by TRB » 15 Mar 11, 2:22 pm
Lurk wrote:even though it's a good idea.
Except that us building nuclear plants isn't a good idea and that doesn't even have anything to do with any hazards or waste storage.
by 2020 china will have doubled the worlds consumption of nuclear fuel from what it is now, yet the forecast is that on current consumption there is about 70 years of commercially viable uranium left, after that it becomes way more expensive due to the amount of refining needing to be done to extract low grade ore.
so if china is building enough reactors to double consumption then the forecast, logically, would be halved, no?
additionally we don't have the facilities to make the cores so it'd be likely that we'd be getting in line with anyone else wanting them which means we'd not even be starting construction for 10-15 years after approval anyway.
instead of wasting all that money on something which isn't going to be a reality until, at best, 2030, why not position ourselves as world leaders in geo-thermal tech?
we already have the largest plants in the world running, why not put that money into improving their design [for instance by getting rid of the heat exchange part and making it a closed loop coil system on an 8km bore] and then we'd be the ones sought out for our clean, efficient and exceedingly safe power generation tech.
the biggest hurdle to overcome with geo-thermal currently is getting someone to py for the deep bores needed for an efficient system.
8km should be a minimum, currently less then 5km is a maximum.
we have the people who know how to do these things, it just needs the funding to get one running to prove to the laymen out there that it works.
its a far better solution then some short-term nuclear power plants and their 10,000 year waste.
