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India To Build A Thorium Reactor
In their first story, slowLearner writes "India will build a working Thorium reactor. [Quoting the Guardian] 'Officials are currently selecting a site for the reactor, which would be the first of its kind, using thorium for the bulk of its fuel instead of uranium – the fuel for conventional reactors. They plan to have the plant up and running by the end of the decade.'"
Before anyone gets too excited, this is only a modified Heavy Water Reactor and not one of those fancy Molten Salt Reactors folks like Kirk Sorenson have been evangelizing for a while now.
"India will build a working Thorium reactor."
Building a non-working Thorium reactor would be an absurd plan.
Half the reactors aren't in compliance with NRC regulations, because people like you stop us from replacing older, outdated reactors with newer more safe reactors. You can't on one hand decry the old reactors as being unsafe but then demand no new reactor be built to replace it. So is the old one more unsafe than the new one or not? If you don't like the old one let's build a new one that is safe.
And Chernobyl and Fukushima were both decades old designs, I believe, late 70s. Unless you think reactor design hasn't changed since, then India's reactor will be more safe by default especially considering how they have to "activate" Thorium to even make it fissile. Hint, it's not by itself.
Why do I keep having to say this? If you think that there are no problems with nuclear power, move to Chernobyl or Fukushima.
I will, but this double dare will include you moving right underneath a wind turbine, or moving into a houseboat in a large dam used for hydro-electric power. Why not move next to a coal mine / coal plant and tell me if you like that? Did you drive to work today? Try living next to a refinery, because 40tonnes of hydrofluoric acid, massive clouds of H2S, or the nightly sootblows are enough to ruin anyone's day. Maybe you prefer to simply not have power at night when you want it because no base-load energy source is pleasant and has zero environmental impact.
The problem here isn't that Fukushima and Chernobyl are irradiated, the problem here is that people were living within 20km of it to begin with. Pretty much every generating technology consumes large amounts of land / is not at all nice to live next to. But given the choice at least nuclear uses little land and doesn't put massive amounts of particulates into the air.
By the way I spent 5 years living in a house from which I could see the cooling towers of a nuclear reactor. I wasn't worried then, and I wouldn't be worried now. I work in a plant that would level a city block if so much as a spark ignited our products. Yet statistically I'm more likely to die in a car accident on the way home than due to a chemical release / explosion at work.
Statistically nuclear power is also the safest technology we have in deaths per GWh of generation, more so when you take into account mining of resources needed for the fuel. Please send your fearmongering back to the US government where it belongs.
If we start reprocessing our fuel using techniques that the French have been using since the 70's then the majority of our waste will be recycled. If we further start using modern reprocessing systems (like breeder reactors), then the majority of the waste that is left will also be recycled.
Then for what is left, the Yucca Mountain storage plan is capable of safely storing nuclear waste for hundreds (if not thousands) of years with no maintenance. You add in a little bit of maintenance and we can safely store the waste indefinitely.
Compare that to coal where we have no practical means for collecting let alone storing all the pollution which they create. And whose pollution is causing much more immediate problems. And whose normal operation causes far more more deaths per MWh than nuclear. Building more coal plants is what is insane.
Geeks interested in safe practical thorium power really need to read the history of molten salt reactors here. I hope India and China have the sense to invest in this path. The LFTR is the long term theoretical evolution of the molten salt reactor path. My only problem with the whole LFTR hype is it's pushing for massive research instead of building reactors we know how to build now. We should get back in the game now, first building a new MSR taking into account what we learned in the 60's and new advances since then, and then build a few commercial plants.
To be specific about some of the hype I don't like, check out the claimed advantages of LFTRs. Some of the advantages that LFTR theoretically inherit from MSR I wont dispute, including inherent safety, small size, and low operational cost, as MSR research proved that already in the 60's. However, I take issue with "load following" which means ramping the reactor up and down to follow the load. That's what all our other generators are good for, but to get your investment out of a nuclear reactor, you want to take advantage of it's low fuel cost and run it at 100% capacity almost all the time. This also greatly simplifies the engineering involved, and given the economics, there's simply no way our early LFTRs will be designed for load following. Then they claim minimal end-of-life expense. Cleaning up the MSR plant turned out to be massively more expensive than anyone would have guessed, though with knowledge gained from that experience, we should be able to do a better job next time. Then, they assume that the first LFTRs will use a new turbine design, rather than standard steam turbines. That might be where we eventually get, but build the first plants using cheaply available and well understood technology! This sort of hype looks more like fishing for DARPA grants than solving the energy crisis.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
I worked on the control system for a nuclear plant maintenance robotic system back in 1990 (actually the controller was based on my design :) ). I learned something interesting about the nuclear power industry. The short version is - in France, nuclear power plants were considered machines, like airplanes. They were constructed and maintained like machines - they were all basically alike (in a given generation), and the differences were only in details of siting, etc. So each new one was just like the previous one, so everyone concerned knew pretty much how to avoid common problems like piping layout. And when a problem showed up in one, it would be fixed in all of them, much like FAA requires a problem in one 747 to be dealt with in every similar plane. (The paperwork for each 747, back when it was actual paper, weighed a significant fraction of the actual plane.)
In the US, these plants were considered buildings, and were designed (mostly in the 1960s and early 1970s) by architects (using components, but put together in different ways). So every facility is different. The architects generally weren't familiar in advance so had to learn while designing. As a result, many plants have things like pipes that go through a walkway at waist high, so the workers have to climb over or under it, and pipes that had to be re-routed on-site (often halting construction for a period of time) because they collided with another one in the design. (These were all designed before modern CAD systems had the capability to catch that.) And, because they are all different, a problem in one may or may not be found in any other, so there's no easy way to pro-actively fix problems that are found in one plant, because the design may not match in the correct way.
In an earlier job we were reviewing nuclear plant construction drawings with regard to the possibility of scanning them and generating CAD models. We found that the drawings in question were the worst engineering drawings we'd ever seen. They were essentially done without design rules, with multiple system layers all on one drawing - everything from concrete footers to electrical to plumbing all on one drawing, with pieces actually cut out and replaced by a redrawn section! I can't say that all plants were like this, but certainly this one was. It was unreadable by humans, much less computer scanners.
The plants we were working with also had radically different cleanliness standards - they are all run by independent companies, with different rules and traditions. One plant was so clean that the whole radon-in-houses problem was identified when a worker set off the radiation detectors going IN to the plant. The interior radiation level was maintained substantially lower than the ambient in the area - the place made 'hospital clean' look like a swamp. Others, based on what we heard, were more like that guy down the street with the cars in his yard.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/