OK 50 years may be wrong but seeing no one is putting a time line up it is a good an estimate as any one else's.

If the consumption from one new plant is equal to the production of the old then we need as many new units as existing and proposed.

That is 500+ reactors at present.

Then we need more reactors to start consuming the stored waste, how many? 50? 100? 500?

So how many reactors are needed to consume all the waste?

How long are Gen 4 reactors going to take to build? 1 a week? 1 a month? 1 a year?
How long will it take to build a production plant(s)?

Till then the waste has to be stored and will be increasing every year.

So saying the new generators are the solution does not seem to me to be correct.

We have a waste problem.

Pffft. All the world's nuclear waste could be stacked in barrels 1 layer high on a football field. Compare that to coal tailings! Waste problem indeed. I say again, with GenIV reactors it could run the world for 500 years and so is worth $30 trillion dollars! Do you think a nation should invest a little money to try to protect that asset? ;-)

What we have coming is a whole new world where nuclear 'waste' will be called 'once-used fuel', where it moves onto a nuclear facility and NEVER leaves, where it is bred and processed and used again and again on site, where the final waste product is so small it can be stored in a bunker on site for 300 years, and where all today's 'waste' will be in the breeding-fuel use/fuel creation process within a generation or so (and not sitting around waiting to be used), and where by the time we are done burning all today's 'waste' the first generation of *real* nuclear waste will already be safe and decommissioned from storage!

Nuclear 'waste' is not the problem, it is the solution! I should know — my poster says so. ;-)

http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/nuclear-posters/

'Pffft. All the world's nuclear waste could be stacked in barrels 1 layer high on a football field.'

There is no point in saying put it in a barrel as no existing technology exists to do so.

If it was possible then why has in not been done?

Why are countries trying to find a hole to bury the huge amount of waste if they thought it could have been put in a barrel.

And it has not answered my question on how many GenIV reactors are required and how are we going to build them.

And what about the waste until the 1000 reactors are built, if ever!!

By making statements is not good enough, that something in the future may happen and may fix a problem, in the mean time what?

Peter A,
They do store it in barrels, for now, not for the ‘long term’. Many in the know in the nuclear industry are not that worried about looking for longer term storage because they anticipate what is coming. We have 300 reactor years experience with breeders, we know the fuel cycle, and are just working out how to commercialise it cheaply. It’s coming.

GenIV reactors were cancelled because of a misunderstanding over the fuel cycle — it breeds plutonium from uranium, but plutonium that is not pure enough to make a bomb.

So, how many need to be built? Let me answer by asking how much power do you want?

Once IFR's are on the production line in China the world will quickly run out. We don’t have ENOUGH waste to kick start the first generation of IFRs if we build them as fast as we need to!

It takes a few fuel cycles to BREED the uranium into plutonium.

When the world wakes up to the fact that the IFR is the only way to provide reliable baseload power for the next generation it will become the ONLY new power station built. China will pull these things off the production line so fast we’ll be shutting down coal stations and plugging these guys in. AT THAT RATE WE DON’T HAVE ENOUGH ‘WASTE’! It will all enter the fuel cycle and we’ll run out. So we'll have to build Gen3 reactors and keep mining uranium to feed the Gen4 reactors. Storing waste is not the problem mate. We'll have too many GenIV reactors in about 20 years. When the word gets out how valuable 'nuclear waste' is, we'll guard it like diamonds, like platinum!

Eclipse Now, "Pffft. All the world's nuclear waste could be stacked in barrels 1 layer high on a football field."

So how come the major powers haven't called on you for advice in disposing of all of those reactor cores from their nuclear warships? Twenty plus years behind they are. You would be most critical of the US Defence department for continually running out of storage space, for starters. Phone Obama, their budgets for storage are bleeding him white.

Whatever the amount of money wasted at Yucca mountain for largely political reasons due to misunderstanding the kind of plutonium used in IFR's, please remember that many of these fuels can be reprocessed and used up in IFR's.

EG: Nuclear warheads can be processed into the fuel cycle. Check out Megatons to Megawatts.

"From 1995 through September 2010, 400 metric tons of highly-enriched uranium from Russian nuclear warheads have been recycled into low-enriched-uranium fuel for U.S. nuclear power plants. This program has eliminated the equivalent of 16,000 nuclear warheads. The Megatons to Megawatts government-to-government program goal of eliminating 500 metric tons of warhead material is scheduled to be completed in 2013. Currently, one in 10 American homes, businesses, schools and hospitals receive electricity generated by this Megatons to Megawatts fuel See:
http://www.usec.com/megatonstomegawatts.htm
http://nnsa.energy.gov/news/2592.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts