Uranium is $128.30/kg
After enrichment, conversion and fabrication that’s $3400/kg for 4.95% fuel.
At 36-45MWd/kg and a net thermal efficiency of 25% or $12.5/MWh up front.
With a 90 month lead time (72 month fuel cycle and 18 months inventory) at 3% this is $16.2/MWh
U-238 is fuel, you just need to run a reactor type that was mostly banned in the 70s. Otherwise u-238 is not a big deal to handle. If you don’t want to burn it, just bury it where you found it, or convert it to the oxide and mix it with a few thousand gallons of water before dumping it out at sea. (which is where 99% of uranium can be found)
And yeah, plutonium is the dangerous stuff, but it’s also the best fuel you can get. Sure, Pu-240 is an issue, but it’s also solvable. And by solvable, I mean that it’s one more neutron away from being fuel again. This does slow the reaction, after all, it takes multiple neutrons to become fissile again. Pu-241 is back to being fuel. Pu-242 is not fuel, but also has a low cross-section.
That video I linked talks about all of this. It runs through a typical burn of a light water reactor, and breaks down what percentage of everything is in the waste, from day one out to several hundred thousand years. It also gives a dollar amount for each part on the open market.
Even so, if you really don’t want the transuranics, just use the thorium cycle. There are a dozen reactor designs that can handle thorium. We just need to let people build them.
Working breeder programs are a myth and condescendingly telling me to watch a video taking a narrow myopic view of things I already know (which ignores all the important points) isn’t helping your point.
Show me where I can find documentation of a reactor running on U238 or Th which actually worked for a complete fuel cycle and wasn’t just the same breeding ratio as a U235 but with extra steps.
You’ve also not addressed the hard bit either, which happens outside the reactor.
Also nobody banned breeders, breeder programs are still eating huge amounts of public money and failing to do anything useful in india and china to this day. Superphenix and Monju also weren’t banned in the 70s. Nor were the BN reactors.
The only reason they exist is for plausible deniability on filthy loss-making Pu separation equipment for weapons, and for people like you to palter with.
Reprocessing fuel for breeder reactors was the thing that was banned. Now there have to be all sorts of workarounds that don’t work well.
…banned in a couple of countries for four years.
Why is every single one of these always a trivially verifiable lie?
Oh you’re a lftr bro.
Do you realise how hilarious it is that your proposed solution to mineral scarcity and toxicity of the product lifecycle is 2kg of beryllium per capita?
I said,
But every reply I’ve gotten from you has been you not actually addressing what I’ve said, but you, instead, seem to be replying to what you wish I’d said. There’s some disconnect.
Ah so now it’s one of those superposition reactors which has the all the upsides all the different people trying to sell them imagined after building half of one and having it fall apart in a year, but none of the downsides. Also a U235 reactor running Th in place of U238 for a breeding ratio of 0.5 somehow means U235 ia sn’t needed anymore.
The disconnect is you are pretending a half-proof-of-concept of the easiest bit is all the hard bits being complete.