this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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For countries with a lot of money to spend and a lot of time to spare
The best time to build a nuclear reactor was 30 years ago, but I am sceptical that we can build the storage capacity to fully and reliably decarbonise with renewables while similtaniously decarbonising transport. This on a global scale using extremely sought after rare earths that we posess relatively little of.
Luckily nuclear reactors can be build and fueled with scraps everyone has in their backyard.
If we replace all fossil fuels with nuclear reactors we run out of uranium before we'd run out of oil and gas on our current consumption levels.
The Materials required to build reactors are cheap and abondant. The amount of Uranium required to supply a plant for 10 years is small enough that it can be stored on site. It would alse be possible to extract Uranium from seawater, a supply that would last until the sun expands and swalows the planet.
Extracting Uranium from seawater is a ridicilous idea. The hypothetical proposals for a single extractor require 100.000 Tonnes of absorbens on a surface of 1000 km² At concentrations around 3 ppb, you'd need to filter about 7,5 trillion m³ of water per year, to meet the current US electric demand.
That is an environmental catastrophy abomination of ressource extraction and it is most likely still energy negative, because of the insane amount of chemicals needed.