Slashdot Mirror
Thorium, the Next Nuclear Fuel?
mrshermanoaks writes "When the choices for developing nuclear energy were being made, we went with uranium because it had the byproduct of producing plutonium that could be weaponized. But thorium is safer and easier to work with, and may cause a lot fewer headaches. 'It's abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn't require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind. Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab's finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.' So why are we not building these reactors?"
Because a number of groups with rather different goals have one thing in common.
Sustainable nuclear power is a threat to their pocketbooks.
You mad
It's easier to prevaricate and then blame your political successors for lack of action than it is to decide to just get on with it.
Especially when there is no spare money to procure a wholly new reactor type.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
IMHO, this technology will finally come forward from outside the nuclear energy industry.
Even Iran wants nuclear power for this reason.
You sure it isn't because their oil production has peaked and is now declining alarmingly quickly?
Deleted
How many times have we designed things that are supposed to be unsinkable or infallible and then had them sink or fail? If there is a radioactive material being used in the plant, then there is a chance that some of it will leak out.
- 1/2 the country doesn't believe what scientists tell them: evolution, global warming, birth control/STDs. Why believe them now?
- No new nuclear plants have been built in 30-ish years.
- uranium was thought to be pretty much endless, so why do more research into thorium? (yes, U is getting in short supply now)
- nuclear power still has the stigma of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl attached to it. It'll be tough to get public opinion on that changed, especially with advances in fuel cell and solar technologies
Nope the thorium reaction path produces weapons grade fissibles.
So still no explanation as to why no common use of Thorium reactors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium
The thorium fuel cycle mainly creates Uranium-233 which can be used for making nuclear weapons, and since there are no neutrons from spontaneous fission of U-233, U-233 can be used easily in a gun-type nuclear bomb. ... some weapons proliferation risk due to production of 233U; ....
India's Kakrapar-1 reactor is the world's first reactor which uses thorium rather than depleted uranium to achieve power flattening across the reactor core.[21] India, which has about 25% of the world's thorium reserves, is developing a 300 MW prototype of a thorium-based Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR). The prototype is expected to be fully operational by 2011, following which five more reactors will be constructed.[22] Considered to be a global leader in thorium-based fuel, India's new thorium reactor is a fast-breeder reactor and uses a plutonium core rather than an accelerator to produce neutrons. As accelerator-based systems can operate at sub-criticality they could be developed too, but that would require more research.[23] India currently envisages meeting 30% of its electricity demand through thorium-based reactors by 2050.[24]
On the one hand, modern uranium reactors (pebble bed, or even well-made light water reactors) are perfectly safe. Using thorium instead is at best a minor improvement.
On the other hand, if using a different fuel convinces members of the general public that nuclear power is safe, and allows the construction of new facilities in less than a decade, that's great, and worth it even if thorium is slightly inferior as a fuel. In short, it can be a PR win.
I am working on the very periphery of the problem, designing equipment to measure the properties of hot radioactive molten fluorides - in the region between 900-1700 C, for European nuclear researchers. Clearly one of the problems which should be obvious is that we are looking at cutting edge material technology to work at these temperatures and neutron fluxes !
Japan, Canada, South Korea
Those certainly use their own tech in nuclear reactors, they actually build them instead of contracting out. But don't have any bombs.
Ukraine is also an interesting example. Not sure how much of a nuclear power plant they can build domestically, but certainly quite a bit...and they had 5000 warheads when the USSR dissolved. Got rid of all of them.
One that hath name thou can not otter
or, no sooner than 20 years.
rewriting history since 2109
Uranium is also abundant and safe, but it's a lot better known than thorium. Thorium is promising, but there's no need for an alternative nuclear fuel at the moment (and probably won't be for a very long time). The nuclear fuel isn't what caused the Chernobyl disaster, it was the reactor, and huge amounts of research has been invested into new uranium based reactors with all sorts of properties making them safer and cheaper.
Thorium looks good and should be researched, but with nuclear fuel we're spoiled for choice. The idea that we need to find a new nuclear fuel for safety or cost reasons only damages the chance of people getting behind the fine technology we have/are-developing now.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
These days, people only mine Thorium while they're working on getting their skill up to the Fel Iron and outlands level. One thing worth noting is that somewhere in the past few patches, they've made it so you can mine Fel Iron at 275, which is pretty nice. No more running around the Eastern Plaguelands looking for Rich Thorium Nodes for those last few points when you'd rather be in Hellfire Peninsula.
Err, yes. Why didn't I realize that before? You've really opened my eyes. Radioactivity can get into the environment! OH MY GOD! LET'S BAN SMOKE DETECTORS. THEY CONTAIN TEH RADIOACTIVITY.
I brought this article up in my government class a few weeks ago (we spend more time discussing what the government is doing than how it's set up), and I couldn't convince a single person that this new kind of reactor was safe. Let's face it: years of not building reactors combined with years of scare tactics from our government about other countries building reactors can't be undone with science. Propaganda > Science
The debate has been ranging here in Norway lately, since we hold a lot of the world's known reserves of the stuff (as opposed to many wild guesswork assumptions about possible reserves around the world). The reason why not more reactors are built is quite simply because the technology is not there yet. By most accounts, a functional prototype reactor is 20 years away. It is a very complicated technology, and more difficult to engineer safely than uranium reactors that we currently know a lot about. Several studies, for instance from MIT, cast doubt on whether thorium reactors will even be cost effective. Extracting thorium from the ground is harder than for uranium, and the enrichment process is more difficult and costly. Thorium will also produce dangerous, radioactive by products, and if you have enrichment capabilities for thorium, it is not a far step further to produce weaponized plutonium.
So it may be the future, but apparently no silver bullet.
All this is IANANP (I Am Not a Nuclear Physicist) so I guess someone reading ./ can answer this better than me.
According to this (see the section called "Fuel cycle concerns"), because there is no need to refine the Thorium fuel, which is the stage where the nuclear power companies currently make their money, they would need to change their business model to cope. We all know how much companies like to do that.
So, you combine the politicians' lack of desire to risk being associated with nuclear power, and the entrenched industry's lack of interest in the business model, and it's suddenly easy to explain.
Of course, if we're going to tackle the problems of the 21st Century, we have to be willing to solve hard engineering problems, but it makes perfect sense to tackle the easier ones first. Especially when it takes years to build and test a reactor, so developing anything really new is apt to take a decade or two before it can actually make money. So far, it has always seemed easier to tweak the existing, mature Uranium technology to deal with its remaining problems.
Personally, I'd love to see a sustained government effort to develop commercially viable Thorium power plants. (I have thought this since the 1970s.) But the reason that hasn't happened yet is Thorium just has too many unsolved problems -- it's not because of some industry conspiracy.
--Greg
how about pouring more resources in nuclear fusion? Isn't it n times more efficient and m more clean?
India has Thorium reactors today.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Tubes and "billiard balls" ... weren't 'em trucks?
P.S. I think "series of tubes" to be one of the best simplification of the 'net ever.
As the subject says, there is already a proven and safe reactor design that can use the thorium fuel cycle.
Ian Ameline
36 comments so far, and only one mentioning the #1 problem of current nuclear technology: WASTE.
The problem is still unsolved but nobody cares about it. Meanwhile, we are cumulating tons of material which will be dangerously radioactive for many generations after ours.
If switching to thorium stops the generation of highly radioactive waste, we have the #1 good reason for doing so.
Fuel cells may replace batteries but they do not generate electricity and are thus irrelevant to the current discussion. People keep thinking that the so called 'Hydrogen economy' is a solution of energy production. It is NOT. Hydrogen is a great way of storing energy but impossible to generate without electricity and the only natural available source is in oil/gas reserves.
So what happens when the thorium leaks out of small holes in the tubes from cracks or fme intrusion and pools in the bottom of the core? It can't melt down because it's already melted. This is why a meltdown is so bad, because you can't control how many bricks are in the pile.
Oh Crap, I'm an optimist.....
Such reactors may be less dangerous and the may produce less radioactive waste. But even though. They still produce radioactive waste, which we cannot handle. And it uses still a extremely limited resource. We will eat up the reserves in no time. And it would be again a centralized energy production. We want a decentralized energy production to become independent from big energy companies and to produce the energy more safely. And a large number of small generators are much less vulnerable to a total loss than one big one. Big technology is bad technology.
"So why are we not building these reactors?" Yeah, cause its always a good idea to work with large quantities of molten fluoride salts. I think I've got some materials right here in my shop that would work perfectly fine with that.
Because 'Big-Uranium' bought up all the patents and made them secret. ...... Just like 'Big-Oil" bought up the super-dooper battery patents.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
So still no explanation as to why no common use of Thorium reactors.
Same reason we don't use hemp paper, and why anyone thinking we'll move away from oil based cars before the famine starts is fooling themselves.
The existing corporate status quo makes money doing it this way, and they won't change unless made to (by, say, running out of uranium or oil or what have you).
The article seems a little misleading. The article makes it appear that just by using thorium, it is possible to get better fuel efficiency (burnup). The reality is that the article is talking about using liquid fluoride based reactors, a technology that we havent been able to make commercial use of yet, and it is unlikely we will see those types of reactors for many years. Comparing liquid fluoride reactors to any type of light water reactor (the kind in use in the US) is like comparing the gas mileage for a car to an airplane. They use different fuel types due to design, and you wouldnt buy a hummer just because the car salesman says it gets better gas mileage than an airplane. The article should talk about the difference between LWRs and gen4 reactors, and how by using a gen4 reactor you can make efficient use of thorium, expanding our fuel options and reducing proliferation threats. When thorium fuel is used in an LWR, you actually get much worse fuel economy (about 5% to 10% at best compared to traditional uranium cycles), for the same cost. Wikipedia's thorium fuel cycle has some pretty good information about thorium in LWRs. http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/TE_1450_web.pdf is a great document prepared for the IAEA and has some good bullet points about thorium viability.
Plutonium fears from breeder reactors and the green movement in the 60/70's with their irrational fear of "OMG NUCLAEAR!!!111"(yes I spelled that wrong on purpose). Accidents with things like the sodium reactor in Japan, and so on just give them more fearmongering tools. Instead of "we need to make sure this doesn't happen again, what went wrong and how do we make sure it doesn't happen again." That's why we're 30 years behind the times, and why the US has no functional breeders, and why you're just starting to use MOX again, and why you ship plutonium to Canada, Japan and S.Korea for us to make the fuel for our own reactors.
I realize that people are going to get pissy as I've now blamed the entire environmentalist green movement, reality is that's why there haven't been any new reactors built in the US. You need oh 100 easy, you needed 50 new ones to be under construction 20yrs ago. Even Japan and Canada have a projected timelines for new reactors into 2065 and where/when they'll be built to deal with electrical generation.
Om, nomnomnom...
What type of nuclear reactor to use it completely unrelated to what fuel to use to power cars.
You aren't going to stick a nuclear reactor in the trunk, and how the grid gets its electricity has no impact on electric cars either.
I've often read that a CANDU reactor is already designed for use of Thorium as a fuel, but compared to claims in this article, would prove to be an expensive way to burn this fuel. Of course, a CANDU reactor can burn up old warheads and even the waste a PWR leaves behind, so I have my doubts any of the 7 countries using that reactor would need to switch to a Thorium cycle. By then, perhaps even more ingenious ways to extract power from Thorium may be discovered.
There are several hour-long talks on the history and potential of Thorium as a nuclear fuel. Very interesting stuff.
I've long been opposed to relying on nuclear power but after looking at the info on Thorium, I'm starting to have
second thoughts.
Whether or not it pans out, I'm afraid that nothing short of a catastrophe of some kind will lead to its adoption.
It's very hard to unseat the entrenched industries, especially in North America, so coal and uranium won't
suddenly disappear.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Nuclear power is a really bad idea for two reasons 1) all the energy we need can come from solar and wind Thorium may be "inherently safe" but having tons of super hot, possibly corrosive and toxic (HF, hydrofluoric acid is super corrosive and toxic) fluoride salts doesn't really sound like a good place to start. so, if you had the control of how to spend, say,10 billion dollars (and that is probably a minimum to bring a new reactor technology on line) to develop new nukes, or better solar panels, which way would you go ? 2) it helps spread nuclear weapons technology there is also an issue about nuclear weapons. Building the complex infrastructure to manufacture, test an store nuculear weapons requires a huge amount of expertise in how to handle radioactive materials. I think it obvious that it is easier to aquire this expertise if ou have a civilian nuclear power industry. Say for just storing vry radioactive waste - you need to know how to monitor it so workers are safe, you need special shielded drums, etc ect Civilian nuclear power = more nuclear weapons
A heavy water reactor is the anti-thesis of the salt-based Thorium reactors.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
India has Thorium reactors today.
Really? Can you show me a photo of a commercially operating (today) Thorium reactor?
There are certainly designs and plans and prototypes and test reactors.
Deleted
Decommissioning any industrial site is a nightmare. Nuclear power isn't special in that respect. Perhaps we should just be more reluctant to close these facilities.
Bethlehem Steel in Buffalo, NY shut down in the 1970s. Here is what it looks like today. 40 years later, and it's still a barren wasteland.
No nuclear power involved there.
This is part of why the whole quasi-conspiratorial story of "why we didn't go with thorium in the first place" is utter nonsense. It was not because "we wanted bombs instead" and were prejudiced against "superior thorium", it is because only if you have an established nuclear industry cranking out materials usable in bombs by the thousands can you build these reactors in the first place. Either you must have natural/low enriched uranium reactors to produce plutonium, or you need large amounts of highly enriched uranium (prime bomb material) to load into thorium breeders.
Also unacknowledged is that the particular type of reactor being promoted, the molten fluoride salt reactor, was and is a complex technology that requires substantial additional development. Only one single reactor of this kind was ever built, and it was an 8 megawatt (thermal) materials test reactor, not a power reactor. We are looking at many years of additional development before construction can start on a prototype full scale power reactor. I agree that this technology should be further pursued, and it may turn out more successful that plutonium breeders (no successful power plants have been built, just several failures) but it is by no means guaranteed.
Hyman Rickover, by the way, was interested in light water uranium fueled reactors because they are a good technology for powering submarines, not because they produce plutonium (they are lousy plutonium producers, the yield is low and the material produced has terrible properties for bombs).
Check out the 2005 IAEA survey document (http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/IAEA-TECDOC-1450.pdf) for a good summary of the thorium technology options and prospects.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
and yet, despite all you say, the supposedly incorruptible Manmohan Singh [*] bent over backward to do a deal with the US that is -- in the long term -- clearly very bad for India if you consider energy independence combined with foreign policy independence. He's accepted an unprecedented level of interference from the US... oops I mean "inspections", we're now committed to buying hundreds (thousands?) of billions of USD worth of equipment from the US (most of the drooling over this deal was from US companies in that line, naturally), and there's no mention of Thorium anywhere on the horizon as far as these bozos are concerned.
[*] to be fair, I think he's still incorruptible; it's just that fornicating Italian female canine has such an influence over him... What bothers me is that President Kalam, who had been talking up Thorium for years (IIRC) and criticising the nuclear deal (albeit gently, considering his status), suddenly veered around and said yeah this is good for India. Now *that* is an achievement. I do believe Indira Gandhi herself could not have budged this man from saying what he believes, so how the fIfc {see above} managed that is beyond me...
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html
Seems there are zero commercial thorium-only reactors in the United States.
So, now I am wondering if the idea sounds great on paper, but is unable to be made a commercial reality.
Seem that if it was so easy to do, someone would have done it by now, as generating electricity for a utility seems a win-win in terms of profit.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
'Because everyone that has nuclear reactors also builds bombs...'
In this case, one can't blame Canada!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
What type of nuclear reactor to use it completely unrelated to what fuel to use to power cars.
You aren't going to stick a nuclear reactor in the trunk, and how the grid gets its electricity has no impact on electric cars either.
My point is there is an existing system that involves large amounts of profit in doing it the old way, and the people making said profit have no reason to foster change just because science said so. In fact, given the dismal state of the US education and patent systems, companies often can actively push back by simply hiring, destroying, or buying out people with new ideas.
Look at digital music, for example -- we had to drag the music industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and they only came along after they had time to get their lawyers and executives to put down their clay tablets and abacuses long enough to think up some admittedly pretty innovative ways of screwing the rest of us over.
I guess a more succinct way to put it is that corporations have used profit to make science and progress their bitch this past century, and I see no reason why this won't continue going forward.
Apparently all the manufacturers of nuclear technologies and plans are non-thorium based - they have interest in their promoting their business. Thorium based reactors are definitely the future - India has been active in this area since a very very long time and has reportedly made quite a substantial inroads into its use and application. It is mainly motivated by the fact that it has to rely on the nuclear raw material from those few who would not sell it easily - a lot of diplomatic and political arm-twisting, conditions and business favors. The real reason US and other western nuclear powers want India to sign NTPT and CTBT by offering it nuclear fuel (for non-thorium based reactors) is also to make it agree to sign for access to its nuclear facility for overseeing its usage and security by the "watchdog" agencies and also to roll back and terminate its research reactors (which are instrumental in thorium research), and thereby either kill its research and/or gain access to it.
Because everyone that has nuclear reactors also builds bombs, so they go hand in hand, and cost less in the short run.
No. South Korea, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, have nuclear reactors and do not have nuclear weapons. This is not by any means an exhaustive list either.
You do not need nuclear reactors to make nuclear weapons. You can make nuclear fission weapons by using U-235 or Plutonium. If you have a centrifuge cascade like Iran does, or some other means to separate fuel, you can make U-235 weapons without owning a single nuclear reactor. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Little Boy) was of this type.
Are we forgetting Tylium? Easily mine-able and can spool your FTL drive. Endless benefits.
The only way to have no chance of an uncontrolled chain reaction is not having a chain reaction in the first place, e.g. like in a fusion reactor, or using the neutrons from a fusion reactor to split fission fuel. No chain reaction, so just stop the neutron source and you only have decay heat to deal with.
What 'heat' other than strongly worded letters did the State of Isreal take in response to their Gaza attacks?
They're not even part of the Non-proliferation treaty. Your assertations need citations.
Blar.
Hemp paper makes writers want to rape and kill!
Hemp paper is used by negroes and latinos!
Down with the hemps and their evil papers!
(sarcasm)
Yes, its madness.
thorium? are we not on to saronite yet?
Life is what you make of it.
Primary reason there is limited interest in thorium, right now. Infrastructure. Ore processing, refining, isotope separation, fuel rod manufacturing infrastructure. Most existing fission reactors rely on an U 235 / U238/ Pu 239 fuel. Industrial scale processing in the countries that process fuel is all set up for uranium and plutonium processing. It would cost 10's of billions of dollars / euro / rubles / yen / yuan / or what have you, to build the necessary facilities.
Well, then there is an easy solution to the Iran problem - provide them all the help to set up new Thorium-based reactors that can not produce weapons, in exchange for shutting down their current program. Win-Win.
I have heard the hemp paper argument before. Try reading some actual publications on the field. An eucalyptus monoculture is about as cheap, or cheaper, than hemp in some places. Hemp is only used in countries which have limited land area, so they use crop rotation with hemp
they do not want their power base to evaporate
Metaphorically, or indeed actually :D
My point is there is an existing system that involves large amounts of profit in doing it the old way, and the people making said profit have no reason to foster change just because science said so
Maybe the fact that 4x more product from the same ammount of raw material (in your example) could recude production cost per product unit, increase margin and make a step ahead from competitors ?
Segmentation Fault in "Life, Universe and Everything" at line 42. Don't Panic.
One caveat: U-233 will inevitably get you some U-232 as well, which is much more radioactive stuff compared to Pu-239 (the stuff most bombs are made of), so it's easier to detect, which in turn makes weapons inspections easier and less invasive. Given that it's inevitable that any country that really wants to make a nuke will be able to do it (if N. Korea can do it, anyone can), a country that's using Thorium reactors for power can be considered operating with a measure of good faith.
Not a typewriter
I say let's call it Metal Power Plants instead.
That's ridiculously inaccurate. There are dozens of national nuclear programs that have reactors for power generation and research which don't build bombs.
Apparently the big money-maker is not in power generation but in producing reactor-grade Uranium, which is expensive.
Thorium requires no pre-production, it can be used exactly as it is found in nature. So if the production of fissible Uranium is where all the money is made today, and you introduce a system that eliminates that function, lots of money goes away.
That's what the GP is talking about.
And it's not like some enterprising new company can come in and just start making Thorium reactors, making nuclear reactors is very, very hard and require a lot of expertise. The folks who can pay the scientists are the folks with lots of money - i.e. the folks who want to maintain the status quo.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
A lot of big players must really enjoy the contracts for building complex nuclear reactors. Make them better and simpler and these middlemen will not make as much money. You can bet that your local power company and the entire coal industry would be willing to kill anyone coming up with small, safe, efficient modes of power production or delivery.
If you think that paragraph is paranoia at work consider how many people the coal industry has been known to murder in the past. Time does not change greedy people.
U-233 is probably not a significant proliferation risk, as produced it is inevitably contaminated with U-232 which produces hard gamma radiation from its decay products(pdf). This makes it very hard to handle and very easy to detect, not great attributes for building a bomb.
A more credible proliferation risk (IMHO) is that once you've perfected breeding U-233 from Th-232, you might well have gained all the expertize you need to breed Pu-239 from U-238.
japan and the ukraine both have strong reasons not to have nuclear weapons.
Canada really don't need to have their own as any attack on canada is just as bad as attacking the USA anyways. (most canadian cities are near the US borders).
South Korea has external pressure not to piss off the people 50 miles away.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Everyone that has nuclear reactors does not build bombs. 50% of Sweden's electricity comes from reactors, and Sweden has never built a single nuclear bomb.
These reactors are not being built because the technology is not fully developed (as I understand it, better materials are required because of the high temperatures). Though some prototypes has been built.
On this subject it can also be worth of mention that all Gen-IV reactor concepts (which include molten salt reactors) are designed to make it very hard if not impossible to extract Pu-239 from their fuel or waste.
You are correct on the subject of Iran, they want to build a reactor based on a Gen-IV concept (i forget which one right now) but modified to facilitate production of Pu-239. That design is not accepted as a Gen-IV reactor.
Generation IV Wikipedia article
Posting anonymously because it's bull. 200 years to peak oil there? Maybe if they don't sell any.
This isn't flamebait at all. None other than Dick Cheney was running around telling everyone who would listen that there was a huge production problem in the middle east. He had a great quote to sum it, something like, "If the Saudi's have so much more oil, they would have to be finding other fields like Gawar, and they haven't been". In fact, he calculated out how many Gawar size mega fields anybody would have to find, simply to meet existing demand, and they aren't out there.
Suddenly we find the USA sitting in Iraq, for what reason? The whole Bush administration's energy policy was essentially to get the dibs on the last remaining oil taps in the world, its own coastlines, interior, and in Iraq, essentially to buy time for its other plan of shoveling money at alternative energy projects would kick in.
This is my sig.
Your 'big oil monopoly' theories are very, very 1970's. Can't you move on?
It's very difficult to regulate and control the production of THC-producing plants (cannabis).
This is why the government is so strongly opposed to it. It can't be taxed and controlled easily. Any dumb pot-head can grow a years supply of it in a few pickle buckets, anywhere on the planet.
It isn't difficult to grow like tobacco, and massive-scale growing operations are not needed, as with opium or cocaine.
... in the Auction House. At least on my server.
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
Yeah, everyone is trying to get those deadly Thorium bombs! Right?
Huh? You think if there is a famine we will use available farmland to grow shit that we press for oil to put into our gastank? Didn't it occur to you that this would be rather strange behavior in a famine?
Because everyone that has nuclear reactors also builds bombs, so they go hand in hand, and cost less in the short run.
No. South Korea, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, have nuclear reactors and do not have nuclear weapons. This is not by any means an exhaustive list either.
You do not need nuclear reactors to make nuclear weapons. You can make nuclear fission weapons by using U-235 or Plutonium. If you have a centrifuge cascade like Iran does, or some other means to separate fuel, you can make U-235 weapons without owning a single nuclear reactor. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Little Boy) was of this type.
Not quite true. You can't make Plutonium based weapons without a reactor, because it is an artificial element. It exists only as a trace in Uranium ores, and can't be extracted in meaningful quantities, it has to be made. The first nuclear weapons were made with the first reactors.
The problem is that carbon plumbing is required and the only form of carbon they have tried, graphite, has a problem with swelling and turning to carbon black under neutron bombardment so it loses its structural integrity.
Fortunately there is a solution to this problem: glassy carbon plumbing.
Unfortunately, the capital markets have failed to put money in the hands of even a few of the right kind of people.
It may be the most important tool for saving the planet is the guillotine.
Seastead this.
Your comment reminds me of a youtube video I watched recently. He briefly mentions this conflict of profit-interests that you brought up.
The author condensed over 3 hours of TechTalks videos down into 16 minutes. It's the most comprehensive video covering Thorium reactors I've seen yet.
It's very difficult to regulate and control the production of, really, any plant (anything containing sugars, amino or fatty acids). This is why the government is so strongly opposed to it. It can't be taxed and controlled easily. Any dumb alcoholic can ferment or distill a years supply of it in anything from few pickle buckets to a simple device the size of a small car, anywhere on the planet. It isn't difficult to produce like tobacco, and massive-scale growing operations are not needed, as with opium or cocaine. /fixed it for you
And Canada's Commonwealth so the Brits might get just a little pissed off...and NATO and all...
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I'm not a nuclear physicist either, but I can tell that you don't understand much about this issue. The most obvious mistake you make is what you said about enrichment. Whaa?? A ten second search would reveal to you that the reactor-relevant Thorium is Th-232. So do we need to enrich natural Thorium to get Th-232? God damn it, look at Wikipedia!. What is the abundance of Th-232 in natural Thorium? You will find the answer is: 100%. So the comment about enriching is 100% bullshit. I suspect deliberate FUD, maybe not originating with you, but it's sad to see this kind of crap circulating in Norway. Is that like the Kansas of Europe?
Second, there have already been several research reactors, not 20 years in the future but over 50 years in the past. Guess what? It worked great. Yeah, we could build them better now. India is doing it.
Third, the debate in Norway is, I presume, not about whether you will use Thorium reactors domestically to produce power. You get almost all you need from hydro, which is a great, clean energy source. The debate is rather about whether you will export Thorium to countries that want to also produce clean power but don't have mountains and rivers like yours. That Norwegians are having a debate about this is a little sickening to me - as though you might have a moral problem with selling this clean fuel to the world, but you're perfectly happy being the third largest exporter of oil, behind only Saudi Arabia and Russia. I think the debate you should be having is about the morality of feeding the world's oil addiction. But instead of just contributing to this problem you are also deliberately putting the brakes on one of its most plausible solutions? If I were Norwegian, I'd be ashamed.
2 things on that point:
1) In September 09, in the Journal of Experimental Botany, research was published to demonstrate all of the genes required for THC synthesis in cannabis. Thus an RNAi or Knock-in(knockout), or possibly a GMO using Agrobacter tumefasciens, can now easily be done to ensure there is no THC production in the plant.
2) Despite my belief of it to be irrational, they can still maintain that the THC-laden cannabis production to be illegal, and the crimes can still be investigated, prosecuted, convicted, and punished. I'm reminded of the common flawed thinking/argument of decriminalizing drugs in which it is assumed that doing so would permit people to do all kinds of drug-fueled crimes like driving under the influence (lets ignore that most drug fueled crimes emit from the black markets of prohibition); the problem in this idea is that it somehow assumes that, for example, a rapist on decriminalized crack is any less punishable now that the crack is legal to use. That's simply not so. In that case, rape is still a crime and can still be prosecuted. The rapist goes to jail for rape. We don't ban alcohol just because drunk guys don't ask drunk girls for permission to date rape.
----
I'd like to argue that the government is more strongly opposed to Hemp because its widespread permission in our culture would further expand the public awareness of the benevolence and lack of hysteria-causing effects of cannabis. Put alcohol, cigarette, and pharmaceutical lobbies into political pockets and you've got plenty of reason to keep people in a state of "reefer madness".
As for taxation, you should come to Cali and talk to a medical marijuana dispensary. They are ALWAYS selling out of stock. The patients are not usually so disabled they could not grow it themselves but simply prefer the easier method of purchasing it. These transactions are all recorded and taxed, and if not, that is illegal as well and can be investigated and prosecuted. It may be easy to grow, but that doesn't mean people will always do it on their own.
Liquor and Beer are actually easy to make, too. People pay a premium for something off the shelf, and that is where it is taxed. A legitimate farm with organic conditions and desirable strains of cannabis could EASILY attract a number of consumers. Amsterdam is also a standing example of this. People *could* grow it in their closet, but its much easier to walk down the street to a coffee shop for a J and a cup of coffee, spend $5 and have a nice day.
On a related note:
Its really funny, though, our politicians who have also smoked pot, still pander to the old (and likely those lobbies) when it comes to cannabis. The cat is literally out of the bag and now about a half mile down the road away from it. Most people under 50 either have personal experience with cannabis, or have at least witnessed first hand how the drug is nothing like it is pretended to be by our government. Most citizens still against its legalization are from the reefer madness era and their minds are still unchanged from the irrational hysteria they were fed by people they trusted. As those irrational old people pass away or finally share a J with their grandkids and see the truth, times will definitely change.
Check this out:
http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_stats.shtml
That's a LOT of people finding out. I hope I'm speaking to someone of experience.
Check out the UK.
http://www.idmu.co.uk/cannabis-use-in-britain.htm
I suggest anyone seriously interested in our energy future to take the time to go through this report called "Technofixes" by CorporateWatch UK
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=3126
According to this report, only wind and solar come out as having the potential to be both socially desirable and effective in combatting climate change. Hypothetical 4th generation nuclear reactors, even if decided upon, would be too little too late because it takes long to deploy at great up-front cost, and the waste problems remain unsolved (despite what you may hear about the magic of breeder reactors etc.)
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
You do not need nuclear reactors to make nuclear weapons. You can make nuclear fission weapons by using U-235 or Plutonium. If you have a centrifuge cascade like Iran does, or some other means to separate fuel, you can make U-235 weapons without owning a single nuclear reactor. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Little Boy) was of this type.
Not quite true. You can't make Plutonium based weapons without a reactor, because it is an artificial element. It exists only as a trace in Uranium ores, and can't be extracted in meaningful quantities, it has to be made. The first nuclear weapons were made with the first reactors.
Little Boy was a U-235 gun-type bomb. The very first nuclear weapon was made from refined uranium, no reactor required. Fat Man was a plutonium bomb.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Actually the reason we won't go to hemp oil is because we are having too much fun imprisoning one another over marijuana cultivation/use. As soon as that game pisses enough people off, then we will be open to revoking our status as the "Only industrialized nation not growing hemp". The reason we cannot legalize hemp (and end middle-eastern rule over us) is because 90% of all of the "outdoor grow-ops" we tear up every year (under the guise of "marijuana eradication") are actually patches of untended "feral hemp". If industrial hemp were legal for farming, we would have to call a spade a spade, and redirect the billions we piss away every year weeding our fields and forests of it.
-Oz
I support Iran's national soverignity. You tend to say they cannot have nuclear power. This is an evil position, and has no legal basis. Perhaps you do not like nation-states.
On the other hand, Iranian nuclear weapons would not be helpful. And there is actually some basis for taking that position.
Personally I'm really not sad of not having a lot of sodium reactors in my backyard ... containment breaches might not be very likely but I have my sincere doubts about their economic viability if you take into account their propensity for turning into containers for molten pools of radioactive cement and the costs for cleaning those up.
There are some reactor designs which simply make sense, water moderated reactors and the aforementioned thorium reactors for instance, and there are some which simply don't make sense ... such as carbon moderated reactors without a safety dome and sodium cooled reactors.
now tell me again what this moralising and evangelising has to do with the subject at hand?
Meh, I'm undoing all my mods in this thread just to reply, but no matter: Are you sure those countries weren't thinking about nukes when they built them? Sweden did in fact build their reactors in order to be able to build nukes, plans which they fortunately ditched.
If frickin' Sweden thought about it, you can bet the others did as well.
That is, in essence, why much of the environmental movement is so mad at nuclear. It's not about meltdown. It's because for fifty years, nuclear power research had all the funding, and nuclear plants all the subsidies, because they were really "dual use". What could we have had if all that money had been sunk into wind, or geothermal? What the environmentalist movement says is essentially "you've had your chance, military pigs!" (but there are also pro-nuclear environmentalists who say something to the effect of "but it's sunk costs, and there are promising things within reach!")
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
> So why are we not building these reactors?"
Because the USA wanted to build nuclear bombs.
25 years ago in OMNI.
It's (thermal) neutrons. They're used for fuel breeding. You an build a thorium reactor to produce them but it requires extra equipment. A U/Pu reactor requires only shielding to slow them down. The US hasn't approved a thorium reactor for anything more than experimentation despite the ability to build full scale reactors because they want to be able to produce high grade (either fuel or weapons grade) fissionables at every possible location. The US has no interest in 'clean & safe' nuclear.
Check the fusion projects the US has backed vs. those it hasn't and see what differs between those.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Don't forget the tree-huggers will not let us mine for it because we'd probably desturb the mating habits of some dung beetle or something. One only needs to look at California to understand that we are stuck in a stalemate. The tree-huggers don't want to use oil products to produce energy (California could be in the black instead of the red if it actually drilled for oil), coal, wood, and even nuclear. China's starting to create a strangle hold on REE that's needed for the green technologies they swoon over which doesn't produce the same bang for your energy buck as the other stuff. Do you actually think think for a moment the tree-huggers will let any mining happen? They would rather live in the dark ages.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Molten fluoride salts are not known for safe handling.
Experience suggests otherwise. Any dangers due to fluoride salts are more than compensated by the fact that the reactor does not suffer from steam explosions or regulation complexities of a light water reactor. Furthermore, several molten salt reactors have been built and run for extended periods of time. This technology is proven.
And fusion is at least 30 years out, I guarantee you. The only promising fusion possibility is Brussard's Polywell, and if that pans out, we're talking about a whole new untested technology that will take decades to refine.
Thorium is tried and proven right now.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
But that would take large capital investment of hundreds of millions if not billions in R&D, production of new facilities, etc., which would decrease short-term profit statements--and executives want to avoid decreases in profit statements at all costs so they can keep stock prices as inflated as possible, and milk their yearly bonuses. The current corporate structure punishes good long-term planning and rewards short-term profitability, so it's not surprising that no one's interested in innovating if it costs too much in the here-and-now to build increased profitability in the distant tomorrow.
Hell, one of the first things "forward-looking" executives do when they get into power is cut short-term costs by any means necessary, even if it means crippling the entire company's future by, for example, spinning-off the expensive R&D operations which have kept the company innovating into new companies so their budget gets off your books. Cf. "Agilent" and "Lucent"--after being spun off, their parent companies stagnated grossly, with the venerated HP a shell of its old self and the "original" AT&T imploding through corporate greed and stupidity with SBC buying up a relatively-empty husk. Oh, and in the process AT&T bought Olivetti Research Laboratory, "Europe's leading communications engineering research laboratory," only to shutter it 3 years later to save money. Corporate asshats at work.
Remember all those financial wizards who melted down the whole economy by discovering new ways to make a quick buck, at the expense of--well, the whole country? How many of them are in the unemployment line now, and how many are still making millions? Yep, thought so. Those car-maker execs who failed to innovate and took the whole American auto industry from best-in-the-world to also-rans--how many of them are collecting unemployment alongside the factory workers they put out of work? Yep, thought so. A few of the top execs lose their jobs whenever big corporations get run into the ground, but they always [golden-] parachute into a new company right quickly.
The whole corporate system is FUBAR, and I have to blame it on globalization--which pushes governments to deregulate lest multinationals scale back in-country operations for laxer overseas venues. So no, no one will willingly invest hundreds of millions to billions to get "4x more product from the same ammount of raw material" and "re[duce] production cost per product unit, increase margin and make a step ahead from competitors" if they can make more short-term profit by business as usual.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
you never ever , ever use thorium , never , be it on your head, matety jim. There some thing which are unaccetable and u buddy u just crossed the line, you have upset me.
Actually, the proliferation risk is very minimal. Production of U-233 from Thorium-232 yields a small amount of U-232, which is a hard gamma radiation source. This means that it fries electronics and is in general far more hazardous to work with. Of course, one could isotopically separate the U-233 from the U-232 but if you have the infrastructure necessary for that, you might as well be making U-235 and Plutonium bombs.
I realize that people are going to get pissy as I've now blamed the entire environmentalist green movement
Not really. You've blamed the mainstream environmentalist/green movement, which is definitely mostly anti-nuclear, but not all environmentalists are - in fact, some old-timers who made the whole thing going way back then are now pro-nuclear, and criticize Greenpeace over its anti-nuclear policy.
In fact, I dare say that nuclear power is the only reasonable choice for a pragmatical environmentalist: it is significantly better than all options that we use today, and it is the only source that can viably maintain our present civilization level, without "going back to the caves" - the latter being effectively implied by all calls to use strictly renewable non-polluting energy sources. In some regions, there is potential to go almost, entirely clean (e.g. U.S. in particular has a lot of potential for wind power; Canada and Russia can - and, in fact, do - bet on hydro; etc), but ultimately, planet-wide it will have to be nuclear.
Centralization is to some extent the direct result of specialization within society. Nuclear power is extremely complex and to work in it, one needs highly specialized training. The direct result is that only a small subset of the population will ever be able to build and operate nuclear power plants, and thus nuclear power generation will always be highly centralized. The same is true of coal power or natural gas power generation, or, for that matter, food and clothing production. The less time I spend managing these things myself, the more time available to me to improve in my own chosen area of specialization.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I'm not suggesting that nuclear ought to be off the table, but I do think that liquid metal reactors are not the best or safest design. I'd much rather live next to something like a Pebble Bed Reactor, or some other design that has passive safety, rather than relying on active cooling in order to prevent meltdown.
Using sodium in a reactor is also a bad idea, because its reactivity with water makes firefighting a much more hazardous activity.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Got rid of all of them.
To be fair, one of the things that helped Ukraine get rid of all its warheads was the nice subsidies we were willing to pay in order to prevent those warheads from falling into the hands of less savory nations. Not that I'm resentful of that, of course.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
There has been some recent break-throughs with Tokamak-style reactors where they've proven that the Plasma becomes self-stabilizing beyond a certain energy level. Sorry, I don't know where the link is right now. Perhaps someone else might know.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
A heavy water reactor is the anti-thesis of the salt-based Thorium reactors.
Antihesis? I hardly think so, it is just another thorium reactor technology - one that is more mature. I think we should look at as many viable candidate thorium reactor technologies as we can, and develop all them to the point of establishing whether they are commercially attractive or not.
There will be dozens of AHWR reactors operating, in all likelihood, before a single molten fluoride salt starts producing power on an industrial scale.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Was Belgium thinking of having nuclear weapons? How about Finland? They are even building a new nuclear reactor right now.
It is bullshit that nuclear power had all the funding and all the subsidies. The US did a lot of investment in the Federal Wind Energy Program between 1974 and 1981. Even NASA had a lot of research projects in the area. Between 1981 and 1988 hundreds of millions of federal tax credits were sunk on wind projects of dubious value. While without the nuclear reactors that power strategic submarines, arguably WWIII would have already happened. Submarine launched missiles ensure a nation has the ability to strike back even in the case of a massive first strike, giving pause to anyone thinking of starting a nuclear war.
Just because a nuclear power plant demands a larger initial investment than a single windmill does not mean it is more subsidized. Dams require a large initial investment as well. They still provide cheaper power in a lot of places.
What is wrong with dual use technology anyway? The Haber-Bosch process helps to make nitrogen fertilizer to feed billions of people today. It is also useful for making explosives. Would you rather us to be still digging up Chile for saltpeter, or collecting guano? ENIAC and ARPANET were built for the military as well. Canned food was invented by Nicolas Appert for the French Empire military.
When I read your comment, I read it as since "I was 10" not "10 years out of school"
but in either form its dead on, Peak-Oil, Peak-Uranium are bullshit, and mean we want the price to go up.
What I find amazing is that so many sheeple fall for this, again and again.
An important point is why fusion research is still not going anywhere, that is important and deserves a much elevated political profile.
Fairly sure it was the other way round: Fat Man was the gun-type Uranium and Little Boy was the, smaller, Plutonium device.
Who ordered that?
Bzzt... wikipedia is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_man and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy
Because it costs 6X as much?
Because the established option is quite a bit cheaper than the nearest alternative option?
Right... sorry. Big conspiracy! That's what it is!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
After the first war, Saddam started/continued killing Kurds in the north and Marsh Arabs in the south. We initially responded by creating no-fly zones.
Think about that for a moment. For about a decade, we patrol the sky over Iraq in some lame attempt to reduce genocide. It's continuous military action. It's an on-going cost, it doesn't work very well, and we can't just quit.
That had to end somehow, in a non-genocidal way. The hope had been that we could encourage a coup, but that wasn't successful. So, what would you have us do?
...like a *danged* good idea. Let's do this. Now.
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
See if they take it. If they do, win/win.
As mentioned by other /.ters india has been working on nuclear reactors using thorium fuel for quite some time.
"India is estimated to have a reserve of 2.25 lakh tonnes of Thorium, with an electricity generation potential of 1,55,000 gig watt-years, against just 61,000 tonnes of uranium, with an electricity generation potential of up to 42,000 gig watt-years only. The use of thorium for power generation had been a dream of the country's nuclear scientists as it would help make the nuclear programme all the more autonomous." ~ http://www.hindu.com/2007/01/05/stories/2007010511500100.htm
Among other things, nuclear scientists in India also believe that nuclear power will be the "primary source of power for the future":
"Right now we are talking of nuclear power as an electricity source, and it will be an important electricity source for a long time to come. Very soon we will reach a situation where the energy source, such as oil and gas, will be in short supply. As our energy use grows, we will have to tap all our energy resources such as hydro, coal, oil and gas. It looks to me that there will be a stress on all these sources.
Our nuclear energy sources, particularly from thorium, are vast. Our technology focus at the moment is how to generate electricity from thorium. What about a point of time when the general energy sources are stretched? The question then is from where will we get the energy for transportation? From where will we get the energy for industrial processes? Just as we get crude oil, and refine it into energy products such as petrol, diesel, kerosene, naphtha, etc., I think the day is not far off when we will have to look at nuclear energy as the primary energy source.
So the question is, using nuclear energy can you produce hydrogen? Or can you facilitate pyro-chemical or pyro-metallurgical processes. In all these, the important thing is the temperature at which the energy is available. In the PHWRs, you get energy at 300C, and in the FBR at 500C. But for other applications - energy conversion applications - you require energy at 1000C. This is a technology development challenge and this is something we have begun doing (Compact High Temperature Reactor) so that in the years to come, we can look at nuclear energy as a primary energy source.
So, the first thrust area is to increase the share of nuclear power in the electricity generated. The second is to expand the source of nuclear power as the primary energy source. The third is what we can do in the area of agriculture. Thanks to the Green Revolution, we are better placed in agricultural output. Even so, oilseeds and pulses are areas that require more attention. That is where the strong point of BARC is - the mutant seeds developed in BARC. It is more focussed on oilseeds and pulses." ~ http://www.thehindu.com/fline/fl2104/stories/20040227003810000.htm
mod parent "answers the GP question". Oh wait, just mod him "Insightful", then...
Segmentation Fault in "Life, Universe and Everything" at line 42. Don't Panic.
Poison with U238? A lot of good that will do since its fairly simple to chemically separate the Th from the U before you stuff it into the reactors!
Or are you meaning something else? IE provide a blend of Th and natural U when we make the fuel.
BTW - you are correct about the article. IMHO its pretty bad.
Some may claim that we will innovate our way into a "safe" fusion reaction using Uranium. They may commence that work just as soon as we get the Thorium reactors online at the regional grids, and shutting down all that smog and heavy metals getting spewed out by current generation thermal generation facilities.
For one thing, they've never built a thorium MSR. If you want to burn thorium in a conventional reactor, you'd need to reprocess your fuel. Of course, they could get a dramatically increased amount of energy out of Uranium if they used fast reactors and fuel reprocessing. The problem is that reprocessing is expensive. That's why there's the interest in molten salt reactors, they think the reprocessing can be done less expensively. But the breeding ratio for thorium is very low, much lower than uranium in a fast reactor (which we know is high enough to be sustainable). It may be too low for the thorium fuel cycle to be sustainable. Someone needs to actually build one to see if it can work. So the problem is that they are not even experimental at this point, they are hypothetical.
Here is another writer who is developing a nuclear reactor based low-CO2 future scenario. Read it carefully, his book is an interesting exploration, but not "the solution".
Thorium for reactors, and the larger context of using nuclear electric generation to replace CO2 emitting coal generation is discussed in:
Whole Earth Discipline An Eco-pragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Here is an online book that organizes a huge spectrum of CO2 reduction schemes. This is worth reading for gaining perspective on just what fraction of the CO2 problem might be addressed using nuclear electricity generation.
David MacKay: Without Hot Air
http://www.withouthotair.com/
Just yesterday I wished to make some progress toward a low carbon lifestyle. I started up my van [ 243,000 miles at 22.7 miles/gallon x 7 lb of carbon per gallon of gas x 3 lb of CO2 per pound of carbon ] and thought oops did I just emit 224,000 pounds of CO2?
Many people here talk about how safe or how cheap it is to use either thorium or uranium. The real problems however are not plant safety or cost, but how to store the huge amounts of nuclear waste. Most of it needs to be stored thousands of years until it's finally safe. There is still no way of doing that, the material is stored in old salt mines without knowing if this will last long enough. Until 1994 it was even legal to just drop it into the sea. This year it was discovered that from the 90s on (until this year!) France was shipping it's nuclear waste to Siberia, where it was stored on a old parking lot. In Italy nuclear waste was packed on old ships by the mafia which then were sank in the mediterranean or atlantic sea. And I'm pretty sure that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Uranium or thorium, nuclear energy is NOT the future, it's a serious threat to our (grand) children!
"Was Belgium thinking of having nuclear weapons? How about Finland? They are even building a new nuclear reactor right now."
I don't know. Not all countries are eager to admit such things, but Sweden and Switzerland have. Other countries which we know have used their civilian programs as cover for weapon production are Brazil, Argentina, South Korea, Taiwan, and Iraq, not to mention France, Great Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, South Africa, the countries that actually succeeded in making a bomb.
I did not say nuclear had all the funding. It had way more, I don't see you arguing that.
Think about all the "dual-use" technologies that have been so immensely valuable to the world, then imagine those resources being used directly towards making valuable things for the world, instead of just as a fortunate side-effect of making new toys for generals. One of the best things you cite in your list, Arpanet, was even based on more than a little deception to gain access to those bottomless dual-use funds (the whole notion that routing would "continue functioning after a nuclear attack" was BS, and Arpanet pioneers have admitted today that they knew it).
I don't think that's the way things ought to work.
What if we got a little blasphemous, and instead called Eniac, Haber-Bosch, Arpanet and all the space program related inventions testaments to the efficiency of government projects? Because that's what they were. There's no magic to military government projects that make their projects more efficient and productive - quite the opposite if you ask me.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Canada had nukes until the mid 80's, and they have dozens of nuclear reactors through out the country, with at least 6 of them within 75 miles of where I am currently sitting.
As for commonwealth status, Canada has been independant from british control for decades, while the queen is still head of state she has about as much say as all the other voters.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Wind Mills and Electric Solar Panels are the Alchemy of our Age.
Don't let their green image fool you, the "hidden costs" are big.
Even in the few cases where their appliances are somewhat practical, we have real alternatives available.
Why take energy from moving Air, when you have moving Water?
Why use the thin rays from above (Fire), when you have a molten core (Earth) below?
Let's build (clean) geothermal systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Geothermal_hotspots.JPG
Photovoltaics can do some:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_land_area.png
but Solar Thermal Power Plants already do it better:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andasol_1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Solar_One
Let's let them move the water: ;)
http://www.livescience.com/animals/090729-jellyfish-mixers.html
(The UK Government name for its side of the Manhattan Project in WW2)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I question the "All the power we need can come from solar and wind." According to wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption we use an average of 1.5 Terawatts. A square kilometer has a million square meters. Sunlight runs about 250 W/m2 when averaged over 24 hours. Assume 25% efficient solar cells, and a 50% placement rate. (Leaving aisles for service, etc) So our million m2 is now 125,000 m2 Our power/km2 is 31 MW So to get 1.5 TW requires just under half a million square kilometers. Hmm. Wind turbines currently come in 5 MW chunks, and have an average utilization of about 30%. So about 700 turbines per GW. 700,000 turbines per TW or about a million turbines. This totally ignores the storage problem. High altitude wind power may work, but we have no practice with 25 kilometer long kite strings. I don't think there is any one-size-fits-all solution. We have to explore all energy technologies, and get a lot better an energy use.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
The only promising fusion possibility is Brussard's Polywell...
Only if you permit the laws of physics to be wrong and a number of experiments to also be wrong. ITER could work. But its not the best next step, and the multinational nature costs the project huge gobs of money with internal politics and the like.
Also most say that for next gen conventional nuclear we are looking at 10-20 years at least as well (for the experimental reactors).
Personally I think we should get started.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Only if you permit the laws of physics to be wrong and a number of experiments to also be wrong.
Polywell doesn't violate any laws of physics that I'm aware of. The physical limits of electrostatic confinement do not apply to the Polywell fusor since it uses magnetism for the bottle.
Also most say that for next gen conventional nuclear we are looking at 10-20 years at least as well (for the experimental reactors).
Thermonuclear fusion has been failing for over 30 years now, and it will probably continue to fail for another 30 years.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
For the pollywell to work it need to keep electrons and ions away from thermodynamic equilibrium. Yet the ion-election interaction probability is orders of magnitude higher than fusion. So without black magic it will use more energy that it produces. It does not matter how they are confined.
Thermonuclear fusion has failed to produce a working reactor. But confinement has been improved over a million fold. If we do that for the next 20 years, we will have DD fusion reactors, let along DT reactors.
I think we should peruse both options. Conventional should be focused on energy production and waste management today. I personally think molten salt reactors offer potential well beyond solid fuel based reactors.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Nuclear power never was cost effective. Nobody has proven it can be competitive. I don't care if you can find unlimited amounts of the stuff - I know it is safer now than in the past; I'm not convinced the disposal process works as far as uranium and I remember how much that was/is downplayed to this day so I'm reasonably skeptical about the claims on Thorium. Above all other issues; the technology has never payed off - it requires massive government funding to "compete" at all levels. At least the French have the government runs them instead of subsidizing private monopolies and those still run at a loss.
When the arguments continue to be that alternatives are too expensive to coal because we don't include a cost to the CO2--- why is it that nuclear power gets so much attention when it costs more than the greener alternatives? Grid power storage is possible - it may also be unprofitable. The reality is that we will all HAVE to pay more for electricity - and most likely the public will not stomach direct payment and will unknowingly pay indirectly with their various taxes.
-
Why is it we praise and defend our military when they lack the profit motive and benefits of the free market capitalism? Is this not socialism? Why don't we have competing military contractors providing all our "defense" needs? Why is government health insurance, or an energy grid is unthinkable? Is it because soldiers are the only professionals who can act unselfishly?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
For the pollywell to work it need to keep electrons and ions away from thermodynamic equilibrium. Yet the ion-election interaction probability is orders of magnitude higher than fusion. So without black magic it will use more energy that it produces. It does not matter how they are confined.
See the paper referenced here.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Guys, can we start talking about TFA again? I'm interested in Thorium as a nuclear fuel. The whole middle-east political situation is a re-hash of discussions that seems to hijack each and every discussion about fuel. Isn't there anything we can say about the technology? Or has this become simply a more accessible forum than the mainstream press?
Oh wait. Damn, started that one again...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Fat Man was fat because the physics package was a large sphere of explosives surrounding a sub-critical sphere of plutonium. Little Boy was long and thin, with a uranium "bullet" at one end and a uranium "spike" at the other.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I don't drive a tank to work, and I don't have a Howitzer in my backyard. My electrical power shouldn't be generated by a reactor whose design is a leftover from the Navy's think-tank.
The people who say "OMG! Thorium leaves waste that is much more radioactive! Cooties!" are poorly-educated. The more radioactive nuclear materials are, the sooner they'll burn up and become something less icky. "The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long" (to quote Blade Runner). Highly-radioactive waste is the good kind, not the bad kind.
I have read it (not wiki, but the real papers). I did do quite a bit of plasma and nuclear physics you know. Buzzard pushed his idea when he had only detected a few neutrons and then claimed it was the best anyone ever done (it was not by a long shot). If you want a dark horse fusion idea that can actually work, this is your best bet.
For some reason everyone thinks the science is rock solid when it comes to Climate studies. But when it comes to the next crackpot with the *same* fusion idea that been tried many many times before, a 100 years of experimental data and very very good theoretical understanding is now all wrong. We are talking about the 2nd law of thermodynamics here, entropy is increasing. A hot thing that is in contact with a cold thing will lose heat to the cold thing. At the very least the people in question should be able to say why it will be different this time round. But they don't, instead they make crazy claims like that they can do boron fusion even though its 1000x harder and lower power density and despite the fact they *can't* break even with DD or even DT.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
When has Polywell fusion ever been tried before? It's markedly different from the Farnsworth fusor if that's what you're referring to.
Where is the "hot thing in contact with a cold thing"? There is no physical contact of this sort in Polywell fusion. Unless you're referring to the particles involved?
Indeed, Brussard explained in many venues why Polywell fusion is quite different from previous ideas, and he was hardly a crackpot.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Actually, that is not true. Canada has some of the most advanced, and ancient Nuclear Reactors in the World...The Montreal and later Chalk River labs contributed significantly to the Manhattan Project. So Canada is really one of the top pioneering countries in the World in atomic energy. But Canada never built a bomb. What bombs Canada did have were American bombs, and have been given back to the US by the 1980s. Canada doesn't want the bomb.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
One tank should last me to the Mars and back.
Huh? You think if there is a famine we will use available farmland to grow shit that we press for oil to put into our gastank? Didn't it occur to you that this would be rather strange behavior in a famine?
No, I think when we run out of cheap gas, the trucks bringing McDonalds Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese meals to most of our urban population centers will stop, and a very very LARGE number of people are going to be too pissed at $15/gallon milk to be upset at $15/gallon gas.
And before anyone points out "But most people don't survive on Fast Food" -- the same thing goes for just about everything we eat now. I live in Idaho. I think locally, as in, no imports from out of state, I could get Sugar, Potatoes, and Milk. Maybe some more supplies, if I really looked into it, I admittedly haven't.
Anything else would need to be shipped in from a factory farm someplace back East. No gas? Hope you like fried taters.
If we don't have the gas to send 18 wheelers around, food prices are going to go through the roof -- if we can even get food to the markets at any price -- and people will starve.
The Russians did back in the 60s. Thats where the idea came from. The "virtual" cathode/anode idea was studied quite a bit by them and Buzzard references them in one of his few and quite poor papers.
Even wikipedia can help you with the "why it won't work" (under the fusion energy IIRC).
Electrons in a plasma emit massive amounts of x rays (Bremsstrahlung radiation). The amount depends on the charge of the ions, so with Boron fusion the x rays is 5 times higher than with DT or DD fuels. It also needs to be hotter since the protons need to overcome a higher potential in order to hit a B atom. This mean that no matter how hot the plasma is the fusion energy will *always* be less than the xray energy and the plasma will cool very rapidly or rather never get hot enough for fusion.
Now in a polywell or a fusor, they work by accelerating ions to high energy. ie a hot thing. Electrons are in the background plasma or directly injected (some Russians experiments did this) and are at low energy. The cold thing. They occupy the same space and ions/electrons can and *do* collide. A hot and cold thing in contact. Now if the probability of fusion is higher than the probability of colliding with an electron, you get some fusion before they loose all their energy to the electrons->xrays. But its not. You are about a million times more likely to hit an electron than to fuse.
We have a huge amount of experimental evidence and observations that back this up too. If something like this would work, we would have seen it work by now in some of the experiments back in the 60 and 70s. Asserting that everyone else is wrong without anything to back it up, and claiming that you can do H-B fusion when you can't even demonstrate a neutron yield at a fusor level, is a strong sign of heading towards crackpot territory. His scaling laws are literately pulled out of thin air. His talks further show how clearly he had no intention of dealing with the experimental and theoretical shortcomings of his claims.
This is widely accepted in the science community, with data to back it up. I find odd that something with speculative models and only long term predictions and almost no track record of validated models is held up as such a certainty (aka climate change) where something like this with *far far* more of consensus in the community and far more validated models and data and experiments, must surly be wrong. Faith will not make this work.
However don't read this as acceptance that tokamak is the only way to go. I think its one way, and currently has achieved the best confinement by a long shot. Other schemes should be perused, but lets make sure they at lest work in theory first. The Polywell does not.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Was this meant as an argument against or for hemp? I can't see how it could be considered a legitimate argument against it, as most crops not grown on trees or vines have a limited duration of the year in which they can be grown. Being able to work yet another cash-crop into your rotation would be nothing but good news to a person making their dough in agriculture.
Eucalyptus may be as cheap (or cheaper "in some places") as hemp, but in truth it has many disadvantages by comparison. A. Hemp seed is high in protein and is also a viable source of Omega-3 fatty acids, B. Hemp oil can (and had until Prohibition stamped out all hempinol fueling stations...)yield an ethanol-based fuel suitable for automobiles, C. Hemp grows much faster than eucalyptus in far more varied environments than are suitable for Eucalyptus trees. I could go on, but I will spare you the deluge of uses Hemp can be put to where Eucalyptus cannot be used as an analogue...Google it sometime.
-Oz