Quote Originally Posted by Hornet331 View Post
what shintai said, just to add the actual uran production/consumption numbers:

as of 2007:
  • 41.279 tons world wide production
  • 64,615 tons required


most of the gap is filed by the scraping of nuclear warheads but they are limited.

new mines are comming online, but they cant keep up with the rising demand, now that everyone wants to build powerplants.

And even with the new reactor typs you have nuclear waste that has to be dealt with, as shintai mentioned.
True, but the point is that a fuel rod is considered depleted when only a portion of it's U235 has been split. If you reprocess, you get new fuel for the cost of reprocessing. Plus, less than 1% of uranium mined is U235 - what's used in normal reactors. The rest is U238 which can be transmuted into Plutonium 239 in a breeder reactor - and we have so much U238, we use it as artillery shells - that's what they're talking about when they say 'depleted uranium.'

The problem with plutonium is that it is very toxic - chemically as well as from radioactivity. By comparison, enriched uranium is relatively safe - in the sense that you can handle it without dying immediately. However we've been using plutonium 239 for decades in weapons so it is possible for it to be handled safely.

Reprocessing eliminates some of the waste storage issue, but yes, there is definitely a lot of stuff that has to be disposed of. However it won't necessarily have to be stored for 10's of thousands of years unless you think that our technology will never advance. Transmutation of elements into other elements is scientific fact, not fiction. You can't argue that in 10 or 50 or 100 years we won't have the ability to go back and transmute radioactive waste easily and cheaply. We still don't have a good understanding of what is going on in quantum mechanics. If you doubt that, then explain how something can exist as both a particle and a wave simultaneously - because that what quantum mechanics requires you to believe. We just accept this as fact and move on, but it doesn't make any sense in human terms. Even Einstein labeled quantum 'teleportation' as 'spooky action at a distance.' And as for Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, he said that he refused to believe that god played dice with the universe.

Personally I would rather see wind and solar be used over nuclear, but I'm not going to make the argument that nuclear can't be done either because it's too dangerous or we don't have enough fuel, because that just isn't correct.