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Solar energy now overlaps in cost with nuclear fuel alone for "cheap" modular reactors (energy-utilities.com)

submitted 1 year ago by schroedingershat@lemmy.world to c/energy

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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

Which some solar projects are now matching

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[–] chaogomu@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So it is... That's what I get for typing that completely by memory.

U-234 is the side product... It's another fertile form of uranium that can form when you don't get the protactinium out fast enough...

[–] schroedingershat@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You also get U232 and a bunch of other actinides. Then you have to turn your reactor off because the void coefficient and delayed neutron fraction keep changing and you don't want it to go prompt critical.

Then you have a bunch of gamma emitting salt there's no clean or affordable chemical process for separating, and you leave it lying around for 50 years before finally burying it at huge expense.

You did get the benefit of pointing to your failed experiment every time someone points out that LWRs are unsustainable though, so that's nice.

Maybe BN-800 will finally be run in breeding mode but not as an obvious shell game to make weapons grade plutonium now that it's more than a year old and catching fire as often as every other sodium cooled reactor?