What Is Nuclear

Introductory, I’m quite fond of: https://whatisnuclear.com/ Lots of great takeoff points from here too.

https://whatisnuclear.com is another great site with information about nuclear energy

On this topic, see the excellent website https://whatisnuclear.com/ and its webpage about economics https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

His best lesson, in my opinion: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html His writing style is very good, and he succinctly summarizes the phenomenon where a technology that is substantially complete to the point that it has known issues is looked down upon while a technology that is purely "on paper" (the "paper reactor" as he calls it) is treated as a good alternative, since the paper technology isn't far enough along for the problems to even be known. That's not even a good TL;DR, so you should just read Rickover's essay.

It's not consumed. It's heated up a bit and returned to the water cycle. Not needed in Germany, but a 2 gigawatt nuclear plant can be hooked to a desalination plant that can make a billion gallons of fresh water from the sea, per day. It was once considered to use these to make agro-industrial parks. I recently got an archival film on this topic digitized and posted it here along with a bunch of technical papers: https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-01-30-no-greater-challenge-nuclear…

The one thing that's clear is that this makes tethers a more challenging engineering problem than a naive / uninformed view might have suggested. This is almost always the situation in engineering applications. The simple approach based on first principles turns out to be massively influenced by second- and higher-order effects. See Admiral Hyman Rickover's "Paper Reactors" for a classic take on this: <https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html>

From Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' memo (1953)[1]: "An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: 1. It is simple. 2. It is small. 3. It is cheap. 4. It is light. 5. It can be built very quickly. 6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”) 7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now." The whole paper is well worth reading, IMHO: [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html

I went snooping in your HN profile to find the link, and that is a really well done site. Clean design, relevant pictures, and interesting material. It's probably going to cost me an hour or two of productivity today. Link for people lazier than me: https://whatisnuclear.com/

> By a few thousand years, the most dangerous isotopes will be decayed. I wondered about this claim because it could easily be (dis-)proven by a curve. And no, it seems that the waste remains dangerous for quite a while due to actinides. See this curve: https://whatisnuclear.com/img/ingestion-radiotoxicity-nuclear-waste.pn… Now, people say that these actinides can be turned into non-dangerous things, which is great, but the P&T process has not been developed yet. It might turn out to be vaporware. See also: https://www.base.bund.de/EN/ns/ni-germany/transmutation/transmutation.…

3 great articles about nuclear energy: https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

- Get the IAEA Isotope Browser App for your Smartphone. Learn how to use it. - Read all history articles on https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html then follow your interests. - Use Wikipedia to the max! - Trust no one. Check everything! - The IAEA has a comprehensive study program. But I wouldn't recommend it as a starting point: https://www.iaea.org/topics/infrastructure-development/e-learning-for-…

Not to mention the waste associated with semi-conductors. Long term waste is not just a problem associated with nuclear. It is also worth mentioning that the major waste issues are associated with DoE weapon sites and not as much power sites. I would also encourage other's to click on acidburnNSA's profile as this is where their expertise lies and they have written extensively (with plenty of links) on the subject.[0] [0] https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html

It's always interesting to see how these companies can progress in a year[0]. Regardless though, for those curious, there's a great presentation by the CEO, Dr. Leslie Dewan on what TPT does differently[1]. The big selling point for their Molten Salt Reactor (compared to others) is that they designed it to be able to use low-enriched Uranium (fresh fuel, as opposed to spent fuel) and nuclear waste. The downside of this is that it can't produce the same volume of electricity that a normal nuclear plant can, but it's significantly safer, and can't be used to produce weapons grade uranium. For those interested in MSR's this serves as a good starting point too[2]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7922216 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UXXwWOImm8 [2] http://www.whatisnuclear.com/reactors/msr.html

> The real win is that thorium MSRs can eat the existing mountain of "spent" fuel rods from regular reactors That's not true. The spent fuel can burn in fast reactors. There are hundreds of molten salt reactor designs (see for example [1]), and some of them are fast reactors. But thorium MSR are not fast. That's the attraction of thorium, it can undergo transmutation (into protactinium, which then decays into fissile uranium-233) using thermal neutrons. Nobody is proposing thorium MSR as a solution to burn spent nuclear fuel. > So...Three decades? Maybe if the West keeps sitting on its hands. The West does not keep sitting on its hands. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of nuclear startups in the West, and they are actually making progress. However, thorium is hard. Very hard. Breeding plutonium from uranium is much easier than breeding uranium-233 from thorium. Here's a good post [2] about the thorium myths written by a former active HN forum member, Nick Touran. It's a good read. But, now, for an even better understanding, you can just ask ChatGPT, or any other LLM, how thorium breeder reactors compare to plutonium breeder reactors, and which technology is closer to reality. [1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/STI-DOC-010-489_web.pdf [2] https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html

I think your down votes are because people are tired of rebutting the same old anti-nuclear arguments. "Civilizationally" The evidence is nuclear has remained safer than alternatives well over half a century even when we have failed organizationally to do the right things (e.g. Chernobyl, Fukushima). IMO let us move on and use technologies that might prevent civilizational collapse rather than avoid them and make such a thing more likely. (Although it's unlikely under any scenario.) "Proliferation" as a product of civilian nuclear power has been studied and discussed for its entire history and has been disproven. There's no link. In general having civilian nuclear power allows more oversight by international bodies about what you're doing, whereas regimes pursuing nuclear weapons tend to pursue them in secret and using infrastructure fit for the purpose of producing weapons materials. "Fuel efficiency" simply isn't important when the fuel is so abundant and so cheap. We can afford to worry about that in future if we ever wind up building enough nuclear power it becomes a problem. If anything this is a good reason to stop freaking out about "nuclear waste" i.e. mildly used and 95% reusable fuel and leave that where it's been sitting perfectly safe for decades, above ground. If someone had the time they could mine every nuclear thread on Hacker News and pull out all the common tropes and rebut them someplace in a similar vein to Skeptical Science's list for Climate Change…

I used to be against nuclear energy. I have realized since then that since it is not nuclear energy itself but the not following of proven safe guards which are the problem. For e.g., nuclear energy is proven and safely run in many countries. There are many problem cases such as corruption in South Korea [1], the Japanese not ensuring that there was sufficient safeguards that they were told to implement but did not [2], improper design and lax adherence to safety procedures at Chernobyl [3][4][5] I had started to research about Nuclear Energy since I believed that as a supporter of the Environment and of Clean Energy I need to prepare myself to add my voice against Nuclear Energy ( this is the result of years of exposure to messaging that nuclear==bad). However, having participated in the electronic automation of factory plants (e.g. using SCADA, touch panels, PLCs and Drives from Siemens) and also having worked as an IT systems administrator, I have come to understand the need for proper design and safeguards and for following safety procedures. I am opposed to out-dated and flawed nuclear designs - e.g. what the French are trying to sell to India - and I am against corruption ( a given in India for such large value projects). However, I am also an hopeful that the world can use safer Nuclear designs such as Canada's CANDU, or even Thorcon's Thorium molten salt reactor technology (five plants to be implemented in Indonesia). When researching about Thorcon's design from…

> The main problems are 1) that catastrophic events can and will happen in the future. That's why nobody wants to live next to a nuclear power plant. The chances for such events are vanishingly low when it comes to modern reactors. Seriously, as hard as it is to believe, we've come so, so far from Chernobyl. Thorium-based reactors are meltdown-proof [0], and Thorium comes with the plus in that it's not as easily weaponizable [1]. > 2) Nuclear waste storage. Thorium reactors also produce less dangerous waste [2], which is great! They're not a panacea by any means- it is still technically possible to make weapons using Thorium reactors even if it's more difficult, and fuel is harder to prepare, but I do think the upsides greatly overcome the downsides. Solar and wind aren't viable everywhere, which is why we need nuclear. The sooner we get over our inveterate fear of it, as difficult as it may be, the better. [0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20090038711.pdf [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html#prolif [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257126696_Abundant_thorium_as…

> I have not the instruments for differentiating which is good and which is pushing an agenda, since it's not a clear case of partisanship (like you'd expect from articles pushed from 'the union of conservative scientists') It it a joke? "Mike Conley and Tim Maloney, long-time members of the Thorium Energy Alliance, have calculated what they call a “Worth-It Treshold” that gives the answer." Thorium Energy. Which never worked safely or economically, even if it's "promising" since around end of the WW II. https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium_myths.html It's a good approach to calculate the total costs, including the need for the gas plants, also for wind and solar, but the same has to be done for nuclear, not about the gas plants, but all aspects of direct or indirect subventions that nuclear also had or is assumed to get, including again the totals of the whole infrastructure and all aspects of handling the waste etc. E.g. the cost of nuclear has to include the costs of Fukushima and equvalent events. Or if you worry about the nuclear bombs, the cost of somebody who shouldn't getting the bomb (even the dirt bomb) material.

Precisely. Especially when comparing the number of deaths(1) from then-China's favourite energy source or simply Uranium's efficiency(2) and the fact we know now how to recycle most of the waste(3) Sure, I prefer the solar too, but I agree the governance is the bigger problem in the example from the story. (1) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/rates-for-each-energy-source-in-de… and https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/10/new-nuclear-power-is-preventing-… (2) https://xkcd.com/1162/ (3) https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544214002035

"Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years" https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html

Thorium is not about to change the world. There's a lot of muddled nonsense going around about thorium for nuclear energy. https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html

It's not necessarily malice, it's very easy to underestimate the difficulty building and running a real nuclear reactor. The 1953 'Paper Reactor' memo still applies fully today: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html

Million times more energy dense, yes. More abundant? Depends. There's a lot in the sea, which isn't currently recoverable. There's a lot we could do (but actually don't) with breeder reactors to make more fuel. This means the answer to the question "how long could we last on just nuclear fuel alone?" varies from 5.7 years[0][1] to 4.3 billion years[1]. [0] https://globalwarming-sowhat.com/renewables [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html

With breeder reactors we have enough uranium to last us until the sun goes out https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html

Thorium based reactors have largely the same benefits and risks as uranium fueled reactors. See this page written by reactor physicist and HN poster acidburnNSA: https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html

Before the typical "nuclear is too expensive/takes too long to build" comments start: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html. Understand why this is the case and how it's entirely reasonable to fix those problems with sufficient will & funding.

billions of years of energy ? https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html#:~:text=Breeder%…

> No one knows where to put the trash They do, though. That is where the “trash” is. They have become so adept at it, they made a museum out of one facility[0]. Two misconceptions that benefit from being clarified: 1. There is very little waste for the amount of energy produced. If we only used nuclear, it would amount for 40 grams per person per year[1]. 2. The waste is not trash, it is extremely valuable. It was valuable in the ground, and it is still valuable out of the ground; just not for the particular reactor that it came from. [0]: https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preservation/ [1]: https://whatisnuclear.com/factoids.html

> You can't run the entire planet on nuclear power. Yes you can: https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-s…