Availability of fuel is an issue. For 20 years, starting in 1992, the Megatons to Megawatts project arranged for the US to buy highly enriched U-235 from Russian warheads to be blended down into reactor fuel. Great idea, but it inhibited US uranium mining and enrichment capacity. By 2022, Russia was providing 50% of the world's enrrched uranium and 25% of fuel for the existing US fleet. In the present geopolitical climate, being dependent on Russia does not seem like an optimal scenario, as Germany discovered. It will take a parallel effort to improve US fuel capacity for this admittedly excellent idea to work. Perhaps getting rid of the now-ludicrous once-through fuel cycle, and copying France in reprocessing spent fuel, would go a long way to solving the problem.
Perhaps you have covered these issues elsewhere: small fission reactors offer a time-line that may be shorter than what it takes to build a conventional plant, but neither is likely in the time-frame needed to get to net zero and the waste problem remains. Fusion design has a great deal of appeal, but its potential for deployment is even murkier. Wind, solar and batteries are ready to deploy and aside from dealing with siting, permitting and even transmission is implementation achievable if we don’t get distracted with shiny pennies IMO.
This sounds like a great idea, but I'm not very optimistic about the chances of getting it past the NRC. Not to mention the political firestorm that arises from anything nuclear-related.
Had this been done in TX, we probably wouldn't have had the February fiasco. No worries about the lack of sun and wind; no worries about the lack of fossil fuel; no worries about too few interconnects to external power sources.
Now if we can just get by the NIMBYs...
One question – what is the likely "water intensity" of the nukes vs coal?
Great essay on great concept. The spoilers will accuse the supporters of racism if we push to place these in the midst of the disadvantaged. I suspect that the first few will need to be near folks on the other end of the income spectrum and they are known to be first class NIMBYs.
Availability of fuel is an issue. For 20 years, starting in 1992, the Megatons to Megawatts project arranged for the US to buy highly enriched U-235 from Russian warheads to be blended down into reactor fuel. Great idea, but it inhibited US uranium mining and enrichment capacity. By 2022, Russia was providing 50% of the world's enrrched uranium and 25% of fuel for the existing US fleet. In the present geopolitical climate, being dependent on Russia does not seem like an optimal scenario, as Germany discovered. It will take a parallel effort to improve US fuel capacity for this admittedly excellent idea to work. Perhaps getting rid of the now-ludicrous once-through fuel cycle, and copying France in reprocessing spent fuel, would go a long way to solving the problem.
*their implementation*
Perhaps you have covered these issues elsewhere: small fission reactors offer a time-line that may be shorter than what it takes to build a conventional plant, but neither is likely in the time-frame needed to get to net zero and the waste problem remains. Fusion design has a great deal of appeal, but its potential for deployment is even murkier. Wind, solar and batteries are ready to deploy and aside from dealing with siting, permitting and even transmission is implementation achievable if we don’t get distracted with shiny pennies IMO.
This sounds like a great idea, but I'm not very optimistic about the chances of getting it past the NRC. Not to mention the political firestorm that arises from anything nuclear-related.
Had this been done in TX, we probably wouldn't have had the February fiasco. No worries about the lack of sun and wind; no worries about the lack of fossil fuel; no worries about too few interconnects to external power sources.
Now if we can just get by the NIMBYs...
One question – what is the likely "water intensity" of the nukes vs coal?
Great essay on great concept. The spoilers will accuse the supporters of racism if we push to place these in the midst of the disadvantaged. I suspect that the first few will need to be near folks on the other end of the income spectrum and they are known to be first class NIMBYs.