Cornflower,

The storage of waste is not "bleeding the nuclear industry white" as presently the majority of it is stored in drums in warehouses, mostly on the generating sites.

The issue with any waste problem is to reduce it and make what remains less dangerous. Some similarities can be drawn with household waste. Because of the cost and undesirability of land fills, house hold waste is sorted at source into plastics, paper, garden waste, and rubbish. The plastics, paper, and garden waste are recycled generating the council revenue, and the small fraction of house hold waste can either be incinerated, or taken to landfill. Similarly, the spent fuel rods while highly radioactive contain much value.

Natural mined uranium contains about 0.5% of the active U235, which needs to be enriched to 5%, the 90% depleted uranium has such a low radioactivity that it is almost not measurable and is used in industrial machinery and munitions.

once the rods have been spent, they still contain 1.5% U238 along with small quantities of other highly radioactive nasties such as Iodine and plutonium. The reprocessing process removes the plutonium which can be used for fast breeder reactors, and the Iodine, which is used for medicine etc, and leaves the now far less active U238 which can be used directly in CANDU type reactors or mixed with more highly enriched (20%) fuel and re used in standard reactors.

The end result is a tiny fraction of the waste we have today.

The downside is that it increases the fuel cost, but in comparison to the cost of renewable power, it is still cheap.

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

Say a 1000.

'We'll have too many GenIV reactors in about 20 years'

And there is not even a prototype been built.

No production plant planned.

Could go on but a waste of time it just will not happen in that time scale.

Totally pie in the sky.

[Deleted at request of the author of the comment.]

PeterA, please forgive my tone in the last post. I have asked to have it deleted.

But back onto the topic at hand. You said you wanted 1000 reactors?

China opens a coal plant *every week*. That's just for their domestic energy market. Prototype IFR's are planned in India and Russia, let alone the proposal I showed you for America.

Now just imagine China finally sees a working IFR in India or America. They'll quickly figure out how to modularise IFR's — which is really the whole point of GenIV reactors to bring the price down and ensure their market share. (That's the radical nature of GE's plans for the S-PRISM IFR — whacking nukes up on the assembly line!)

Imagine China DECIDES (in a way democracy's seem incapable of unless threatened with war) to build a few IFR manufacturing plants, and as they hit peak coal start pumping out IFR's at the same rate they open coal fired power stations. 1 a week.

That's at least 50 nukes a year, and in 20 years? There's your 1000.

However, we haven't figured in here the fact that both India and China might end up competing to EXPORT the lowest cost assembly line IFR components shipped to the rest of the world. It would become a MAJOR earner, like a few car multinationals combined!

I submit that once IFR's hit the assembly line, the sky's are not even the limit. We'll have IFR's in space, running a Moon base, even running Mars. And once we're in space or running a moon-base, then launch costs from the moon are much lower and we might even get Space Based Solar Power running.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_based_solar_power

Eclipse
Don't take that coffee, you're on a high already. Can I respectfully suggest you calm down instead.

What is not to like about the IFR? Breeds nuclear waste as fuel for 500 years — and the point of my post above is WHO KNOWS what we'll have developed by then?

As for your implication that the IFR is unrealistic any time soon...

"In October 2010, General Electric-Hitachi signed a memorandum of understanding with the operators of the Department of Energy's Savannah River site, which should allow the construction of a demonstration reactor prior to the design receiving full NRC licensing approval[3]."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-PRISM