Ethanol....saviour or pipe dream?

[Rockford35]

Well, the main thing is that Uranium is found in nowhere near the concentrations it is after refinement... it's found in an ore just like most other elements, with a dilute dispersal, which must then be heavily concentrated for it to function inside a nuclear reactor.

David,

I'm not trying to push buttons, nor single you out with any of this. Please don't take it this way (if you are! LOL...)

Here's an image of the province I live in. It's easy to draw, that's why I live here! LOL. The city in the south is where I am. The pink area of the north is Uranium rich ground, all of it housing millions of tons of ore grad uranium. It's been this way for at least 2.8 million years at minimum. All of it is sheild rock, more than capable of housing nuclear by product (I use the term byproduct because "waste" sounds so dirty).

This is to scale as well. So as you can see, there are vast areas of the world that have the potential to both provide and house nuclear fuels.

That area of the west that is a circle is an impact area from a meterorite 2.3 million years ago. Now, if that's not an indication of a "Natural Diaster" , then I don't know what one is.

Yes, we have to think beyond our generation for this, but we also must not think of the past when we dwell on what decisions must be made for the future. Times have changed.

Now, if we could just come up with the 900 million - 1.2 billion dollars for infrastructure and facility upgrades, we'd be laughing!

R35

 

[David B]

Well, that sounds like a plan... we'll just ship all our nuclear by-product to Canada.

I know you're not singling me out... I just happen to be the only one on the other side of the fence.

I was mainly just trying to point out that you don't find Uranium heavily concentrated in the earth's crust... if that were the case, you could just bore a few holes, pump water down into it, and harness the steam coming out of the ground to drive a turbine.

Uranium has to be mined, concentrated and enriched before it's really usable inside a conventional reactor, so the radioactivity given off by it is several hundred times more concentrated than you'd experience in the environment. I'm not an expert on Uranium mining, but from what I could gather, radiation concentrations are so low that the miners don't even need to wear any special protective equipment.

I understand what you're saying, and I'll also say that I agree with you 90%... the other 10% of me simply wants some safe way to both transport and store the 'by-products', but if you're suggesting Northern Saskatchewan, then I have no problem with that scenario... who wants to visit that place anyway...

 

[Rockford35]

CanDu reactors don't use enriched uranium in power production. Nor do they create enriched by-product.

Interesting that they are a Canadian invention.

CanDu Reactors

R35