Now nuclear power is good? At least Bill Gates says so

[Saltwater60]

Bill Gates: Stop shutting down nuclear reactors and build new nuclear power plants to fight climate change

Bill Gates told the Nuclear Energy Institute's Nuclear Energy Assembly that the United States needs to stop shutting down nuclear reactors and build new ones.

www.cnbc.com

 

[fresch]

I saw he and others are investing in a new one.

 

[Robin]

Okay Bill, how bout we store all that radioactive nuclear waste, which will remain lethal for millions of years, on your land.

Bill Gates Becomes the Largest Farmland Owner in the United States: Report

Fucking vampire.
Robin

 

[dsdmmat]

Nuclear energy is the only reliable green energy source that can power the modern world.
Just need to find a way to deal Spent fuel rods.

I know we can bore a hole to the center of the earth and deposit them in the molten core.

 

[Robin]

Its' not green, it's invisible and deadly for millions of years. Rods are not even a drop in the buckets of tonnage that must be dealt with.
Robin

 

[ManrisFrack]

What's the deal with molten salt reactors that use thorium? That seems like the way to do nuclear power. Extremely low risk of meltdown, and much less waste to deal with.

 

[dsdmmat]

Its' not green, it's invisible and deadly for millions of years. Rods are not even a drop in the buckets of tonnage that must be dealt with.
Robin

It is green in the sense it produces no emissions like other energy (oil, gas, coal, wood) sources. The problem as you stated is the waste. Once we figure out how to deal with it, Nuclear energy will be the power which leads us into the future. The problem in the US is since 3 mile island nobody wants it in their neighborhood.

 

[Steal2B]

Okay Bill, how bout we store all that radioactive nuclear waste, which will remain lethal for millions of years, on your land.

Bill Gates Becomes the Largest Farmland Owner in the United States: Report

Fucking vampire.
Robin

Actually it is not waste. Only a small percentage is consumed and it should be reprocessed but Jimmy Carter shutdown our Breeders used to reprocess fuel to keep daughter Amy happy. Our heirs will one day be retrieving the fuel to reprocess and curse us for being stupid, not following the science, and bowing to the wackos.

 

[Jsmegs77]

One day it’s “Nuclear bad”, the next it’s “Nuclear good”. Waffle much? I guess there’s a reason they say all these people have more money than brains.

 

[FS1040]

Nuclear is safe and clean. If we could recycle the cores, we would have very little waste.

 

[Jmac00]

Im amazed someone hasn't taken a shot at Gates or Zuckerberg.

 

[spat]

It is green in the sense it produces no emissions like other energy (oil, gas, coal, wood) sources. The problem as you stated is the waste. Once we figure out how to deal with it, Nuclear energy will be the power which leads us into the future. The problem in the US is since 3 mile island nobody wants it in their neighborhood.

Dealing with the waste is a political problem, not a technical one.

We know how to deal with it very well.

What we don’t know how to do is to get those solutions implemented.


Every nuclear reactor in the US today is storing every bit of their spent fuel on site.

We've got 70 years of experience in doing that.

The problem is that people opposed to nuclear power are demanding it be a perfect solution. Perfect doesn't exist. All it needs to be is a significant improvement over what we've got. It easily meets that bar.


So, a plan to store the fuel for 100 years is more than enough. But people demand that todays solution needs to last for 10,000.

In 100 years we will either have a much better solution, or it won't matter. But the nuclear opponents are demanding that the storage remains safe even after a complete collapse of civilization.

I for one don't care if people in some future mad max world aren't smart enough to avoid the strange drums of stuff that stays warm on it's own.


It's like self driving cars. People demand they are perfect and never cause an accident. But that is not the correct criteria. The drivers they would be replacing aren't perfect.

The self driving cars just need to be noticeably better than the average human driver. That is not a very high bar to meet.

 

[Phauxtoe]

He wants one so it can leak and De-Populate the world
He most likely has a bunker for him his family and friends

 

[SonOfSun]

What's the deal with molten salt reactors that use thorium? That seems like the way to do nuclear power. Extremely low risk of meltdown, and much less waste to deal with.

MSRs are great for power generation. They didn't take off because the byproducts weren't suitable for nuclear weapons, sonething the govt. really wanted in the 50s and 60s.

 

[Robin]

One day it’s “Nuclear bad”, the next it’s “Nuclear good”. Waffle much? I guess there’s a reason they say all these people have more money than brains.

Kind of like eggs, coffee and a shit ton of other things we enjoy, one day they are Gods' wonder, the next a curse on all man kind.
Robin

 

[spat]

MSRs are great for power generation. They didn't take off because the byproducts weren't suitable for nuclear weapons, sonething the govt. really wanted in the 50s and 60s.

Well, no commercial reactor produces material suitable for weapons.

AFAIK all the plutonium in all the US weapons comes from one reactor that is *not* suitable for power production.

Research reactors and power reactors are *very* different designs.

The plutonium produced in a commercial reactor is a mix of Pu239 and Pu240.

You cannot build a nuclear bomb if there is any significant amount of Pu240 in the core.

It would be much *much* easier to dig up some uranium and enrich it to weapons grade than it would be to extract the Pu239 from the Pu239/Pu240 mix produced in a commercial reactor.

I am not sure it's even possible to remove enough of the Pu240 from commercial waste to make a bomb with current technology.

It is *much* harder to separate Pu239 from Pu240 than it is to separate U235 from U238.

You also don't have to eliminate all the U238 from your nuclear core to make a bomb. IIRC you can make a bomb with even 50% U238.

OTOH, even a fraction of a % of Pu240 in your core will make it impossible to use.

 

[SonOfSun]

Well, no commercial reactor produces material suitable for weapons.

AFAIK all the plutonium in all the US weapons comes from one reactor that is *not* suitable for power production.

Research reactors and power reactors are *very* different designs.

The plutonium produced in a commercial reactor is a mix of Pu239 and Pu240.

You cannot build a nuclear bomb if there is any significant amount of Pu240 in the core.

It would be much *much* easier to dig up some uranium and enrich it to weapons grade than it would be to extract the Pu239 from the Pu239/Pu240 mix produced in a commercial reactor.

I am not sure it's even possible to remove enough of the Pu240 from commercial waste to make a bomb with current technology.

It is *much* harder to separate Pu239 from Pu240 than it is to separate U235 from U238.

You also don't have to eliminate all the U238 from your nuclear core to make a bomb. IIRC you can make a bomb with even 50% U238.

OTOH, even a fraction of a % of Pu240 in your core will make it impossible to use.

Maybe not today, but back then it was a big driving force. It was the cold war and the USA wanted nukes. Heck, the govt built reactor sites like Hanford mainly just to get the fissile material.

Nuclear reprocessing - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

​

Nuclear reprocessing is the chemical separation of fission products and unused uranium from spent nuclear fuel. Originally, reprocessing was used solely to extract plutonium for producing nuclear weapons.​

​

We had working LiFT reactor technology viable in the 60s. The govt. sought weapons grade fissile material instead. With perspective of the times, I don't blame them, but it is what it is.

 

[spat]

Maybe not today, but back then it was a big driving force. It was the cold war and the USA wanted nukes. Heck, the govt built reactor sites like Hanford mainly just to get the fissile material.

Nuclear reprocessing - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

​

Nuclear reprocessing is the chemical separation of fission products and unused uranium from spent nuclear fuel. Originally, reprocessing was used solely to extract plutonium for producing nuclear weapons.​

​

We had working LiFT reactor technology viable in the 60s. The govt. sought weapons grade fissile material instead. With perspective of the times, I don't blame them, but it is what it is.

They built Hanford specifically to make nukes. Hanford can make all the plutonium anyone ever wanted.

Remember, you only need a few pounds to make a nuke, no matter how big a nuke you want, and there is a practical limit for how many nukes you could ever use in a war. They are not like normal artillery rounds where you will be firing non stop for days expending tens of thousands of rounds per battery.


Nobody had any illusions that any of the commercial power plants, or even the military power reactors would ever produce an ounce of weapons grade material.

After Hanford the military reactor research was focused on naval reactors (with a brief foray by the airforce for the NB-36H

Basically, there was no need for better weapons producing reactors, what we had could do everything we could ever forsee wanting.

Nobody was ever thinking we'd ramp nuclear weapons production up to hundreds of thousands of devices.


Edit:

Plutonium: The First 50 Years

fas.org

I had forgotten about the Savannah river facility.

But that and hanford produced all the weapons grade plutonium we needed.

There was never a need to spend massive research on scaling up production with novel reactor designs. Just build a couple bigger versions of the existing ones.

Producing power with the weapons reactors was an after thought at best. like "oh, yea, we've got this waste heat, might as well use it for something".



You either design a reactor for weapons production or power production. You do not do both. Just like you can either build a vehicle for racing or cargo hauling, but nobody is spending serious time improving the lap times of dump trucks at the Nurburgring or increasing the amount of gravel you can haul with a NASCAR race car.

 

[Acer-m14]

windows 10 here just updated here again 2 days ago ,, now i got a weather notice on my task bar i didn't ask for . fking really ..

 

[togmaster]

windows 10 here just updated here again 2 days ago ,, now i got a weather notice on my task bar i didn't ask for . fking really ..

Yup. Trying to figure out how to get rid of that shit.

 

[Keyzard]

windows 10 here just updated here again 2 days ago ,, now i got a weather notice on my task bar i didn't ask for . fking really ..

Yup. Trying to figure out how to get rid of that shit.

Right click on any empty space in the taskbar - "News and Interests" -"Turn Off"

 

[SonOfSun]

windows 10 here just updated here again 2 days ago ,, now i got a weather notice on my task bar i didn't ask for . fking really ..

Just "disable" Windows update. You can't turn it off, but you can direct it to only get updates from a nonexistent WSUS server.

 

[prambo]

Yup. Trying to figure out how to get rid of that shit.

I was able to do it...but I forgot how - No shit!!!

Hate being old.

So I looked it up - here's a link, and that's what I did...I think??

How to disable the Weather widget from the Windows 10 Taskbar - gHacks Tech News