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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
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
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.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
Weinberg and others as far back as the 1940s had to work with massive amounts of radioactive heavy metal-fluoride salts, as the gaseous diffusion process itself worked with Uranium Hexafluoride. The first US gasous diffusion plant was run from the early 40s to 1987, and employed over 12,000 people in a building of over 2,000,000 square feet, so it looks like the required safety protocols were very robust and should scale to any desireable degree for power plant use.
John W. Campbell wrote an Astounding editorial in the early 50s listing over a dozen materials that had been determined to be safe ways to handle fluorine compounds and were publicly declassified by then, and mentioned the various Nickle alloys among them. Surprisingly, many concrete and cement formulas that use Calcium Carbonates as their base are common, easy to produce materials which are highly Fluorine resistant, and various substances already incorporating Fluorine, such as the Flurocarbons and related, including Teflon, give flexable sealants, gaskets, and liners for containment vessels. There's a lot of very tough problems in this area which have already been well solved, often for half a century or more.
Who is John Cabal?