which I think is what your commenter above is also thinking
Indeed. There's no point in spending the equivalent of six gigawatt years of electricity to commission, fuel, and decommission a power plant that will provide only five gigawatt years of power (as an illustration; I pulled those figures out of my butt, but they illustrate the point well enough). And that's without considering the political issues.
My feeling is that it can be a net gain, provided we reprocess the spent fuel. If we don't, I suspect it ends up being a net loss. As I've already implied, though, reprocessing opens up a massive can of worms, not least of which is how we dispose of the irradiated chemicals used in the reprocessing plant ...
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Date: 2006-05-22 10:30 pm (UTC)Indeed. There's no point in spending the equivalent of six gigawatt years of electricity to commission, fuel, and decommission a power plant that will provide only five gigawatt years of power (as an illustration; I pulled those figures out of my butt, but they illustrate the point well enough). And that's without considering the political issues.
My feeling is that it can be a net gain, provided we reprocess the spent fuel. If we don't, I suspect it ends up being a net loss. As I've already implied, though, reprocessing opens up a massive can of worms, not least of which is how we dispose of the irradiated chemicals used in the reprocessing plant ...