Reddit reviews Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines

It's not true of conventional reactors, but is true of fast reactors. Russia has several in production right now and is building more. The U.S. spent 30 years developing an advanced design called the Integral Fast Reactor, which was canceled by the Clinton administration just prior to completion. GE-Hitachi has a production-ready design based on the IFR, which they're attempting to sell to the U.K. and China.

About 99% of our nuclear waste, and essentially all the long-lived waste, is unfissioned uranium, plutonium, and other transuranics. Fast reactors burn all that up. All they leave is the fission products, which go back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple hundred years.

Sources are abundant, it's well-known nuclear physics. Here's a sampling:

Energy For Future Presidents (a book by a Berkeley physics professor)

BraveNewClimate

Wikipedia here and here

World Nuclear

Plentiful Energy (a book by lead engineers on the IFR project)

The IFR also does a good job with safety and proliferation issues. Liquid thorium reactors would have similar advantages but aren't as far along.

Disclaimer: This is a bit rambling. I'm at work and my brain is completely fried at the moment...

Yeah, I gave you an upvote. Most people just aren't following proper etiquette.

I thought that Muller had a book out on the topic, but I may have been wrong. You may be interested in this one, but I don't think it's the book I was looking for. He has also done some recent interviews on NPR which might reference his book, but are also good interviews in their own right.

In terms of more interesting material, I have plenty, I just have to find some of it. The IPCC report is a good assessment, but is quite long and sometimes comes off a little biased in my opinion.

Personally, even though there is significant evidence to make me believe that humans are impacting global temperature through emissions, there are still questions in my mind about it. For one, after seeing what is under the hood of the current climate models, I am a little less confident of their results. On the other hand, after seeing the amount of research that has gone into the topic including laboratory results and raw data from satellites, etc, I have become much less skeptical.

That said, ignoring the problem isn't going to get us anywhere. Until we fully understand the issue I believe that we need to take a careful approach to what we put into our atmosphere. Think about this, though. Compared the amount of CO2 we pump into the atmosphere daily, a very small amount of CFCs were able to deplete a large section of the ozone layer through chemical reaction. The argument that I hear now and then that "there just aren't enough humans to make such an impact" is ridiculous.

Lastly, if you are really interested in the topic, my adviser from when I was in grad school is much more fluent in climate research than I am. I can ask him for some good, unbiased resources.

I just read Energy for Future Presidents. Despite the somewhat odd format it was one of the best thought out books out there.

While I didn't expect it from the title, Green Metropolis is another book which should be required reading on energy.