
Uranium Seawater Extraction Makes Nuclear Power Completely Renewable - hirundo
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable
======
AngryData
This is good news, unless we pull viable fusion power out of your asses in the
next 20 years I don't see any way to power our world without nuclear power.

Sure, we can replace our current day electrical needs with solar panels, but
there are many non-electrical energy sources, primarily chemical, that we
utilize from fossil fuels and other mined minerals.

Fertilizer for example, it uses a good portion of our world's total power
needs, but at the same time we are only inputting a fraction of the power
required to produce it via electrical means. There is a ton of potential
energy utilized chemically from fossil fuels, which in most cases for
fertilizer production is natural gas. The carbon from that natural gas usage
ends up in the environment just the same as burning it. There are ways to not
use natural gas, we can seperate elements from the air and from water, but
that takes like 100x more electrical energy to do. The same for plastics,
solvents, and pretty much anything else in the world that relies on some sort
of chemical processes, so pretty much everything.

So to truly become a renewable powered world, our estimates for the green
energy production needed are woefully inadequate. Multiply the amount of solar
panels required to power the world by 10, now how reasonable does it sound?
Pretty much every industry in the world is limited in some way by energy
production and in many cases we aren't going to achieve any truly meaningful
gains in efficiencies because of course there is a physical limit.

The only power source I can see that can compete with our requirements,
nuclear power. Right now that means uranium, in the future maybe we will have
thorium or whatever exotic shit, but uranium power production is well known
and well studied. The only problem with uranium power production, open pit
mining, all the rest are mostly relics from running 50 year old plants and
technologies that we haven't been able to replace due to political barriers.
The safety problems with nuclear plants are based almost entirely on the fact
that we are running the equivalent of Model-Ts for power and criticizing their
crash safety, while refusing to build new shit. The Fukushima plant for
example was built in the 60s based on designs from the 50s, it was designed
basically 15 years after nuclear power was first discovered. And here we are
now 70+ years later still using that same old shit. Imagine comparing a car
from the 40s to a car built today, they aren't even in the same realm of
engineering and safety and the 40s car already had decades of design
improvements.

------
laurentl
I hadn’t really thought about it before, but this makes clear that renewable
!= clean.

~~~
hirundo
Which renewable energy _is_ clean? Certainly not biomass as it exists. Wind
power requires mining of rare-earth metals, 200x as much material per watt as
a gas turbine and is an ongoing threat to birds, bats and the sanity of
locals. Solar power has notoriously toxic manufacturing and disposal waste.
Hydro horribly damages downstream ecosystems. There are probably some fairly
clean niche renewable techs like wave or thermal energy, but not enough to run
the economy.

How bad are these kinds of renewable uncleanliness compared to nuclear waste?
Honest question.

