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NPR Story on the Future of Nuclear Power
deeptrace writes "The Living on Earth show on NPR recently had a segment on the future of Nuclear Energy. The nearly hour long show is available as an mp3 and in transcript form. It talks about hot fusion, cold fusion, and Pebble Bed Reactors. It provides a well balanced and informative overview of progress towards their use for future nuclear power generation. Most interestingly, they talk with Dr. Pamela Boss and Dr. Stanislaw Szpak at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego. Dr. Szpak says of their cold fusion experiments: 'We have 100 percent reproducible results'."
We have 100 percent reproducible
100% success or 100% failure?
Considering all the various physical constraints and obstacles to sustained fusion reactions (like: current density must be over 2.6 A / squared cm, surface status must be as crack-free as possible, hydrogen-metal ratio inside electrode must be over 0.84, there must be some but not too much "light" water in the heavy water, etc...) I prefer calling it "Difficult Fusion" :D
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Were these the guys who did the Crystal or Sonic based fusion? As I recal, while they are repeatable, neither of them were particularly usefull for creating large scale fusion reactions.
I love to slaughter the english language.
Now that NPR is on board, when can we start to build new reactors?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
You can never put TOO much water in the reactor.
...seem like an interesting concept.
I was especially interested to read the following (apart from the funny connotations of the scientists name!)
Sue Ion is the technology director for British Nuclear Fuels. She thinks nuclear energy is becoming more attractive because of the growing concern over greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. Ms. Ion also says pebble beds have an added benefit that can move them beyond the electricity business. The reactors will operate at extremely high temperatures -- not hot enough to melt the fuel, but hot enough to efficiently desalinate ocean water for drinking. And actually so hot they could crack open molecules of water. That would make it possible to manufacture hydrogen.
It would seem that this could kill several birds with one stone - "cleaner" electricity production, a source of hydrogen for motor vehicles and the possibility to make sea water domestically usable. Those seem like massive upsides, what are the downsides?
Chernobyl, definitely. TMI could more accurately be equated to a mis-fire (probably a dud round), not an actual shot.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Well, General Foods gave us Tang in 1957, and Swiss engineer by Georges de Mestral gave us Velcro in *1948*.
But how many times are you going to put the gun to your head and pull the trigger? It seems we've already hit that live round a couple of times. TMI and Chernobyl certianly come to mind.
Well, right now we are sitting in a car with the engine running and the garage door closed. I think we are better off with the revolver.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The 1st NPlant in the US came in ahead of time and ahead of budget. Protests have kept every other plant from being on time and on budget. It also made every plant larger and larger; as they tried to make the economics work.
Each plant being so big and so custom made to the area, also makes them hard to inspect; each one is different to some degree.
The French have been building small scale N-Plants w/ passive cooling; meaning if something goes wrong it shuts itself down without any need (or room for) equipment failure. (an example being using the pressure from the reaction to hold back water. If there is less pressure or more pressure the water enters an shuts down the plant.
It seems to be passive cooling and uniform construction is key to safety. Building them smaller means there are more of them and they are closer to "you." So not sure how I feel about size. Also there is security risks, more plants to watch equate to more risk.
http://www.hawknest.com/
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Fission reactors will always produce harmful waste, but we have been able to deal with that in the past quite effectively. The problem that will kill nuclear energy is people. Private citizens are freaked out about both meltdowns and terrorism, so they'll lobby to have new plants built in someone else's backyard. The other people problem is the people running the plants. If you hire an $8/hour rent-a-cop to guard your facility, you're asking for trouble. Also, both the Three Mile Island incident and Chernobyl were caused by inattention and lack of maintenance. I guarantee that turning over contol of nuclear facilities to the private sector will immediately trigger the hiring of low-wage bare minimum staffs to save money. Eventually, someone will screw up, trigger another disaster, and that'll be the end of nuclear power in the US forever once people start demanding a stop to it.
I agree that nuclear energy is probably one of the best choices for the future as coal, natural gas and oil run out, but it's got a lot of obstacles to overcome.
Very impractical. The principles are totally different; all they have in common is the word 'nuclear'.
Think about what it would take to refit a coal-fired power plant into a gas-fired power plant. You'd have to rip out and replace the entire furnace. Same with fission to fusion; you might be able to keep the boiler and turbines and so forth, but the heat source - the actual power core - would have to be totally replaced.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Chernoble was more like putting a fully automatic weapon to your head and firing a full clip. The Soviets MADE that accident happen, even though they did not intend for it to explode, they set the conditions up for it to occure on purpose by removing all fail safes. Chernoble is not a statement on the saftty and efficasy of nuclea power, it is a statement of the stupidity of people.
. . .are they so different that this won't be possible?
Yes.
KFG
And what precisely did you find left-leaning about the article? You did read the article, didn't you?
As it turns out, you guessed right that the article was not very balanced, but not he way you thing. The imbalance here stemmed from the way informed criticism of the technology (not of local economic issues) were awarded about one sentence in an great big sales-brochure-like presentation of the proponents' view.
Yes, valid criticisms do exist, and from solid sources too. Google it. Not necessarlily saying they're wnough to tip the scales in the "no-go" direction, but pretending there are none, or that this article was anything close to balanced, is just ridiculous.
And what's "left" about believing in pshychic phenomena, anyway?
sudo ergo sum
In a nuclear reactor, heat is cheap.
What you're doing with these things is using the heat from the nuclear reaction to boil water, then using the steam to spin turbines and thus turn dynamos to generate electricity. It's a giant steam engine.
Now, if you want to desalinate salt water, one way to do it is to boil the stuff. The salt is left behind, and once the steam condenses you have fresh water. So. Use your nuclear furnace to boil off some salt water from the sea. Direct the hot steam through your turbines. Generate electricity. Then condense the steam in your cooling towers and output fresh water.
There'll be some tricky engineering to be done to make sure you don't get salt deposits clogging up your plumbing, but in principle the idea is pretty sound.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
NPR may not be the best source, but to compare it to Fox News is an insult and simply wrong.
I believe in conservation as a means to make our society more energy efficient. However, in a world of increasing population and bringing 3rd world economies into a one world modern economy, we cannot expect global energy consumption to decrease. This means either burning fossil fuels at a faster rate, wind and solar, or nuclear. As far as burning fossil fuels go, realize that we will run out and that burning coal releases tremendous radioactivity into the atmosphere. I love wind and solar but I think we need to hedge our bets with a major committment to developing safe nuclear power generation.
At some point you have a heat exchange process somewhere, right? They didn't detail it -- I did listen to the hour long program. Now, isn't that heated coolant considered 'dirty' and if so, what coolant can you use to carry that heat to an exchanger but use a low enough volume of it so that what is exchanged is still hot enough to crack open water to get hydrogen and still have enough energy left open to produce the steam required to run the turbines? Once you're used the steam that way, and its gone through the expansion process, how do you STILL have enough energy to heat even more water to desalinate it?
It seems like you're re-using the same heat from that coolant quite a few times. You can't use the coolant directly without the exchanger, I assume, since it would be contaminated -- and what good would desalinated but otherwise radioactive water be to anyone?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
IIRC, the pebble bed designs usually use helium as primary coolant, and helium simply doesn't get "dirty". The natural isotopes (He3 an He4) are stable, and the others are both hard to create and have half-lives of under one second.
sudo ergo sum
Not to nitpick, but if we're still talking about Pebble Bed Reactors:
Instead of water, it uses pyrolytic graphite as the neutron moderator, and an inert or semi-inert gas such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide as the coolant, at very high temperature, to drive a turbine directly.
From this Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor/
What was wrong with Ms. (Dr.?) Ion's parents, naming her Sue of all things.
If my name was Ion, I'd surely name my daughters Anne and Katya (Kat for short).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm asking this next question in the utmost sincerity:
Are you saying this because of specific misinformation in the piece, or is this a knee-jerk reaction you had without even hearing it?
You would never actually run the seawater through the reactor core itself; not only would you have the problem of salt deposits that would clog the thing up rather quickly (you can do the calculation yourself -- figure out the grams of dissolved solids per liter of seawater and figure out how many thousand liters you'd run through before you filled whatever the empty volume of the reactor chamber would be), but also you'd have the issue of making the core area, which is assumedly radioactive, not a sealed unit.
What's generally done in nuclear reactors is that the core cooling is done through a sealed loop; the material which flows through the core never actually goes near the steam turbines. It goes out of the core, into a heat exchanger, and then back into the core. That's it. Barring some sort of disaster, it never leaves this closed loop.
This gives you a lot of additional flexibility in terms of what kind of coolant you want to use, too. It doesn't have to be water -- it can be liquid metal (IIRC the French use or used liquid NaK in their breeder reactors) or even some sort of pressurized gas or something more exotic.
Having an open-loop core cooling system just doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea; I do like the concept of using the waste heat from power generation for some actual purpose though, be it desalination or H2 production or whatever, but I think there are lots of ways to do this without opening up the core to the environment.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You could never cycle drinking water through the reactor as the primary coolant anyways, it becomes radioactive. iirc, helium, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide do not (or the nuclear products have sufficiently short half lives that it's not a problem), which also has the benefit of massively reducing the impact of a coolant leak (some people may talk funny until the helium dissipates vs. tens of thousands long term deaths from cancer).
You could still heat exchange from an inert gas to water, however, and most likely have more than enough heat to boil it or "crack" it.
NPR is a media organization. Their focus is on public discussion, information dissemination, and issue analysis. As such, NPR is much more useful, and threatening to the status quo, than they would be if they were a politicized organization such as MoveOn.org or the American Heritage Foundation. (And yes, I did mean the American Heritage Foundation.)
Very little tax money goes to NPR anymore (1-2% of funding).. and the money that does is through competitive grants, meaning that they are in some sense competing for the money. (Note: NPR != NPR affiliate stations)
And as the sibling said, if you think NPR is leftist, your 'left-right' spectrum is way out of whack.
While I personally don't get cable anymore, anyone who does pays for Fox News, whether they like it or not. The only way to not pay for Fox News is to not have cable or satellite, which is a minority of the US.
I don't think that they are proposing that you re-use the heat. Power generators like to have steam go from ~900F to ~500F, to imporve efficiency. Everything after that is waste, which they dump out of the cooling tower. If the power plant is nearby some homes & offices, you could capture that heat and pipe it to where it's needed, but that would require more heat exchangers, etc. I'm not sure the economics would work.
For the desalination or hydrogen cracking, I believe they are talking about that being the *primary application* of the reactor. In a place where you need power, you use the heat to make electricity. In a place where you need water, you use it to desalinate. In a place where you need hydrogen, you use it to crack water.
Electricity is great for running stationary objects like buildings, but not so good at vehicles. A storable fuel is better for that.
Consider some seaside urban area that is outgrowing its supply of fresh water. Since these reactors are modular, you could install one reactor to make electricity, one to make water and one to make hydrogen for the cars. The power, water and hydrogen distribution grids are all in place and benefit from economies of scael, and you can share the administrative/training/regulatory overhead of running the reactors.
Need even more power/water/H2? Install another module.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Yeah, it's an insult alright - an insult that our tax dollars prop up the blatantly leftist NPR.
Well, conservatives believe that *all* media is liberal, with the possible exceptions of Fox News and certain talk radio programs. This fact adds nothing to our understanding of NPR. Note that most people who have actually listened to NPR approve of it. Hence, it is doing its job.
The notion that government should promote conservative values and stifle everything else is arrogant, ignorant, and in the end inadequate for a pluralist society.
Actually, NPR has to compete for their federal money. And that money only makes up 1-2% of their budget, to boot. Plus, they certainly do have to compete for market share, and listener dollars, since pledges (through local affiliates) make up a good part of the budget.
Couldn't find any info on an NPR hiring scandal (unless you mean the recent Bush CPB scandal?) Care to provide a link? Or is this a 20-year old canard that you are still holding onto like Chappaquiddick? Also couldn't find anything on a funding scandal so a source there would be helpful as well.
I don't believe Fox is publicly owned.. or did you mean Fox as the 'government-controlled' media source?
NPR managers were deciding on who to hire based on whether or not they were Republicans. Great way to get balanced news, huh?
Well, the Republicans in charge thought that Republican views weren't getting enough airtime apparently, so they wanted to hire more Republicans to call the shots. I've listened to several talk-radio stations, both lefty (which there are very few of) and righty (which are everywhere), and NPR is nothing at all like either type. You'll not find anything like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly from the right, or Thom Hartmann or Jerry Springer from the left. Compared to the righty and lefty stations out there, NPR is the model of balance and journalistic integrity. They regularly have both democratic and republican guests on several of the shows. They have shows like Justice Talking where you actually get two sides of an argument presented in a manner that doesn't devolve into a Crossfire-esque shouting match like you find on many "news" shows these days. The host puts forth questions and the guests both get some time to answer them. Simple. Fair. Comprehensible. So go ahead and take a shot at them for their funding, but don't even try to compare the level of bias with Fox or any other news organization that hardly even tries to appear balanced.
Of all the people who bash NPR, I wonder how many have actually listened to it for any length of time. It's one of the least biased news sources out there right now. Hell, I know quite a few Republicans that support it. I'm an independent who pretty much fits the bill of the social liberal / fiscal conservative. Needless to say I'm very much frustrated with the current state of both major parties. At least I have a decent radio station to listen to on the way to and from work though. Sure beats Rush or Springer (I can't believe they gave him a political show).
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Yeah. Chernobyl.
We should consider it as a learning example, instead of just proof that nuclear energy is unsafe.
The nuclear technicians should learn that.
A) When you run procedures that states minimum of 30 rods down do not run it with only 6.
B) Do not turn off the reactors cooling system.
C) When running tests with powerplant please inform the people that are actually running it that there is a test going on.
The Nuclear Power Plant builders should learn to build the plant according to designes specifications instead of making it like it looks almost reasonably like that.
And people should learn that people at nuclear plants need training.
The finally, the reactor type should be decommissioned as soon as possible since there is inherent design flaw that made it impossible for humans to fix the problem they made during that test.
I think after Chernobyl people are atleast little more carefull here in west than the people responsible for Chernobyl.
56 people have died because of chernobyl and chernobyl related radiation diseases.
4000 people is estimated overall toll. There was over 400 000 people on the effected area.
Oh. And one thing, most people on the toll where within 20 mile radius of the reactor.
Thats from one accidents in many decades. The coal industry is more deadly but the difference is that coal industry has thousands of small incidents that kills, and those doesn't raise the headlines like a single nuclear accident does.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Indeed, CANDUs seem relatively ignored compared to PBRs. The original design was rather expensive in terms of the amount and purity of heavy water needed, but the advanced design reduces that substantially (although possibly at a cost of making it impossible to use thorium as a fuel.) Unlike PBRs (AFAIK), CANDUs potentially could be used to make weapons grade material, but the safeguards to prevent this don't seem onerous.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
There are people out there who seriously think Fox News is the epitome of journalism and that any other source (except maybe the WSJ and Wash. Times) is hopelessly biased. No, I'm not kidding.
Please point to one study that shows the left bias of NPR News.
:)
Humans can't help but be bias, this is due to them being human.
NPR's news is written and recited by humans.
Therefore NPR is bias.
Bias isn't always obvious and is rarely on purpose. The UCLA study on bias found that journalists often will use the WORDING of a story to slant it one way or another. For instance, they'll say that Newt Gengrich "gained notoriety for his time as house leader" instead of saying "he was the house leader." Of course, this is not word for word from the study, please read it before deciding how much you believe it.
Getting back to your request, the study states that NPR does indeed have bias but not much more-so than the average publication such as Time magazine, for instance.
I equate being a partisan to having a mental disorder, due to a study I read on how the rational thinking center of the brain of a partisan literally shuts down when exposed to a differing viewpoint. The reason partisan journalists are bias is because they think all facts point towards their viewpoint as "truth."
The brain will cut off information input at some point because if we really knew how many variables we DIDN'T know, we'd never make any decisions. That's why I don't vote
Latewire
Stars may look easy, but have you ever tried making one? Just figuring out where to put all the hydrogen you'll need is a major logistics headache. And don't even get me started on the nightmare Environmental Impact Statement you have to fill out. Face it, if the sun hadn't just been there by chance, we never would have gotten the funding / permits needed to build it.
--MarkusQ
Indeed. Listen to a my hometown radio station KPFA in Berkeley, Ca. for a few hours then you will know what real leftist radio sounds like.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
It turns out that dropping things into the subduction zones doesn't work out very well. The problems are mainly due to instability, as it doesn't simply suck what's there into the earth's core, but rather spews it around as well. There's some better solutions that involve burying it in the deep clays in more geologically stable areas.
Of course, many countries have banned dumping radioactive waste into the sea under the London Convention. The United States signed it in 1998, but it hasn't been ratified yet.
The amount of excess heat is usually about a few Watts per square centimeter of palladium electrode.
During some experiments this excess heat is believed to achieve much higher value:
One event described here which is not described in the technical literature is an extraordinary 10-day long heat-after-death incident that occurred in 1991. News of this appeared in the popular press, but a formal description was never published in a scientific paper.
Mizuno says this is because he does not have carefully established calorimetric data to prove the event occurred, but I think he does not need it. The cell went out of control. Mizuno cooled it over 10 days by placing it in a large bucket of water. During this period, more than 37 liters of water evaporated from the bucket, which means the cell produced more than 84 megajoules of energy during this period alone, and 114 megajoules during the entire experiment. The only active material in the cell was 100 grams of palladium. It produced 27 times more energy than an equivalent mass of the best chemical fuel, gasoline, can produce. I think the 36 liters of evaporated water constitute better scientific evidence than the most carefully calibrated high precision instrument could produce. This is first-principle proof of heat.
A bucket left by itself for 10 days in a university laboratory will not lose any measurable level of water to evaporation. First principle experiments are not fashionable. Many scientists nowadays will not look at a simple experiment in which 36 liters of water evaporate, but high tech instruments and computers are not used. They will dismiss this as "anecdotal evidence."
It is a terrible shame that Mizuno did not call in a dozen other scientists to see and feel the hot cell. I would have set up a 24-hour vigil with graduate students and video cameras to observe the cell and measure the evaporated water carefully. This is one of history's heartbreaking lost opportunities. News of this event, properly documented and attested to by many people, might have convinced thousands of scientists worldwide that cold fusion is real. This might have been one of the most effective scientific demonstrations in history. Unfortunately, it occurred during an extended national holiday, and Mizuno decided to disconnect the cell from the recording equipment and hide it in his laboratory. He placed it behind a steel sheet because he was afraid it might explode. He told me he was not anxious to have the cell certified by many other people because he thought that he would soon replicate the effect in another experiment. Alas, in the seven years since, neither he nor any other scientist has ever seen such dramatic, inarguable proof of massive excess energy.
Here is a chronology of the heat-after-death event:
Total evaporation equals:
Everytime I hear about cold fusion, my BS alarm just rings like wild. If they're getting such real results, then why not hook up an array of these to a small generator that feeds back into itself and give themselves some free energy. Any competent physicist/chemist would know how to convert heat to electricity with an acceptable loss rate - especially at the 4x output that's being claimed in some cases.
If I had a portable fusion generator, the first thing I would do is hook one up to my house and disconnect myself from the electric company so I wouldn't need to pay electric or heating bills anymore. The next thing I would so is start selling "long life" battery systems, or "super duper efficient" heating systems to fund my research. Considering that this is the last thing they are doing, even after having 8 years to study it - my BS alarm is ringing like wild. They wouldn't happen to be seeking big government funding would they? Hmmmm.
A 2002 Economist article looked at the pebble bed reactors, they described the process as
The SA plan for pebblebed reactors seems ridiculous to me. If I heard right, they were going to spend $2 billion on them. Once built nuclear power plants provide very cheap electricity but they constitute a massive capital investment. SA is capital poor but rich in cheap labor. A distributed system of cheap locally produced wind turbines and solar panels would make a lot more sense.
I think your numbers are off. Without using breeder reactors, at current power generation rates and known deposits of uranium recovered at economically recoverable levels (current energy prices), it's about 200 years worth. *However*, there are a couple of big glaring holes in this.
1) As energy prices rise, "economically recoverable" changes.
2) This ignores seawater uranium recovery, which contains thousands of years worth at current consumption rates.
3) Non-breeder reactors burn 0.7% of uranium down to about 0.35%, so they're using about 0.35% of the mass. A good breeder will burn 95% of the mass of the uranium.
4) There's also thorium breeders.
Realistically, we're looking at thousands of years even as energy consumption grows.
Beautiful Blueberries
Wake up and envision a sitaution where NPR was conservative and being supported by your tax dollars.
The funny thing is that there are many liberals who feel that NPR is too conservative. Or rather, too corporatist, due to the fact that they've generally given up government money and are now reliant on corporate grants (aka sponsors).
When both sides call a source biased, that's a good indication that they're about as middle-of-the-road as you can get.
This reasoning, plus the fact we don't like breeder reactors today, is the primary reason why disposal of nuclear waste is difficult and expensive in the US: we're actually storing the "spent" fuel against future need. Tossing the "waste" into a breeder reactor would be cheap and easy, and disposing of the waste in a way we could never retreive it would be much cheaper and easier than what we're trying to do today.
We don't want to use breeder reactors today (bacuase of the risks associated with enriched uranium), but we might want to do so in a few hundred years (because of limits on uranium supply), so we're stuck with the expensive proposition of storiing waste where we can get it again in a few centuries. Not an optimal situation.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Three Mile Island was effectively the worst-case scenario for the reactor and as a result released less radiation into the atmosphere than a coal plant does on a normal day of operation.
If that's a "live round", then I'm going to have to say that I'm not very worried.
TMI had a flawed reactor design. The control rods were designed as a single unit. Therefore, when one rod was unable to be reinserted into the reactor, none of them were. Oops. Now we have an unregulated reaction going out of control -- pretty much the nightmare scenario, right? Well, fortunately some other engineer didn't trust the control rod engineer, and put a bed of graphite pebbles underneath the reactor. When the reaction got hot enough, the core melted and dripped into the bed, which spread out the uranium and slowed the reaction.
The radiation that was released while the reaction was uncontrolled was contained by the shell, and the outside area was largely unaffected. Chalk one up for good design and back up safety systems.
We've only gotten better since then, and learned from the TMI accident. TMI has been used as a bogey man against nuclear power since it occured when it never warranted that status and certainly doesn't today. Fusion will be great when it comes, but in the mean time fission is a great way of providing power.
The enemies of Democracy are
Especially since the revolver seems to be loaded with blanks.
3 mile island was an econimic desaster but killed no one. Chernobyl caused a notable loss of life, but nothing nearly as bad as recent coal desasters. Given that Chernobyl's design was about as safe as playing hot potato with nitro glycerine, I think nuclear power has a pretty good safety record.
As for breeders - find out about them, paticularly superphoenix and learn from the mistakes instead of ignoring them. They may be a possibility but there is still work to be done.
There are not yet thorium breeders or any type of thorium plant, but research is ongoing into using thorium as a fuel.
Anyone who pushes a single energy source is selling something or has been deluded - nuclear scales up, the only way to remotely consider it on economic grounds is large base load stations running at a constant output. Other things can cover the peaks.
Pebble bed covers the safety angle by having units too small to fail catastrophicly. However, the big advantage of thermal power is you can build huge plants and get well over double the amount of power produced for twice the size of plant (as distinct from photovoltaics - get two and you only get twice the amount, which is why they are used as a comparison by anyone with a large scale energy source that wants to fool people). The small unit size of pebble bed makes it an unattractive way of generating electricity - unless someone works out a clever way of using multiple units working together. The first full size pilot plant is going to be constructed in China so we'll soon find out if it is a viable idea.
High estimate, but even with this what happens when you increase your nuclear power generating capacity by more than an order of magnitude? The answer is that the high quality fuels which currently result in carbon production of only one third of that of gas turbines (yes, it's rock that has to be mined and processed) runs out and the lower quality stuff that requires more resources to turn into fuel is used.
:) What matters is the safety of the facility, and without a containment structure, the PBMR doesn't have that.
If you have ample high-temperature nuclear power, you can make hydrogen at 70% efficiency, and thus oil at around 30-50% efficiency through Fischer-Tropsh. Of course, if electricity is cheap, expect more electric or partial electric vehicles. Expect factories burning heating oil to switch to electricity. Etc.
As for breeders - find out about them, paticularly superphoenix and learn from the mistakes instead of ignoring them. They may be a possibility but there is still work to be done.
I'm not fond of sodium breeders. Superphoenix was just the start - look at Monju and its sodium leak which almost ate through its protective steel plating (i.e., it would have encountered the concrete; sodium + concrete is explosive). I much prefer lead and lead-bismuth breeders, as well as thorium breeders (which use moderated neutrons, so no need for liquid metal).
There are not yet thorium breeders or any type of thorium plant, but research is ongoing into using thorium as a fuel.
This is incorrect. There have been, and are, many thorium breeders. They're all classified as research reactors (i.e., none in mass production), but they've been working quite well. India has the majority of them currently in operation, as they want to replace their uranium reactors with thorium (India has much larger deposits off thorium).
Pebble bed covers the safety angle by having units too small to fail catastrophicly.
Building more little plants means many little failures instead of a few big failures. That doesn't buy one anything
Beautiful Blueberries
What are you calling commercial? If you're calling commercial "sells power to the public", then you're wrong on all counts. By the way, all thorium reactors are breeders. The energy comes from irradiating thorium to produce U233, which is fissionable. You "breed" thorium into a fissionable fuel, just like you do with U238 to plutonium.
Beautiful Blueberries