nuclear...](http://bravenewclimate.com/integral-fast-reactor-ifr-nuclear-
power/)

~~~
ScottBurson
Steve Kirsch has a rather breathless but nonetheless informative summary here:
<http://skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifr.htm>

Personally, I incline to the view that until we have a viable fusion option,
it's worth building some IFRs.

------
JoeAltmaier
I really thought this was going to be about Thorium. Surprise - its about
extracting Uranium from seawater.

~~~
mrinterweb
I can not figure out why more effort is not put into thorium nuclear
technology research. The only reason I have heard why thorium is not being
considered is because it is not weaponizable. Are there any other reasons why
thorium based nuclear fission is not being pursued as an energy source?

~~~
ars
> Are there any other reasons why thorium based nuclear fission is not being
> pursued as an energy source?

Mainly because we don't need it. It's got some advantages, sure, but not
enough of them to make it worthwhile to spend on the money on it.

~~~
pstuart
Its proponents seem to think that it would be significantly cheaper and safer
[citation needed], which sounds worthwhile.

Could briefly expound upon your reasoning?

~~~
ars
I agree - it probably would be significantly cheaper and safer.

But it will also cost a lot of money to develop, and even though it's safer,
it's still nuclear, i.e. opposition to it will be unchanged. The worst is some
people are demanding that they be installed with full containment domes, which
wipes out any cost savings.

Anyone who wants to actually install one will probably be stymied, so no one
wants to spend the money to develop something they can't use. And especially
not if it costs the same as a regular reactor.

Instead people just stick with the tried and true since it minimizes risk of
failure.

------
tokenadult
I thought that the Hacker News community was a lot more alert to avoiding
upvoting linkbait articles like this.

First of all, the entire main story point of the article is based on PRESS
RELEASES, not on peer-reviewed articles published in good-quality scientific
journals.

Second, even if a statement like the premise of the article were published in
a peer-reviewed article in a good-quality scientific journal, you would still
want to check the methodology of the study described in the article for the
"Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" that Google's
director of research, LISP hacker Peter Norvig, is always warning us about.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

Third, the article is about a public policy proposal, so it's not just about
physics, it's about economics and the psychology of the general public as
well. As Thomas Sowell has written, "The first lesson of economics is
scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it.
The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
What the public wants is as much energy as can be humanly desired, with total
safety, and at nil cost. The efforts of politicians to reconcile these
contradictory desires may very well result in a regulatory pattern that
doesn't let this new technology thrive. As a matter of economics, this
technology should only thrive if it genuinely provides a better cost-benefit
trade-off than other proposed energy technologies, which the article hand-
waves away as an issue.

Discussions on Hacker News are better if they are launched by submission of
better sources. This source, on this subject, is below general community
standards. We can learn more about new possibilities in energy technology from
(for example) Technology Review (several HN participants regularly submit
articles from that source) or The Economist (I am one of several HN
participants who submit articles from that source) or the better
professionally edited mainstream newspapers or general news weeklies. We don't
need to rush ahead to speculate about every new press release here.

~~~
ktizo
The register can be good on tech issues, however it just goes completely
mental if anyone mentions the words _climate, nuclear, green_ or _wikipedia_
anywhere within the editors earshot. Or if anyone shows Lewis a picture of
some guns.

After a while I have decided that the most likely explanation for their
behaviour is that they are mostly just trying to troll hippies and don't
necessarily actually believe a lot of what they print. Trolling the readership
is fairly common in the UK press anyway, the Mail having turned it into
something of an art.

------
lutusp
This idea only makes sense if the used-fuel disposal problem is resolved, and
it is not at all resolved. It would be like claiming that the coal supply is
unlimited, but without addressing the problem of emissions.

~~~
rosser
The used-fuel problem is already solved. The solution is just effectively
permanently blocked by NIMBY-ism.

~~~
pgrote
What is the permanent solution?

~~~
bdunbar
There are several.

One is to dump it in the Mariana trench, let nature push it back down into the
crust.

If we're foresighted, we'll bombard a crater in the moon with it. It won't go
anywhere, and if we need to get it back, there it is.

~~~
jfoutz
Space launch is risky, not just perceived as risky, actually risky. rocketry
isn't one of those 5 9's of reliability activities.

~~~
rosser
Two words: rail gun.

~~~
bdunbar
Cooler: space elevator

~~~
rosser
Cooler, yes; sooner, no.

------
gliese1337
The 5000AD date is admittedly just an estimate, but I am extremely sceptical
of any such prediction. It just depends too much on what new uses for lots of
energy we might come up with over the next thousand years. How many people
will there be to use it? What standard of living will they demand? And that
standard of living actually require more energy, or will other technological
advances make us far more efficient with the power we generate?

The article even states that different groups estimates of how long Earth's
uranium could last vary by more than a factor of 2.

~~~
TallGuyShort
I don't think it's an unfair way to express the estimate though. Sure, it
might not really last until 5000 AD, but to me it simply implies 3000 "years
of fuel", with a "year of fuel" being how we use fuel now. If energy
consumption goes up or down it doesn't really matter - I still have a sense of
how significant this energy source is.

~~~
aidenn0
Yes, but growth sucks. Assuming 3000 years in the article means what you think
it means, consider exponential and linear growth:

If energy usage doubles every 30 years (pulled that out of my ass, it's not
likely the trend but divides nice into 3000) then it will last us less than
200 years

If energy usage grows linearly increasing by the current amount every 30 years
(so in 2042 we are using double, and 2072 we are using triple) it's lasts us a
bit over 400 years.

~~~
gliese1337
And in any case, 3000 years is still finite. There will come a time, if we
don't go extinct or experience the rapture, when nuclear fuel will run out,
and we'll have to use renewables anyway. Fortunately, the sun puts out a
rather large amount of power, and even 200 years is a pretty good amount of
time for figuring out how to capture it better.

~~~
nickik
The question really is if going to something 'harder' now is worth while. We
do something more expensive (and have large oppertunity cost) to avoid problem
we will only really have in 200 years.

If you look at the change of technology in the last 100 years you can only
assume how small this problem will be then. I mean in 200 years using solar
energy will possibly be cheaper then fossil fuel, and if it is not we will be
better equiped to solve the problem then.

I do not want to say that we should not keep working in direction of renewable
energy but I think it is a valid question.

------
afterburner
The problem with nuclear power generation today is it's always way more
expensive than promised, in often unpredictable and sometimes not-easily-
quantifiable ways. Add the uninsurable nature, the constant risk of human
error/decision making increasing the risk factor (eg. not decommissioning old
plants), and waste problem, and it gets even less attractive. Meanwhile,
renewable energy and power grid improvements continue to be underfunded, and
everyone claims the only alternative is coal.

~~~
pjscott
It's not inherently more expensive than promised; that's caused by a
combination of first-of-a-kind construction and unpredictable political and
regulatory situations. In places like South Korea, where they have a more
reasonable regulatory situation and they build a bunch of each type of plant,
they've had a better track record with completing nuclear plants on time and
within an affordable budget.

~~~
justatdotin
"too cheap to meter" they promised.

------
eeeeaaii
In the article linked to from this article:

A preliminary report by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency has stated
that the response to the Fukushima nuclear incident was "exemplary" and that
nobody has been harmed by radiation exposure resulting from it.

That seems to contract what the Japanese government's own panel concluded:

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18718057>

~~~
ianb
The article on safety this article links to is a year older than the article
itself (though same author). It doesn't seem responsible to me to leave out a
year of analysis of the effect of Fukushima, and I don't think it's been a
particularly positive year. In some ways if Fukushima was a result of human
error (as that report indicates), then that's positive: it's resolvable. But
if we scaled nuclear power up to 10x what it currently is I would worry about
more human error, and introducing nuclear power to places that have even more
problems with reliability, or cultural problems with creating reliable
systems. A nuclear power plant in Nigeria? I'm sure there are very reliable
people who could staff and monitor the plant, and that those people could be
attracted to the jobs, but I don't trust the political infrastructure of the
nation to ensure that all actually happens. That no one uses shoddy concrete,
or pushes problems under the table instead of resolving them and opening
oneself up to blame, or manipulates risk assessment to protect their
personally acquired power in the working of the plant.

------
debacle
I think right now our biggest problem is not energy sources but energy
storage.

If we had an amazing vessel for energy storage, the sourcing problem would
become relatively moot - there's so much available passive renewable energy,
all we need to do is collect it.

------
jakejake
I decided to look up some of the authors previous articles and he has an
pretty impressive range of alien conspiracy theory and climate change related
articles including:

"NASA: WE'VE FOUND Four-toed NON-HUMAN FOOTPRINTS" "Martian lakes seen where
NASA Curiosity rover WON'T BE GOING" "Using Facebook causes less eco damage
than farting, figures show" "Climate was HOTTER in Roman, medieval times than
now: Study" "Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show"
"Amount of meat we eat will barely affect future climate change"

<http://search.theregister.co.uk/?author=Lewis%20Page>

------
fowkswe
as rauljara mentions, the claim that fukishima was victimless is a bit
bloated.

nothing i've seen or heard leads me to believe that nuclear waste management
is a sustainable thing.

this sounds like the oceanic equivelant of fracking.

~~~
cobrausn
_nothing i've seen or heard leads me to believe that nuclear waste management
is a sustainable thing_

Keep reading.

<http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf04.html>

Disclosure: Former US Navy radiological controls MOS.

------
SudarshanP
We seem to be discussing pros and cons of nuclear. But is this assertion of
reasonably extractable uranium from sea water even true? Considering the
source to be theregister, what I would like to know is whether the energy
available as per the paper is really as big as claimed? or is it just clever
math? Keeping aside the issue of waste disposal, are the costs really that low
or is the cost cleverly buried elsewhere?

~~~
justatdotin
this is an old non-story. the energy required to extract the low levels of
uranium from huge volumes of seawater outweigh the energy that uranium can
produce as fuel for a nuclear power reactor.

------
FlorianMettetal
Shouldn't we be conserving nuclear fuel for space flight and other operations
where you require a very dense power source?

~~~
ars
Why conserve it? There's tons of it.

------
rorrr
5000AD estimate is complete bullshit. Our energy consumption doubles every ~20
years (15 to 35 by various sources).

In only 10 doublings (200 years) our energy consumption will increase 1,000
times.

After 20 doublings (400 years), it will increase 1,000,000 times.

I expect by then we will be using mostly fusion and/or the energy of the Sun
(and/or some new energy source).

~~~
learc83
Don't you think we might not stay on that curve forever?

At some point growth in access to western amenities (climate control,
transportation, better food) will level off, and population growth will level
off.

Also in 1000 years we'll have athletes who finish races before they begin.

~~~
rorrr
> _Don't you think we might not stay on that curve forever?_

Not forever, but the exponential growth is inevitable while the resources are
available and are used more and more efficiently.

