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Is Safe, Green Thorium Power Finally Ready For Prime Time?
MrSeb writes "If you've not been tracking the thorium hype, you might be interested to learn that the benefits liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs) have over light water uranium reactors (LWRs) are compelling. Alvin Weinberg, who invented both, favored the LFTR for civilian power since its failures (when they happened) were considerably less dramatic — a catastrophic depressurization of radioactive steam, like occurred at Chernobyl in 1986, simply wouldn't be possible. Since the technical hurdles to building LFTRs and handling their byproducts are in theory no more challenging, one might ask — where are they? It turns out that a bunch of U.S. startups are investigating the modern-day viability of thorium power, and countries like India and China have serious, governmental efforts to use LFTRs. Is thorium power finally ready for prime time?"
Why?
NIMBY
I'm all for Thorium, but the title is a question, therefore the answer is no.
Isn't it usually blue?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Chernobyl was a graphite moderated water-cooled reactor. Any commercial nuclear plant in the U.S. is a water-moderated and water-cooled reactor.
Despite the normal perception of the word, a "moderator" actually increases the nuclear activity in a fission plant since it slows-down ("moderates") neutrons and therefore increases the probability that the neutrons cause a fission event. In Chernobyl, the coolant (water) was blown away in the pressure explosion, but the moderator (graphite) remained in place which led to the runaway meltdown.
By contrast at Three Mile Island & Fukushima, the loss of coolant led to a meltdown (literally heat causing melting to occur), but since the water moderator was also missing, the accidents did not lead to a runaway that was anywhere near as severe as Chernobyl. If Fukushima had included a pressure vessel of the same caliber as the one used at TMI, then hardly any radioactivity would have been released during the Fukushima accident.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Molten salt has a lot of advantages as a working fluid over water, unfortunately the major big disadvantage outweighs all the positives.
Viz. the conditions inside these reactors would be absurdly corrosive. F salts are chemically aggressive, and that aggressive increases with temperature. That is compounded by the fact that the reactor materials will also be bombarded with significant neutron fluxes, and by the presence of all dissolved decay products in the working fluid.
We simply don't have materials that can stand up for any length of time to that kind of abuse.
I have the misfortune of living at ground zero for an ongoing wind farm build. 24/7 truck traffic, massive clouds of dust, hour plus highway shutdowns while they move their superloads, obnoxious subcontractors that ignore traffic laws, etc, etc. Then there's the ecological impact -- acres upon acres of wooded hilltops have been deforested. I truly had no idea how obnoxious it was until Google Earth got updated images. Take a look at some before and after photos of a large wind farm and see for yourself how bad it is.
All of this might be worth it if wind energy scaled the same as nuclear, or could provide the same power density, but both of those are utterly impossible. You'll never match nuclear reactions for power density, and the footprint of a nuclear power plant is no larger than that of any other modern industrial concern.
Everything in life is a tradeoff, but having lived near Three Mile Island, and now living in the midst of a wind farm, I'd take the former any day of the week. You simply didn't know TMI was there, unless you happened to have cause to drive by it. Contrast that to dozens of wind turbines, visible for miles around, along with the obnoxiousness of their build process.
Nuclear and low impact hydro are the way to go for base load. Natural gas, along with wind, and solar for the peak load.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Nothing says green like liquid fluorine!
Within microseconds of convincing any "environmentalist" that there is even the slightest possibility of a new class of reactor actually being built you will see the proponents vanish under thousands of lawsuits. Atomic energy is absolutely the only viable method of generating power without carbon emissions that we have, but it is not politically correct and a new reactor design not only won't change that, it will actually provoke a far more extreme response. Too much paranoia, too much stupidity, too much ignorance. It'll never happen, no matter how much it needs to. Americans can no longer deal with reality.
So there is a trope in the engineering world that the safest reactors are the ones that are confined to paper studies, or, to put it more timely, to PowerPoint slides.
It's true that the LFTR reactors don't have the same failure modes as the pressurized light-water reactors, but they still have the same basic issue, namely that there is a very large amount of power-generating capacity in a relatively small volume. Even pebble-bed reactors, similarly touted as "intrinsically safe" during their design phase, have had a radiation-release accident -- scroll down to "Criticisms of the design" on that Wikipedia page. The lesson (which I learned from Charles Perrow and Fukushima) is that complex systems with high power densities are intrinsically hazardous, because unexpected interactions (which arise from the complexity) tend to be highly destructive (because of the power density). LFTRs are less complex, and so less dangerous, than PLWRs, and that's good, but it doesn't make them safe.
The stupid cliche you hear over and over again is true -- safety is a process. You can design reactors so that the safety process is easier to implement, but what actually makes things safe is conservative management schemes that retain the redundancy and margin for error that the process demands, and not cutting them out because of the money, or, worse, because of complacency induced by faith in the design.
There's another industrial safety joke, particularly applicable to complex systems -- accident analysis consists of filling in X and Y in the phrase, "Nobody imagined X could happen whlie Y was true."
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Indeed, another great advantage of nuclear power is that whenever there's a catastrophic meltdown, we get hundreds of square kilometers of new wooded nature preserve.
Over here in these United States, folks on the Right will loathe any government involvement in projects like these, despite the fact that the internet is largely an effort of the government...and oh I forget the interstate highways.
As they (the Right) squabble, governments in the East are investing billions and will surpass us in relevancy before we even know it. A sad state of affairs.
I was under the impression that there's virtually no nuclear weapon risk from a thorium reactor
That was the original thinking, but there was a very recent analysis that suggested that a "minor tweak" in the process could be used to produce materials for bombs.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/nuclear/is-the-superfuel-thorium-riskier-than-we-thought-14821644
http://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-nuclear-wonder-fuel.html
Not my subject, so I won't venture an opinion on whether this is a real problem, or scare.
and that there's no fear of a catastrophic meltdown.
Seems to be what people are saying. Again, not my subject, although I'd add the caveat is that nothing is ever quite foolproof, since fools are so ingenious.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
One of the units at San Onofre is indefinitely off line because an upgraded heat exchange system was designed incorrectly. This is not exactly new technology, but somehow a flawed design made it through all the review processes. This is ultimately a organizational failure, not a technical failure.
Going from uranium to thorium will not make any difference in the long term. Serious nuclear accidents are low probability events will hugely destructive outcomes. Any claims that a technology change will result in a safe system is dangerously naive thinking.
Why is Snark Required?
So, what you're saying is, you don't like living next to a building site? What makes you think that subcontractors on wind farms are any worse in traffic than subcontractors on any other building site?
#shakes head#
I have the misfortune of living at ground zero for an ongoing wind farm build. 24/7 truck traffic, massive clouds of dust, hour plus highway shutdowns while they move their superloads, obnoxious subcontractors that ignore traffic laws, etc, etc. Then there's the ecological impact -- acres upon acres of wooded hilltops have been deforested. I truly had no idea how obnoxious it was until Google Earth got updated images. Take a look at some before and after photos of a large wind farm and see for yourself how bad it is.
Where is this exactly? Come on, don't just give us an unverifiable anecdote, give us hard facts that can be verified.
A properly designed wind farm shouldn't require mass deforestation or environmental damage.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I would say a combination of everything from nuclear, to biodeisal (home compost), to solar, to wind, to geothermal, nat gas, just about anything we can use to decentralize and balance load on the grids should be implemented. But we dont own the power grid infrastructure. If we did we could do allot to help fix it up and spread out the sources of power so it didnt all come from one place.
Wouldnt need as many nuclear plants, and everyone would have a little bit more say and control over what gets implemented here and there by individual community standards and planning.
It is unsinkable.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The article indicates that Adm. Rickover didn't like molten salt / sodium cooled reactors because the "Navy knew how to handle water". In reality, Rickover's nuclear program tried both approaches. The Nautilus (SSN-571) used a boiling water reactor, and the Seawolf (SSN-575) used a sodium cooled reactor. Both were built, both went to sea, and both performed reasonably well. But the sodium-cooled reactor turned out to be harder to maintain than the boiling water reactor, and couldn't be run at full capacity because of some design problems. so after a year, Seawolf was returned to the yards and converted to a boiling water reactor.
That was very typical of the military approach of the period - fully develop several alternatives, operate them, then dump the losers. The history of 1950s jet fighters is a striking example.
As long as we can secure mining rights in Azeroth, there should be no problem...
It's amazing what scores "informative". Why did they clear the forest? Is there really no farmland nearby which could have been used instead?
Also, modern turbine towers can be built tall enough that trees are less of a concern, although that obviously does not work if we are talking redwoods. Some power will be lost and the towers will be more expensive, but that seems like a reasonable trade off if the forest is not just a tree farm with pines in neat rows.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Are you seriously suggesting that building a nuke plant will generate less truck traffic, dust, highway shutdowns, obnoxious subcontractors? Seriously?
Russia does something stupid /one time/ and we never hear the end of it.
Seriously, though, excepting Chernobyl, nuclear accidents are actually rather non-life-threatening.
Fukushima is the only one that comes close and the estimate of its total worldwide results, on the high end, is about 2500 cancers and 1100 deaths, and the lesser contaminated areas will be safe to inhabit in a decade, the worse areas, two decades.
Almost every other accident has estimates for cancers in the double digits and direct deaths by radiation immeasurably small, including the "terrible" Three Mile Island incident.
So, over the past sixty years (excluding Chernobyl*, which was an amazing clusterfuck that had more to do with Soviet organization than nuclear power), you can attribute about 3000 cancers and 1500 deaths to nuclear power. Comparatively, the US alone sees 30 coal mining deaths a year and the world sees thousands annually. (Uranium mining gets something like a thousand times as much energy per ton mined, so deaths should decrease similarly.) And yes, coal is the baseline energy source for most of the world right now.
* Now, Chernobyl itself is estimated at something like 10k to 200k extra cancers, but that was a case where they were using a terrible design and doing a terrible test at the wrong time when a terrible accident simultaneously happened that interacted in pretty much the worst case scenario way with the terrible test going on at the time and multiple safety workers screwed up and chose the terrible option when trying to fix the problem, exacerbating the terrible results. Soviet Russia...
Let's use that as a starting point before we all jump on the latest band-wagon.
That said, Thorium appears to make a lot of sense. For countries such as Japan, it might offer a reasonable solution to their current power production woes.
To my mind, the bigger issue will be to produce a reactor that comes in at a reasonable overall (not just acquisition) cost.
As well, it is important to look at the overall ecosystem of the process from procurement of material through refinement, use and, finally, disposal.
*** Don't be dull.***
This is a much cheaper way to nukes than uranium separation, from the looks of it.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
U-232 is also produced in LFTR reactors, and is HELLACIOUSLY radioactive. You can't work around U-232 with just a glove-box - you're gonna get a tan that way. It also poisons the reaction of a U-233 bomb, so you've got to separate it out, so you're back to centrifuges and the like, and you're gonna have to throw out the contaminated and radioactive centrifuges when you're done as well.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
People that actually work with F, or UF6, actually know how to prevent that corrosion by using the correct materials.
Imagine that.
We built a few gaseous diffusion plants that exclusively used UF6 as the main working gas; K-25 ran for ~40 years.
AFAICR, Weinbergs' 'star' molten salt reactor was the only one we ever built that could have exploded; the U233 apparently concentrated in the mix, and that had to be dealt with.
Weinberg was a cool guy; I used to see him in my shop a few times a year in the 90's. I got him to autograph all my copies of his books... :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Thorium can be used to fuel a heavy water reactor like the Candu. India is developing a heavy water reactor specifically for Thorium. It is designed to be inherently safe and requires no operator intervention to open and shut valves in case of an emergency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_heavy_water_reactor
With many fascinating new species of plants and animals.
Safe, Green Thorium is a myth.
Why ? coz it's the good old dirty Plutonium/uranium, with aded online reprocessing necessary. Chemical + radiological risk.
Yes, the reactor might not get critical (if the impulse is slow). But the chemical processing plant will go kaboom for many reasons....
When the core will be spread around, (explosively or over decades), the same thing will happen a few decades later :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejZyDvtX85Y&list=UU966ccV08PVAmZRhcC0SU8Q&index=28
aaaaaaa
Technologies like this are very expensive to develop, test and prove safe, and then also commercialise on a large enough scale to pay off the huge initial investment. There is perhaps the analogy with our use of silicon in electronics. There are some cool alternative technologies with huge potential, but we still use silicon because we have invested in capacity, and tech has been honed by 50 years of continual, global investment in R&D and fabrication. I've been following the thorium story for years. I'll believe it's time has come when large industry players announce commercial reactors. I don't believe for a second that a startup or a small lab can sustain the level of investment or have scale of capability to commercialise technology like this one.
nuclear accidents are actually rather non-life-threatening.
Until they aren't. Their POTENTIAL deaths is massively higher than anything else.
The difference is operational issues which is what coal has (pollution, acid rain, etc) vs failure issues which is what nuclear has. When it goes bad, it can go very very very bad. When a coal plant blows up? Extremely localized damage and you can safely walk the site immediately after any fires etc.
We *could* make coal safe from a chemical standpoint and filter the emissions but choose not to because of the cost. Nuclear you can't 'choose' to not have a failure. They simply will happen.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Renewables are far and away cheaper than coal. Once you prevent coal from emitting millions of years worth of CO2 for free, it becomes prohibitively expensive.
;-)
Hydro doesn't work at scale because there simply aren't enough suitable places to put a damn. It works where it does and large numbers of those places are already doing so. There isn't any 'growth' in gravity based hydro.
Natural gas is at best a stop gap due to the CO2 emissions. It will have to go away too unless you can cheaply sequester the CO2.
Renewables aren't the solution of and by themselves. They also need energy storage mechanisms invented/improved. They aren't every 100% reliable because dark/clouds/still days etc. Wave power/ocean current turbines might be more reliable but not a lot of that in Okla either
renewables are literally FREE FUEL. When the vast bulk of any power plant's cost is the 'fuel', you simply can't beat them on price when other factors are equal.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
you folks don't know "jack" about the enviroment, apparantly. Okay to get the obvious awnsers someone asked for above, There are windfarms in the world, theyy are designed to catch the energyopf the wind to motivate a motor/generator to "make"" electricty. thats the hard part folks. next you have to find a location to put it in, this is even harder. someplace that has wind 24x7x365. Otherwise no good. It has to be away from the general population, they are noisey, ugly, and need to be away from what I like, songbirds, and bats and the tiny things that live part of their life off the ground, butterfly routes, etc, just to name a few things against a wind farm. Plus It's got to be offf the ground, up, in the air, connected to grids, etc. that eliminates any wind eddying things near the "farm", you know things like buildings, trees, and should therefore be built in places like mountaintops, but then you interfeer with the high flying vultures, that use the thermals. They look so neat doing that. Just because you like "green"?
There's also "no technological fix" that will make driving an automobile safe, but we do it every day and have learned to live with the risk. I guess we could make everyone drive 10mph, but choose not to. According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year) there were 32,367 automobile deaths in 2011. There have NEVER been anything like that number of deaths in a year from a nuclear reactor. Chernobyl had approximately 4000 deaths and the entire list on wikipedia for deaths due to nuclear and radiation accidents doesn't adds up to around 4,066 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents). These numbers might not be entirely accurate, but I'm guessing that all the deaths due to nuclear accidents amount to less than 2 months deaths due to automobile accidents in the US alone.
We have got to start thinking about this like we think about automobile accidents. Tragic, but unless are willing to make a drastic lifestyle change, they are necessary and we just live with them. We don't agonize over getting in our car and driving even though it is statistically WAY more dangerous than any nuclear plant.
Please define 'a lot of R&D'!
We know that breeding fissle from T90 will work.
We know the heat expansion characteristics of LF coolant/moderator.
We understand most of the implications around shutdown.
We understand far to little about the chemistry of making the reactor survive for a resonable length of time.
We understand only part of the chemistry required to seperate out various byproducts (required for a LFTR to operate)
We know there is plenty of T90 around to convert.
So yes there is a LOTS of chemical engineering to be done but there are no known show stoppers at this time.
From this we can be sure that radiation leaks are very unlikely.
Whereas is would be VERY difficult for a group of raiders to swoop in and steal the fissle material.
It would be easy for, say a government, to stockpile the fissle after it cools down. Say 6 weeks or so.
I have the misfortune of living at ground zero for an ongoing wind farm build. 24/7 truck traffic, massive clouds of dust, hour plus highway shutdowns while they move their superloads, obnoxious subcontractors that ignore traffic laws, etc, etc. Then there's the ecological impact
I think windmills look cool when I see them on hills driving by. The newer ones with super optimized blade designs look especially futurastic.
Still talking about large centralised power plants, are we?
I'll put my money behind decentralised power. In fact, I already have ... 3.5kw PV system just installed on the roof.
Cogeneration units for at-home are also gaining popularity, particularly in Germany and Spain. Whispergen.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
You have a very caustic liquid at hundreds of degrees which is infused with very large amounts of high level radioactive waste. Fission daughter products which in a regular reactor are solid and encased in zirconium steel and treated with utmost care are now free floating in something very hot, flowing and caustic. What if if there's an accident and it rains. Or a flood. The fission products are very water soluble.
Every power plant also has to be a very nasty chemical separation and reprocessing plant. Consider the contamination just in "normal" operation. And consider the people running them.
What happens if it cools off and solidifies? You've frozen radioactive waste in the pipes a multi-billion dollar plant, and you can't go in there for decades.
There aren't some failure modes of existing reactors, but there are other failure modes and problems.
It might be a good idea to have one or two, very highly regulated and operated with the utmost skill (i.e. not for profit) used to burn up actinides wastes from other reactors.
I don't know where he is, but here in Tx they move the blades on I35 without stopping traffic, and they mostly put them up in west Tx where there isn't forest to remove. When I've driven past them, I didn't see any houses close by - it's nearly uninhabited.
I don't like the idea of radioactive substance in liquid fluoride. First people might be killed by liquid fluoride. If this doesn't happen, the whole core can evaporate as a volatile compound and then form more complex organic compounds readily absorbed by plants, animals and people.
I really don't understand people who care that much about the appearance of wind turbines. We need power, and those are a good sources in many places. A round here, they've put the wind farms in existing farmland. No deforestation, just extra energy. The nuclear power plant nearby is actually more visible from a greater distance somehow. Maybe geology?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I have the misfortune of living at ground zero for an ongoing wind farm build. 24/7 truck traffic, massive clouds of dust, hour plus highway shutdowns while they move their superloads, obnoxious subcontractors that ignore traffic laws, etc, etc. Then there's the ecological impact -- acres upon acres of wooded hilltops have been deforested.
I have family who live within a mile of a wind farm. They never mentioned the contractors being obnoxious, clouds of dust, or the roads being shut down for extensive periods during the construction, and not a single tree was felled. I think someone just made a mess of things in the planning and implementation stages of your wind farm.
Actually a coal plant blowing up is not the worst thing that could happen.
The worst thing that could happen is a coal fly ash slurry spill such as happened at the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant on December 22, 2008.
Coal fly ash is nasty stuff and, depending on where the coal was mined, slightly radioactive and/or contaminated with heavy metals.
And, as far as I can tell, once it's remove from the coal plant exhaust, not regulated by the EPA.
If the guy who designed both liked LFTR better and the current design trade off, in the 60's, was for the other design, I wonder if there have been enough materials and controls advances to at least consider the "better LFTR" design now on a 10 location trial basis? Just asking.
JJ
Did you notice the scale of that spill? Not even 2 miles long. Not fun, but living beneath a dam of any kind and is certainly a planned activity. Evacuating 100 sq miles is not.
Again, 'operational' issues are one thing (and yes failure of the system holding the waste is an operational issue since it's a planned byproduct). But as you point out, it's one more type of 'pollution' that coal doesn't pay for and so is subsidized far greater than renewables.
Failure scenarios are a different issue entirely. Nuclear has it's own 'waste' issues that are decidedly non-trivial and a bit more than 'slightly' radioactive.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
This widespread "don't tell me until I can bet it from Walmart" obsession is a blight. Technologies like this do not spring fully formed from the lions of Zeus but instead require R&D, pilot plants etc, and THEN you start rolling things out.
Those with the liquid fluoride worries have a valid point which is why you don't put such devices in the middle of cities, just like with oil refineries (which use a bit of HF) etc.
Any sort of nuclear debate appears to suffer from fanboys spouting counterproductive bullshit about various theoretical technologies already existing so we don't need to do R&D but instead just wave magic wands. We don't even have a running AP1000 yet (GenIII and a bit) so all this raving about what Gen IV "can" do is really about what it might be able to do. Luckily India is not listening and is doing some research into thorium without getting suckered into unproven technology based on 1980s R&D, and from early results it looks like they may have something better than any Gen IV design long before anyone ever builds a real Gen IV reactor.
Count the lifecycle costs, including capital costs, operating costs, decommissioning and disposal etc.
With fission nuclear, they SEEM expensive, because everything had to be paid for and accounted for. Fossil fuels have huge negative externalities; renewables aren't suitable for baseload power and have sizeable upfront capital costs (albeit low operating costs). Fusion nuclear (when it comes online later this century), takes this trend to the extreme -- they will have MASSIVE upfront capital costs, but the fuel is abundant and dirt cheap.
Some years ago an old Polish mechanical engineering lecturer (with a small bit of English as about his sixth language) said this to me when I was sketching up a design on a drawing board as a student: "your design is powder."
Impressive parts are a start, but they have to work together before you have a final design. That's why there's still a lot of R&D before the first modern Thorium reactor let along a good one worth producing by the dozen. Luckily India is still doing some of that Thorium reactor R&D.
Russians are currently finishing a barge mounted atomic powerplant ( a PWR I believe), which is a decent example. Conventional coal and natural gas turbine power barges also exist.
Making a LFTR barge solves some problems that people complain about. It can be repossessed or moved to new places (rental powerplants, meaning the fundamental tech can be not revealed to non "nuclear club" nations). It can be retrieved for refueling/decommissioning at a central shipyard facility. It can be swapped out with replacement power barges fairly easily. Emergency cooling water is always at hand. It can be serially built in a shipyard, likely one that usually makes subs, so there are efficiencies of scale (mass production). To make the barge size reasonable though, you would have to put in more than one power barge at any given dock/substation, so no efficiencies of scale (physical size).
If the Russians led a building consortium, with the reactor tech from the US (NRC approved which is the gold standard), I think this might work. Helpful if each barge came with a complementary Spetsnaz security team...
The real question is, ``When will the US reinstate Pebble Bed Nuclear that Professor Fermi patented and the first act of the Atomic Energy Commission shut down due to its lack in aiding for Weaponry" would be the more appropriate question. Westinghouse busts a nut with South Africa and we're going to get what they now call 4th Generation [Actually it was 1st generation that got cock blocked] and then pulled out a couple years back when they started pushing older Nuclear Reactor tech that is already craptastic for efficiency and safety, but would allow them to charge asinine prices to build replacement/new reactors. Pebble Bed is the cheapest, safest and cleanest Nuclear Energy solution ever devised and who is all in? CHINA. The Not Implemented Here syndrome continues in America.
Self driving cars have been approved in some states for testing purposes. It shouldn't take long considering we already have the tech just not the price margin to make it market viable.
The wind farms I've seen in Wyoming are an improvement to the landscape. :-P
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies.
I've been using it for years in World of Warcraft!
And yet even less than 2 miles long the spill caused significantly more damage than TMI, the worst disaster at a commercial nuclear plant in the US.
until somebody actually builds one.
Coal power has rendered a good sized area including a whole town uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. A fire started in a coal seam and just won't go out. The CO levels in the town range from harmful to deadly depending on the wind at the time. Eventually, it will all fall into a sinkhole and burn.
Now where is my back garden home reactor /generator set one for each house get rid of the grid . ..
Buy it once never pay another electricity bill that is where we need to head now
The implications of this, and the very question is just bull##*( greenwashing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing
If slashdot posits a question "Is X technology ready for primetime/mainstream/get its due?"
- then the answer will always be no.
"Fusion nuclear (when it comes online later this century)"
I'm afraid fusion is still always 50 years away, it was 10 years ago and it was the same 15 or maybe even 20 years ago.
Let's just say, it isn't a easy task.
It might happen, I hope it happends.
But the last few years budgets have been lowered for fusion.
New things are always on the horizon
First the spent fuel is Thallium 238 from my understanding of this process, and a reasonable mass of it. Do we put it the same place that we don't store the pu-239?
Which micro nutrients does Thallium 238 analogue, so we can understand it's effects in the food chain.
It would be great to see answers to these questions for pretty much any new Nuclear technology that comes along, including this.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I thought someone showed how you can make a weaponizable radioactives starting with thorium: in a chemistry lab, ie easily.
For the facts on thorium and molten salt reactors, please check out this book at http://www.thoriumenergycheaperthancoal.com.
The principal idea is that this reactor can deliver energy cheaper than coal, the only realistic way to dissuade 7 billion people in 250 nations from burning fossil fuels for electricity.
Where is this exactly? Come on, don't just give us an unverifiable anecdote, give us hard facts that can be verified.
A properly designed wind farm shouldn't require mass deforestation or environmental damage.
The trick is to make the wind turbine look like a tree.
Self driving cars have been approved in some states for testing purposes. It shouldn't take long considering we already have the tech just not the price margin to make it market viable.
Its the approval that is new. Cars operated by blind drunks must be self driving, and they have been for years.
Hmmm, you're joking, but it could work: contaminate the rainforests with radioactive dust and maybe people would leave them alone. Not optimal for the wildlife and plants, but far better than no habitat at all...
I grew up within line of sight of Three Mile Island, in Falmouth, PA (home of the Goat Races). Give or take, half a mile from the operating reactor.
We were told TMI was the worst civilian nuclear accident in the US. As far as any of us knew, or could find out, no one died. No high amount of cancer or birth defects. It was very much a part of the education. It was fun to see the Geiger counter not jump at all while aiming it at a nuclear reactor, but twitch quite a bit from the coal plant downriver. Your comments are not quite right. The steam is very visible. From my parents' house, you could see the red lights on the stacks very clearly at night. And Saturday at noon, the evacuation sirens are tested. This was probably just my experience from living basically next door to TMI. If you were in Etown or Middletown, you wouldn't notice a thing unless you were driving along the river.
No one is bothered. No one freaks out. Education helps quite a bit. I probably had better knowledge in 5th or 6th grade of basic applied nuclear physics than most college students. Because nuclear engineers really enjoyed explaining how their reactors worked to kids. Best. Field. Trip. Ever. Doubt it's been allowed since 9/11, but we got a tour of basically everything.
renewables aren't suitable for baseload power
Sure they are, provided we have a suitable energy storage technology. Which is what I actually said. The aren't the solution 'by themselves', but they are part of the only long term sustainable solution we currently have.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
'in the US' you could also say 'so far'.
The potential damage from a failed nuclear plant is 10,000s of dead and 100,000s of extra cancer risk, plus 100s sq miles rendered uninhabitable for decades if not centuries.
NOTHING else we use for power has that type of potential destruction, for ONE PLANT.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
No, hydro has them beat: a dam breaking will kill everyone downstream. And of course coal's actual annual death toll beats nuclear's potential one hands down.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
A breading ratio of one has not been shown. Modern numerical simulations show it will be rather close... That would be a bit of a show stopper if you are not prepared to add a little Uranium to the mix.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Thorium is the only nuclear fuel that can breed in a thermal spectrum.
The Shippingport reactor had the final core loaded with thorium dioxide fuel, and after 5 years the core was removed and found to contain 1.4% more fissile material than it was initially loaded with.
This implies a breeding ratio of ~1.0028
A molten salt reactor have an even higher breeding ratio since the main neutron poison, xenon, bubbles straight out of the fuel.
LFTR is expected to be able to achieve a breeding ratio of 1.08.
Battery-swapping EV infrastructure providers - such as BetterPlace.com - are to buy Green energy, ie, as they put more of their EV's on the road.
Competitors will forced by the market to do the same. & - hopefully - sign-up to compatible battery-swap standards.
FAIK, science- / engineering-based Germany may embrace LFTR's as -acceptable- risk nuclear power...
Ideally, gov'ts will create a new regulatory category for LFTR's, to enable them to come on-line soon.
Eh? Blabber.
Blabber,