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Current uranium reserves are expected to be depleted by the end of the century, at current use.
Fission as a serious replacement for just coal plants is a pipe dream without asteroid mining, and contrary to what people pretend we still don't have a good answer for the waste, or what to do for developing nations that don't have the human infrastructure to run them safely.
We need a global fusion research project and orbital solar. Simple as that.
More like somewhere between 200 years and a couple million years, assuming we fire back up and finish developing some 60-year old technologies.
…Yeah, no. At least, not yet. Plus, the energetic and engineering challenges to just throw "asteroid mining" into the conversation are insane— So you're burning either fossil or synthetic/biofuels for the launch, electric ion (which is itself insanely difficult and expensive) I presume (so, I.e. nuclear or solar) for in-orbit maneuvering, for rocks that aren't even that that big and which you don't even have the technology to do anything with.
We have most minerals in sufficient quantities in the Earth's crust. And more importantly, we have the industrial processes to extract them efficiently. Fission is viable, has been for a long time, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
It's rocks. Processed "nuclear waste" is literally just rocks. (Well, technically it's solid glass covered in welded steel.) It's not like air pollution that we end up breathing in, and it's not like the chemical waste from other industries (including from batteries and rare earth extraction) which finds its way to the water cycle where it then bioaccumulates. If you're picturing a glowing green river, or a barrel full of leaking sludge— Well, that's not it.
It can't hurt you unless you powder it and huff it or build furniture with it or do something insanely stupid like that. And there are other much easier and more dangerous ways for malicious actors to hurt you too, that don't involve breaking into secure facilities to steal the some of the heaviest elements known to exist.
Dig a big hole and toss the waste a kilometer or two down the Canadian Shield, and it will sit there inert for a billion years long after it's burnt through all its dangerous levels of residual radioactivity.
We already have a couple of those. If everything goes perfectly for them, they might become commercially widespread right around the same time the hard-to-reverse effects of climate change might become truly apocalyptic in the second half of this century. If the past history of this field of research is any indication, they quite possibly won't really work, will work but only a decade or two behind schedule and several times over budget, or will lead nowhere except for some media coverage that's good for military-industrial stock prices or whatever.
This isn't Sid Meier's Civilization, where you can click "Global Fusion Research Project" and get a +100% boost to production after 20 turns. To quote Randall Munroe, "Magnetohydrodynamics combines the intuitive nature of Maxwell's equations with the easy solvability of the Navier-Stokes equations". Fusion is hard, or else we'd already be doing it, and though we know it's definitely possible, there's no guarantee of anything when it comes to actually engineering it.
Uhh… No. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to blast photovoltaics into an incredibly hostile environment, where they can't even be cooled by dissipating into the atmosphere, is not probably going to bring energy costs down, at current or near-future technology levels.
Plus any system capable of precisely beaming terawatts of power from space into localized collectors on the planetary surface is (1) probably by definition an omnipresent death ray and (2) probably at least going to fuck up a lot of migrating birds and components of the atmosphere.
…
We spent more on the Manhattan project than the disorganized fusion projects have spent in a decade, and will spend in the next decade as well.
Both are a pittance compared the US military's current budget, much less global spending.
Thorium is a safe bet, but it also needs significant research.
On the other hand, why not both?
That cost was overwhelmingly slanted towards implementation though, not research. The theory for fission was very simple compared to nuclear fusion: Gather enough fissile material in one place rapidly, and it explodes. Once the basic parameters and theory were proven, the actual project cost went overwhelmingly to just enriching enough nuclear material and then, separately, getting the Silverplate Superfortresses ready. They were so sure of the science that they didn't even bother to test the bomb they dropped on Hiroshima. It wasn't like fusion research at all, where for over half a century every new device that's supposed to produce power instead just discovers new plasma instabilities which mean it simply doesn't work.
Also, the cost comparison you've made is simply false. The Manhattan project cost no more than $20-30 billion, inflation-adjusted. ITER's cost (from 2008 through to ~2025) is going to be at least €22 billion, and apparently $65 billion if the US is to be believed. That's of course not even counting the various other "disorganized fusion projects", like the ongoing operating costs for W7X, the NIF, JET, and whatever the Z machine, Shiva star, etc., and assorted Chalk Los Sandia Livermore national laboratories are doing for fusion research. Still worth it, probably— Hell, if it cost $10 trillion, it would probably still be worth it, as long as it actually works— But let's not pretend it's cheap or free or a safe bet or easy solution.
That would be far too much foresight, obviously.
…But there's also never enough resources to go around, and you don't want to be the country that sank all its money into a technology that didn't pan out.
Yes we do, because 95% of the waste is low level waste that is safe within a dozen years. This waste is currently almost entirely stored on site at every plant. These are things like paperwork, clothing, safety materials, etc. The remaining 5% high level waste that humanity has ever produced from all plants worldwide, the stuff that's dangerous for thousands of years, would fit within an area the size of a football field.
Nuclear waste is a boogeyman just like nuclear power in general has become due to a poorly educated public and a ton of misinformation. Just look at the blowback from the recent Fukushima news regarding the release of radioactive water into the ocean bcause the holding tanks are finally running out of capacity. The treated water only has one radioactive isotope, Tritium, that can't be filtered since it's an isotope of Hydrogen, and that's kid of a big part of water itself. It's not uranium that nearly every damned comment I've seen online seems to assume. Tritum is a weak source of beta radiation, too weak to even penetrate the skin. The treated water is being diluted further with seawater and the plan will take decades to release the water off the coast through an undersea tunnel which would further dilute it. The resulting release would be lower than that of many currently operating plants that release similar water else where in the world every day. In addition, the half life of Tritium is only 12 years, and the oldest portions of this water which would be released first date back to the disaster in 2011, which is already 12 years ago now, so effectively the released water would already be halfway decayed. Numerous professors and nuclear experts have stated that the risk from this is nearly non-existent both to humans and to marine life. Yet people are stupid and panic about things they don't understand.
People just aren't educated about how radiation works, they only see the extreme cases because that's what makes for good media. The media is absolutely fucking terrible now at anything that requires nuance or a true explanation. If it can't be summarized in a simple catchy headline, and the public needs to get some ecuation to understand it properly, the media doesn't care enough to report it properly. It won't bring in that ad revenue from clicks online.
Yes, yes. A well done fusion plant is ∞ times better than covering tens of kilometers in solar panels or wind turbines.
Supporting something doesn't mean I can't acknowledge its cons