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Fusion and Fission/LFTR: Let's Do Both, Smartly
TheRealHocusLocus writes: Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel. I too was happy to see Skunkworks' Feb 2013 announcement and the recent "we're still making progress" reminder. I was moved by the reaction on Slashdot: a groundswell of "Finally!" and "We're saved!" However, fusion doesn't need to be the only solution, and it's not entirely without drawbacks.
All nuclear reactors will generate waste via activation as the materials of which they are constructed erode and become unstable under high neutron flux. I'm not pointing this out because I think it's a big deal — a few fusion advocates disingenuously tend to sell the process as if it were "100% clean." A low volume of non-recyclable waste from fusion reactors that is walk-away safe in ~100 years is doable. Let's do it. And likewise, the best comparable waste profile for fission is a two-fluid LFTR, a low volume of waste that is walk-away safe in ~300 years. Let's do it.
Why pursue both, with at least the same level of urgency? Because both could carry us indefinitely. LFTR is less complicated in theory and practice. It is closer to market. There is plenty of cross-over: LFTR's materials challenges and heat engine interface — and the necessity for waste management — are the same as they will be for commercial-scale fusion reactors. To get up to speed please see the 2006 fusion lecture by Dr. Robert Bussard on the Wiffle ball 6 plasma containment, likely the precursor to the Skunkworks approach. And see Thorium Remix 2011 which presents the case for LFTR.
All nuclear reactors will generate waste via activation as the materials of which they are constructed erode and become unstable under high neutron flux. I'm not pointing this out because I think it's a big deal — a few fusion advocates disingenuously tend to sell the process as if it were "100% clean." A low volume of non-recyclable waste from fusion reactors that is walk-away safe in ~100 years is doable. Let's do it. And likewise, the best comparable waste profile for fission is a two-fluid LFTR, a low volume of waste that is walk-away safe in ~300 years. Let's do it.
Why pursue both, with at least the same level of urgency? Because both could carry us indefinitely. LFTR is less complicated in theory and practice. It is closer to market. There is plenty of cross-over: LFTR's materials challenges and heat engine interface — and the necessity for waste management — are the same as they will be for commercial-scale fusion reactors. To get up to speed please see the 2006 fusion lecture by Dr. Robert Bussard on the Wiffle ball 6 plasma containment, likely the precursor to the Skunkworks approach. And see Thorium Remix 2011 which presents the case for LFTR.
It doesn't matter how safe modern fission designs are; the public fears it after several high profile disasters and that isn't likely to change.
What the hell am I reading?
>Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel.
How does a non-nonsensical saying apply to energy? Explain yourself.
> I too was happy to see Skunkworks' Feb 2013 announcement and the recent "we're still making progress" reminder. I was moved by the reaction on Slashdot: a groundswell of "Finally!" and "We're saved!"
How did we move from crazy people sayings into nuclear energy? This is the worst written summary on /. in a very long time.
Also, learn what a comma is and how it's used. For the love of god, this reads like stream of consciousness passed through google-translate a few times.
The problem with Fission energy is that a "screwup" at any point means a run-away problem. We've had no less than 3 of these accidents, two of them were in recent memory (Chernobyl and Fukushima) where we will be having to deal with the consequences of "cheap" reactors.
Let's do things right, if any new nuclear facilities come online, they have to be "expensive" solutions that can not meltdown. If a reactor fails, be it from natural disaster, employee incompetence/training, corporate greed, or government beauracy, it must self-shutdown, even without power or cooling, otherwise it should not even be considered at all.
Fusion is considered a holy grail of energy production because it produces no waste, and has no risk of meltdown (but that doesn't mean that it's risk-free, if it explodes it will rain down radioactive parts just like a fission reactor would.)
I'm not entirely of the mind that fission plants should never be done, but past experience has shown that "capitalist" and "communist" ideas around nuclear energy are horrible "lowest bidder, highest risk" plans that should be thrown away and never have been considered. Just where are we going to bury all the existing radioactive nuclear reactor parts that are in operation right now? Launch them into space and hope they don't blowup on the launchpad?
If you've got a valid business plan, then get investors like any other business.
Nobody has built a large-scale reactor of this type. What we had and have is THTR300 and CANDU converting Thorium. What we figured was that is IS HARD, ENGINEERING-WISE. I am not saying we should not do it, quite the opposite. But -
Now we have a bunch of folks claiming that an unproven-in-reality concept is "easy". What year do we have ? 1317 ???
Better look at the record of CANDU and the Russian fast breeder. These things ACTUALLY WORK.
This sounds like a fanboy cheerleading. Nothing really informative here just someone saying I support this.
I don't want to do a sig now
Fission is only "super-dangerous" if you compare it with unicorn fairy energy sources. REAL ones badly compare to fission in terms of people killed/TWh. Just figure how many people fall off roofs installing solar panels and divide that by the funny leccy you get from that. Or better, dont get in rainy days and need coal backup. Or better Gazprom-based backup like we Germans idiots do it.
100 years or 300 years walk-away is fine if idiotic revolutions (like IS these days, but it doesn't have to be Islam) don't happen that often and/or the political class implements a good long term watchful eye policy regarding hazardous materials. But as soon as society collapses, once these rupture, we rapture, so to speak.
Actually pretty interesting numbers
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...
History has shown (most recently with the baby boomers) that humans don't handle abundance so well. I mean, by all means, go for it, just don't be all slovenly about it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The funny thing is that only in Germany we need thousands of policemen to escort radioactive material because of the GREEN* operatives, In the U.S. two guys with an M16 each and sunglasses suffice. I guess this is because in Germany NSA works against German nuclear industry while NSA works for nuclear industry in the U.S.
Monoculture is bad. Choosing one form of baseload generation to emphasize is bad, because however great it looks on paper, if some horrible problem emerges 10 years later, you're screwed. If all new powerplant construction for decades were split between 2 technologies, and one of them proved problematic, we have a "shipping, tested solution" to migrate to immediately. Expensive, but possible. All of which is even more true when it comes to designs that aren't yet production ready.
The US Gov couldn't even fund ITER and all you want for Christmas is TWO technologies? For Christ's sake "expensive" doesn't even begin to describe it!
I love the idea of LFTR. Honestly. A thousand years of cheap and plentiful fuel, simplified nuclear design, smaller physical footprint, lower risk of cataclysmic meltdown & resulting fallout, waste having a much lower half-life, no CO2 emissions...
But it's still an idea. After Oak Ridge, there's been no government-led development of LFTR reactors in the states. Our only hopes at present are either with the Chinese or a private company called Flibe Energy that's trying to gather investment funds to build LFTE reactors for army bases.
I agree, acronyms should generally be expanded the first time they're used in the summary. Hell, I'm even rather familiar with LFTRs, but had to google it to remember exactly *which* reactor family with an L-starting acronym it was.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
America is a part of the ITER consortium. I hope America does no other research on LFTR, or Lockheed's fusion hype.
1) What the hell does the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works have to do with fusion? I thought they built airplanes?
2) Others are already doing the work. Russia has had success with its BN-600 sodium cooled breeder reactor. China is pursuing LFTR research. India has been pursuing light water breeder reactors for a while now. India and Europe are each building a new, big fast sodium breeder reactor. The United States is working on a pebble bed reactor, cooled by lithium flouride salt. I'd like to see some experimental reactors with different fuel claddings, and a scaled up TRIGA reactor.
3) If all else fails, wind and solar are now cheap enough to run a civilization on. Our civilization would change quite a bit, but it can now be done.
screw you. Fusion has the potential to fuel all energy needs and future ones with minimal waste. How do you plan on creating solar panels with no energy? it costs a mountain of coal/gas/oil to produce. Solar has some big issues involving night time, scaling and expanding to meet future needs.
How will you launch rockets using solar? You won't. You'll never reach that level of energy production. You can with a fusion reactor.
All nuclear reactors produce only waste that will decay within a few centuries, assuming you're reprocessing the spent fuel and not doing something phenomenally stupid like burying the waste along with a bunch of fertile material that will continue to fission into more waste for tens or hundreds of millenia.
Fusion reactors will generate neutron activated waste, and in fact will do so in quantities much higher than fission reactors because the energy per neutron released is notably lower. Unless they're using the neutrons to breed more fuel, in which case it will be much lower. Or are doing aneutronic fusion which will likely be the case for most second-gen and later reactors. Aneutronic fusion will still generate some neutrons from side reactions, and thus some activated waste, but in quantities a couple orders of magnitude lower than fission reactors. It's not nothing, but producing ten times the energy of all current reactors while producing 1/10th he waste is pretty damn close to "perfectly clean".
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
But you don't. Until you do it's a meaningless question.
There's almost zero reason we should put LFTR and Fusion into an adversarial relationship.
LFTR is closer to market right now, and fuel for it is ridiculously plentiful. It can easily power this planet for hundreds of years.
At the same time, Fusion is around the corner (though it's been "around the corner" for several decades).
Still, instead of dealing with:
* Nasty, polluting fossil fuel generation
* Solar/Wind/Hydro installs that fuck up the local ecology
* Dirty, ancient solid-fuel fission tech
Take the first step forward with LFTR and MSR fission.
Yes, we'll have waste still. But it's FAR easier to design storage/depletion facilities that last 100-300 years. Current fission plants are producing stuff that'll be hot for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. And, quite simply, we can't guarantee anything we engineer will last that long. The oldest (mostly intact) megastructures on this planet are the Egyptian pyramids. And they're only about 4500 years old. Mostly because they're just a giant pile of stone.
Still with LFTR/MSR, we can lower emissions and give ourselves time to grow and improve the grid while we get the kinks out of Fusion technology.
With portable, modular solutions like Boeing's fusion skunkworks project, we can put cheap, safe power generation capacity just about ANYWHERE.
When more power's needed? Just drop another unit next to the first and keep adding until your requirements are met.
And when it's time to decommission a unit? Simply truck it away!
And both of these technologies are engineered, from the get-go, to be inherently safe.
With LFTR/MSR fission. If power is cut, you don't get a runaway reaction. By design, the reactor dumps the medium into dump tanks, away from the reagent.
With fusion, you turn off power to a fusion reactor or change the dynamics inside the reactor, and the process shuts down naturally. Snuffed like a blown out candle.
But, will all the "nuclear = bombs" hysterics ever allow this to go through?
Hell no!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What is really needed is a fusion/fission hybrid, which has been theorized for decades, but somehow never makes it past initial design phases. Gives a bridge to pure fusion, burns nuclear waste and/or thorium. Far fewer unknowns and engineering problems to overcome than pure fusion. What’s not to love?
Letter To Iran
Quoting S.R. Hadden (from Contact): "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?"
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Here in Georgia we are having a heck of a time jumping through the political hoops to build two new much needed pressurized water nuclear (fission) plants in east Georgia. We also have a boiling water nuclear (fission) plant in south Georgia that probably needs to be decommissioned due to age and the problems of radioactive leaks in boiling water reactors inside the reactor containment bunker...er...building.
P.S. How can you call an airtight, air-locked, negative-pressured, yards thick of specially hardened reinforced concrete, enough to survive at least 2 9/11 style airplane crashes, "building" anything but an above ground bunker?
I have to say that where we built our nuclear plants geologically, population-wise, and climate-wise, are the best places to put such nuclear plants. Far better than in the crowded Northeast US or on the West Coast.
In Georgia we have no single "go-to" on alternative energy for base electric generation, no desserts for large scale solar projects, like Nevada, nor massive amounts of land for large scale wind farms, like the Plain states, and we lost much of our hydro capacity in the last 30 years or so. Natural Gas and Nuclear are our go-to for large scale base electric generation and our chance to break from coal. We use too way much coal here in Georgia our air quality has suffered immensely for it. At least nuclear plants do not create millions of tons of CO2 and makes our air cleaner.
I sincerely hope that the fusion plants can be built here.
Solar panels generate something like three times more energy than they spend making from the leccy from extremely dirty Chinese coal-powered stations. Nuclear will give you an E-ROI of 60.
...How do you plan on creating solar panels with no energy? it costs a mountain of coal/gas/oil to produce...
Where did all the energy go? Is solar energy tainted and unusable for making new solar panels? The energy payback time for current solar technology is 3 years, and steadily dropping. It should reach 1 year over the next decade.
You can with a fusion reactor.
How? They don't exist.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
So boeing is running the same P.R. campaigan like Lockheed ? And it also does only work on PPT slides ?
The truth is that we can only afford these funny solar panels because our entire first-world economy (which now includes China) is only possible by burning massive amounts of coal, oil and gas. That energy is cheap and abundant so we can spend some of it for making solar panels.
As soon as you start to make panels from energy generated solely by panels (think of the purification processes, digging+milling up the metals etc), you will be economically dead and stuffed. IT DOES NOT WORK.
Look up "energy return on investment" if you want to know more.
its an option to simply change grid infrastructure too and eliminate base load as a concept. We are willing to look out side the box on nuclear generation, but somehow tied to some ultimately arbitrary concept of electrical distribution that just happened because idiotic utilities are too lazy to think differently?
That's because you cain't find nobody to read the instructions.
I mean, we're talking Georgia.
You just build them next to that damn meth lab.
I found this documentary about the people building the Georgia nuclear plants:
http://youtu.be/HBwUROwdE6w?t=...
You are welcome on my lawn.
> nor massive amounts of land for large scale wind farms
I had to look this up because I thought you were wrong. But you're not. Georgia has crap for wind:
http://apps2.eere.energy.gov/wind/windexchange/wind_resource_maps.asp?stateab=ga
What up with that?
We have been using fission for some time and it sounds like fusion promises to be cleaner. Even when fusion goes wrong it seriously pollutes a few hundred square kilometres at the most. The alternative is petrochemicals which are seriously polluting the entire planet.
I believe the morning sun's
Always gonna shine again and
I believe a pot of gold
Waits at every rainbow's end, oh
I believe in roses kissed with dew,
Why shouldn't I believe the same in you?
I believe in make believe,
Fairy tales and lucky charms and,
I believe in promises,
Spoken as you cross your heart, oh,
I believe in skies forever blue,
Why shouldn't I believe the same in you?
You may say I'm a fool,
Feelin' the way that I do
You can call me Pollyanna,
Say I'm crazy as a loon,
I believe in silver linings
And that's why I believe in you
I believe there'll come a day,
Maybe it will be tomorrow,
When the bluebird flies away,
All we'll have to do is follow,
I believe that dreams can still come true,
Why shouldn't I believe the same in you?
You may say I'm a fool,
Feelin' the way that I do,
I believe in friends and laughter
And the wonders love can do,
I believe in songs and magic
And that's why I believe in you
You may say I'm a fool,
Feelin' this way about you,
There's not much I can do,
I'm gonna be this way my life through
'Cause I still believe in miracles,
I swear I've seen a few
And the time will surely come
When you can see my point of view,
I believe in second chances
And that's why I believe in you
Realistically we should be making a new Nuclear Power utility every 20-40 years just to keep up to date with our technologies. More realistically: People are guaranteed to have health problems with coal furnaces, but only a chance that people get hurt by nuclear.
God spoke to me
> Fusion has the potential to fuel all energy needs and future ones with minimal waste
For infinite cost.
Sheesh, how do people not understand this fundamental point? There are hundreds of forms of energy out there, thousands. We don't use them because they cost to much. Fusion costs more. Even if the price of energy goes up, that means we'll use one of the thousands we're not using now. There is an infinity of money between now and fusion.
> Look up "energy return on investment" if you want to know more.
I did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested#Economic_influence_of_EROEI
Wind outperforms nuclear, 180%. PV is 70% of nuclear.
So, you were saying?
The production is centralized to achieve scale gains.
The core idea is the distribution which is done electromagnetically in a manner similar to those cellphone wireless chargers. Extra care has been taken to adjust power levels so that such radiation can be transmitted within safety levels in order to avoid harmful effects. It may require some protection, though.
It's not restricted to highly populated areas; instead, it can be used in wide areas. Infrastructure investment will be kept to a minimum, though R&D is still working on it to further reduce costs.
The project's code name is sol.
Look at the three big reactor failures: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. All three were caused by human error. For Chernobyl, it was a dangerous design and running dangerous tests. For TMI, it was a less dangerous design, and they still screwed it up with bad procedures. For Fukushima, they made a series of globally bad design choices because they refused to consider realistic worst case external events. Plus they uncovered a flaw in the containment structure design that lead to the hydrogen explosions.
All of these are human error.
And it's not just reactors. The British Petroleum oil platform blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was human error. The sinking of the ferry Sewol in Korea was human error, as was the sinking of the Concordia off of Italy. BP also had a refinery blow up in Texas because of bad operations and ignoring a known problem with volatile fume leakage.
So no matter how secure a technology looks, it will still suffer a complete worst case failure. Assuming anything else is wishful thinking.
What's the worst case for LFTR? No one seems willing to even talk about it. It's remarkably like the head in the sand attitude that lead to the Fukshima disaster.
So here's a question: what happens when a molten salt containing fluorine, uranium, thorium and other miscellaneous radioactive elements comes in contact with water? Does it explode? Does it burn in air? How toxic are the substances entering the environment? (Trick question: both uranium and fluorine are very toxic elements. Fluorine forms many toxic compounds with carbon.) What is the equivilant explosive energy of tons of molten uranium salts?
If it is burning, how do you put it out? (Note: with fluorine compounds water is a bad idea. It's explosive.) How do you build a containment vessel that will withstand all of that? How will the cost of proper containment and emergency planning and equipment impact the economics of power generation?
A burning LFTR makes a burning graphite reactor seem like a campfire for a marshmallow roast. Good luck with that.
Why is Snark Required?
I sincerely hope that the fusion plants can be built here.
Congratulations on achieving ~22% nuclear electricity in July 2014.
My state of no-nuke Oklahoma is powered by natural gas and coal (which arrives by train), considers itself a nexus of wind power but after decades of investment, hundreds of turbines and probably much more money spent --- net generation of mostly-wind ~809GWh for July is still less than the ~855GWh that would have been generated that month by the single two-reactor Black Fox Nuclear Power Plant. That is... if it had not been the only nuclear plant in the United States cancelled after construction began, in 1982.
Oklahoma sits on the border of the three North American grid interconnects. I have been trying to convince the powers that be and Halliburton Corporate to embrace molten salt research, to no avail so far.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
no, you are confused. The worst case is exactly what LFTR addresses and of course its engineers talk about that. Blow a hole in a LTFR reactors, the fuel drains into collection tanks and cools like glass. The salts are chemically stable and don't burn, decompose or explode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
LFTR will only be developed when it has to. There are a lot of people aligned against it: uranium miners, fossil fuel corporations, renewables.
If it is burning, how do you put it out?
You are confusing fluorine with fluoride. A fluoride will not burn because it has already reached a state with a potential lower than that it would have with water or air.
With that said most every LFTR design I've seen does have fluorine as a gas at some point in the process but that is in the chemical processing of the fuel while outside the reactor. There is little to no fluorine in the reactor vessel.
There would not be a fire because the stuff in a LFTR does not burn. If there were things burning then the answer is to use water.
both uranium and fluorine are very toxic elements.
Uranium tetrafluoride is an insoluble salt, no more toxic than sand. Saying uranium and fluorine are very toxic is like saying sodium and chlorine are very toxic. Sodium and chlorine alone are very bad but combined they create a substance vital to life. I suppose you think we should ban the use of table salt because of the toxic materials it is made of.
What's the worst case for LFTR?
The worst case is you douse it with water for hours, maybe days, until it cools off. After it's cool you send in people with jackhammers and tractors to haul away the pieces for recycling. The mangled mess would no doubt contain radioactive material but since fission would have been stopped for days at this point the pile of scrap would be about as radioactive as a typical granite counter top. The workers would have to wear protective gear for the dust because heavy metal poisoning is a risk, just like for people that mine for gold or coal.
Perhaps I am mistaken, perhaps I exaggerated a bit, but regardless a LFTR simply cannot burn or react with water like you describe.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Do you really think it would be very hard to convince the public that it is inherently safer than other fission designs.
I expect that you can convince them that LFTR is safer than our current reactors but that is not the same as convincing them that it is safe enough to build. If you want to do that they best way to do it would be to sell them cheaper electricity. They are unlikely to be able to sensibly judge the risk but at least this way they see that they are benefiting from having a plant nearby.
However there is still the issue of nuclear waste. Both LFTR and fusion still generate it but the advantage of fusion is that it is a one-generation problem not a 10-100,000 year issue. The lighter nuclei activated by neutron radiation from fusion reactors have far shorter half lives than the heavy nuclear fragments left by thorium fission. LFTR might reduce the volume but not to zero and it will be with us for a VERY long time.
Plus LFTR can burn off old Nukes.
Most of the blowhards moved to Alabama or Texas. :)
New here, then? All downmods are of the form "I disagree", with a soupçon of "what choice least likely to get my ass metamodded"
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What's the worst case for LFTR? No one seems willing to even talk about it. .
Well if you stick your fingers in your ears and yell "NA NA NA I CANT HEAR YOU" of course it's going to sound like no one is talking about it. In reality it's been discussed and disected quite a bit
Banqiao hydroelectric dam collapse: 26,000 drowned, 145,000 dead from disease and famine, 11+ million displaced
If you go by the official statistics from the Communist China and yes, _only_ 26,000 people drowned
But if you are to count how many people returned after the disaster had struck, the figure is much higher - an estimated of more than 200,000 people had gone missing forever
By safe, I mean it can't be used to blow things up -- either by accident or on purpose. This makes it bad for nuclear Proliferation -- Including making bombs for the US military. That's why it never got as much funding as Uranium-based reactors ... they couldn't figure out how to use Thorium reactors to make bombs. Remember that this was in the 60's and 70's and at the height of the cold war // arms race.
As a side point of not being useful for making bombs, it's also harder to have a (semi) critical accident -- i.e. a Chernobyl / 3-mile-island / China-syndrome type accident.
That's a big problem when you're trying to get the civilian population to accept bomb-making, but (and) much more dangerous Uranium - based reactors... Which would you rather have in your back yard? A Thorium reactor that pretty much can't have a meltdown, or a Uranium one that is one (albeit unlikely) step from being a bomb.
The other problem is that it's too cheap.... from a commercial vantage point, Uranium-based fuels are incredibly hard to make properly -- and their exact format varies from reactor to reactor... That means that reactors that aren't sufficiently profitable to make (even with military^w government subsidies) can make (more) profits because the plant manufacturer has an effective monopoly on making fuel pellets. ... kinda like the way that printer manufacturers sell you the printer for cheap, then ding you on ink refils. LFTR plants, on the other hand, just need an occasional addition of Thorium, and a little bit of the salts (to make up for any evaporation).
That means that there's less likely to be a commercial proponent for LFTR Thorium reactors. Why spend billions researching a reactor that will never get Military/Government subsidies ... and then -- once built -- won't be a lucrative source of fuel sales? It's really good for the utility using the reactor (and their customers), but it sucks for the plant manufacturer.
So there you have it.. LFTR is unlikely to be created because it's.
That's why LFTR may never find a good backer -- unless we can find a billionaire willing to fund the development on a lark (and to save mankind from our own greed/hatred).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
First of all, LCoE ignores the cost of integrating intermittent wind and solar into the grid, so comparisons with a reliable source like nuclear are meaningless. Those cheap wind turbines require an economically infeasible storage and transmission infrastructure, which incidentally also suffers from NIMBY obstacles. They are also exposed to the environment and need replacement every decade or so, but are typically abandoned when the subsides inevitably run out.
Picking the most expensive first of a kind nuclear build ever is hardly representative of the cost of nuclear. The Chinese are now building AP1000s for a quarter of the cost, with economics still improving. Yes, trolls like you have managed to drive up the cost of nuclear power in the west, but that is not a technical problem, and it is still cheaper than wind and solar when system costs are considered. Molten salt reactors operate at near atmospheric pressure, vastly simplifying construction and lowering cost.
Fuel cost is negligible today, and primarily driven by fabrication of fuel assemblies, which are unnecesary in a liquid fueled reactor. Long construction times are a result of enormous concrete containment structures for conventional water cooled reactors which operate under extreme pressure. Read about ThorCon for what is possible with existing technology. There is also significant potential for decreasing costs even further with molten salt reactors, as compact brayton cycle turbines become available.
That's why LFTR may never find a good backer -- unless we can find a billionaire willing to fund the development on a lark (and to save mankind from our own greed/hatred).
It would take two or more celebrity billionaires coming together who are polar opposites (green+oil, democrat+republican, penguin+polar bear, etc.) coming together and shaking hands under a Thorium banner. It's for the grandchildren, but also good for business. The only 'sustainable' form of wealth creation is to introducing something completely new that changes the game --- by lowering the personal and corporate cost of living.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
Meltdowns at the recent 2014 Thorium Energy Conference
John Kutsch is positively ape-shit about lack of support for the S.2006 Thorium Bill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgRn4g7a068
He's Mad As Fucking Hell And Not Going To Take It Anymore (with bonus luddite doofus footage)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUXmff5R_bI
Jim Kennedy is absolutely bleedin' outraged that DOD is 'blocking' the Thorium Bill and handing over rare earth production, parts to China like fucktard traitorous pussies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CARlEac1iuA
Cavan Stone is excited about Bismth-213 for cancer treatment, also in a blather over S.2006's stall in Congress
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAUzldJqlq4
Fascinating new topic this year, Andrew Dodson (BS EE, going for Master's in Power Distribution) is tearing out his beard about grid instability
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU6izpryqqw
But also choleric, fuming about the ridiculous current state of things
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJtv7gkuh1s
All in all it's a great time to be stark raving monkey fuck for Thorium energy.
We are completely surrounded by fools -- they cannot possibly escape now.
Playlist of all TEAC6 conference videos so far (includes all above)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKfir74hxWhMI5JIcVhnWAZjrDszejxjS
Profanity used for entertainment purposes only. Management regrets any inconvenience experienced by those with delicate sensibilities.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Management regrets any inconvenience
Meant to say incontinence, my bad.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Well, a bunker is indeed a building, isn't it?
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Fusion machine is being developed by Skunk Works/Lockheed Martin, not Boeing.
Ivanpah, CA, has plenty of featureless open desert for its solar mirrors. Unfortunately, it's also infested with Californians.
Current nuclear reactors are strong enough to survive a 747 impact against its secondary containment. That's the result of having to build a containment structure capable to surviving 150 atmospheres of pressure from the inside.
It nuclear reactors were weak, terrorists would have already hijacked one aircraft to blow one up.
But the fact is a nuclear reactor needs a direct hit from a comet, asteroid or heavy military bomb to destroy its secondary (outward) containment.
Anyhow, this topic isn't about water cooled nuclear reactors which have always been a kludge as far as nuclear fission is concerned. We never moved away from water cooled fission cause that's what NATO's Navies want for nuclear subs and surface ships. They paid for the initial R&D costs and follow on improvements.
Take a look at the MSR (Molten Salt Reactor) basics. LFTR is an advanced form of MSR reactors. Even the most KISS for of MSR, the DMSR achieves 6x the utilization of uranium mined from the earth. With this efficiency plus a handful of fast sodium reactors mankind could convert all of our depleted uranium into MOX fuel and power the world with Uranium+Plutonium+Thorium fueled DMSR. LFTR is a way to get rid of the Uranium+Plutonium route and go 100% Thorium.