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No, it's zero emission but not renewable.
Nuclear fission is actually by definition the least renewable energy source. Even coal and oil are renewable on long enough time scales. But there will never be more uranium than there is right now.
We actually don't have that much of it if we consider the long term future, only a thousand years or so. So nuclear is intended to be a bridge to eventual full renewable power generation and storage, an essential component in the present day but it's still a bridge.
Another thing to consider is that nuclear is the only power source that works in deep space away from the Sun. So if we're serious about exploring the solar system or further, we'd be best not to burn up all of our fissionable material right away.
Coal exist in the earth because back then the bacteria who could break down lignin and cellulose hadn’t evolved, so dead trees had the time they needed to compress. There are such bacteria around now, though, and that means there will never be any new natural coal.
The process to produce coal is known for 100 years now. Its just not feasible, because no one needs coal. But its reversible. No one knows how to fuse uranium.
We actually know how. It's the cycle of thorium. You make U233 from Th232.
I wouldn't necessarily say never, it could potentially happen that a dead tree ends up in an environment that isn't conducive to lignin-eating bacteria getting to it, and I would not be at all surprised if it has happened and may continue to happen somewhere in the world since those bacteria evolved, though they would certainly be exceptional cases and almost definitely not happening at any significant scale.
It's also possible for those bacteria to go extinct one way or another. Again, not very likely. And if it did happen it would probably be due to some absolutely catastrophic disaster absolutely wrecking the Earth's ecosystem completely in which case we're probably not going to make it either, but hey, new coal!
What are the emissions, aside from waste heat?
if you want to be like that nothing is. Solar requires vast amounts of rare earths to be mined and wind requires huge amount of unrecylable blades and generators to be produced. On total lifecyle damage to the environment all three are very low but non zero.
Solar requires 0 rare earths, troll.
When considering these externalities for nuclear, you have to do the same for renewables as well. i.e. scrap turbine blades, concrete in dams, weathered PV panels, land use taken up by panels and turbines.
Remember that the materials used in most renewable generation are also shipped around the world and many have very dirty refining processes.
I'm a firm renewable energy supporter but you have to be fair to both processes.
Okay.
Make a PV system out of a strict subset of the materials in the reactor.
Put the PV system over top of Inkai mine.
Get more power than the uranium from the mine would produce for longer.
The 40 year guaranteed lifetime of the panels is longer than the 30 year lifetime of the average nuclear plant at shutdown.
Your materials can be recycled after.
The ground around the mine isn't poisoned with heavy metals permanently,
This all assuming everything goes perfectly for the nuclear plant and waste disposal.
have you seen how large wind turbines are ?
how did they got there is my point. to build anything there are emissions.
Incredibly well quantified emissions that are in total lower than the emissions from mining uranium (except for two or three cherry picked mines which are supposed to be representative), or the emissions from building and decomissioning a nuke if you take real lifetimes and load factors.
wait per energy output? that seems wrong. also what about nukes?
Most uranium ore is lower energy density than low grade coal. Digging it up with diesel equipment after removing twice as much overburden with explosives in a coal powered country and then milling it with 10s to 100s of litres of sulfuric acid is incredibly dirty. All of the "representative" lifecycle studies use Ranger (which used a specific much cleaner more expensive process only suitable for some specific ores on ore 30-70x as concentrated) or Cigar lake which is 1000-2500x as concentrated.
Even after that nuclear is still relatively low carbon, but about 10x a modern wind turbine. It is largely irrelevant (the best llw carbon technology is the one that deploys soonest), but that doesn't stop the shills constantly lying to try and delay decarbonisation.
Thanks
The emissions from nuclear are primarily from mining (this is huge in some cases, enough to not consider it as low carbon, or negligible in others), enrichment, conversion, and fuel fabrication (these last three have no trustworthy data, but from the few steps that are public knowledge, are enough to put it higher than PV or wind).
Transport, and the building are negligible enough they're not worth considering.
In either case, it's largely irrelevant. The main harm is to the local environment of the mines (this is devistating) as well as the main reason the astroturfers come out in force, which is that it delays decarbonization due to being an ineffective use of resources.
Most of those costs are similar for renewables...rather than a building it's the production and installation of fields of solar panels, for example.
In both cases I'm pretty sure it's a negligible fraction of the lifecycle emissions compared to energy generated.
Might be a problem for landlocked countries like Switzerland or so but all swedish reactors are cooled with sea water which is not in short supply any time soon.
Fukushima had structural risks and wasn’t compliant with international standards. Modern reactors don’t carry runaway reaction risks. They just shut down in the event of a power loss. There is zero risk of another Chernobyl with modern reactors.
Easily solved by building them one meter above expected future sea level 😂
And wind turbines have the problem of needing backup power plants when the wind is not blowing. The whole reason for the energy crisis that europe have right now is because germanys backup plants can't run as their supplier have their hand full trying to murder their neighbour.
Wind and solar are great stuff. Puting solar cells on every south facing roff is a no brainer. Hydro- and geothermal powerplants only work where the geography allows it and are in these places also no brainers. But wind is a whole different beast. If you have a good way to save the excess power generated when they are runing then they are super. But right now, outside of repumping back water in to hydro dams, there are no good ways of utilizing it. That leaves at best 50% of a normal country's power demand to be covered by either fossil fuels or nuclear. Unless you are a climate change denier then that choice is pretty simple. Nuclear is the only viable option if you want to keep the lights on.
Sweden?
Drought?
Anyway I'm not a civil engineer or geologist or renewable energy engineer or anything, so I won't pretend to know what the best path is. I'm just hoping they did their studies correctly and are picking the best option.
But even if they're not, it's good they're moving away from fossil fuels, whichever direction they move in.
Well no, that's the thing. They've replaced moving away from fossil fuels now with promising they're going to in 2045
But if you go according the strict physical principle every energy source is non-renewable
The sun fuses a finire amount of hydrogen, earth has a finire amount of latent heat, the moon a finire amount of gravitational inertia etc.
And there's a little paradox if you think about it, how can fusion be non-renewable but solar, that use radiation from the sun fusion, be renewable?
A bit of a stretch maybe, but I'm considering us to be discussing whether an energy source is renewable on Earth. The Sun is not renewable, but by the time that it's no longer viable the Earth will be long gone as well! So as long as the Earth exists, I would say that solar PV and other solar driven processes like wind and hydro are renewable.
By these standards yes, deep geothermal and tidal are "not renewable" either.
But that's exactly the "problem", there's enough fertile material for potential millions of years of consumption, and that's for fission alone.
I think the debacle is more because the definition of "renewable" is a little arbitrary than the dilemma if nuclear is renewable or not
I think we both agree on fertile material as discussed in another comment, the longevity issue is mostly with conventional LWRs burning up our fuel rapidly.
I'm just being pedantic about the sun, lol
Well, yes, the obvious counter argument being that, you will never build more advanced reactors on scale (some are already available), or develop new fuel cycle if you stunt the evolution process and block the technology we already have.
Imagine saying to be favourable to installing solar panels but only when they will be 100% recyclable and with efficiency close to the theorical maximum
This would be relevant if any reactor had ever gotten its energy from primarily from fertile material. None have so it is not.
That's look like not renewable, but like "smaller resources cost".
A thousand years is a massive over-estimate. Providing the 6TW or so of final energy with the stuff assumed to exist that's vaguely accessible for costs that don't exceed renewables' total cost is well under a decade.
No breeding program has ever done a full closed cycle and even if it were to happen, the currently proposed technologies only yield about 50 years.
Will have more when the sun explodes.
"Renewable" typically means renewable on human time scales, so fossil fuels don't count.
Biofuel would be renewable.
If you consider fusion to be "nuclear", that's renewable. But yeah, not fission.
It is zero emission though.