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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (543423)	1/12/2010 9:51:15 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1574883

"CJ, how far is France in developing breeder technology? " Don't have a clue. I do know they have at least had several breeders producing electricity. We have the technology, but concerns over the materials being used for terrorism has capped its use. Despite that, most US reactors use a variant of breeding to reduce fuel needs via "burnup". Instead of removing the waste and reprocessing it, it is just used in place. Certainly, increasing burnup ratios can increase the number of plants that can be built. They are already at about 50% at the moment and could go to nearly 100%. If reprocessing were allowed, we could start exploiting thorium in addition to uranium. That at least doubles the available fuel. Anyway, if you really are interested in nuclear power, the first thing that needs to be done is to revisit and revise our stance on reprocessing. Once that is done, nuclear becomes very compelling. Without it, it is very limited. The idea I like the most is sealed, modular reactors. Designed for a very high burnup ratio, they can be trucked to a site and plugged into the generation infrastructure. When the fuel is expended, unplug it and plug in a new one. That enables the grid to be decentralized and more immune to single point failures.