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Peter Thiel: We Need a New Atomic Age
HughPickens.com writes: Peter Thiel writes in the NYT that what's especially strange about the failed push for renewables is that we already had a practical plan back in the 1960s to become fully carbon-free without any need of wind or solar: nuclear power. "But after years of cost overruns, technical challenges and the bizarre coincidence of an accident at Three Mile Island and the 1979 release of the Hollywood horror movie "The China Syndrome," about a hundred proposed reactors were canceled," says Thiel. "If we had kept building, our power grid could have been carbon-free years ago. Instead, we went in reverse."
According to Thiel, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost. Designs using molten salt, alternative fuels and small modular reactors have all attracted interest not just from academics but also from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists like me ready to put money behind nuclear power. However, none of these new designs can benefit the real world without a path to regulatory approval, and today's regulations are tailored for traditional reactors, making it almost impossible to commercialize new ones. "Both the right's fear of government and the left's fear of technology have jointly stunted our nuclear energy policy," concludes Thiel. "supporting nuclear power with more than words is the litmus test for seriousness about climate change. Like Nixon's going to China, this is something only Mr. Obama can do. If this president clears the path for a new atomic age, American scientists are ready to build it."
According to Thiel, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost. Designs using molten salt, alternative fuels and small modular reactors have all attracted interest not just from academics but also from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists like me ready to put money behind nuclear power. However, none of these new designs can benefit the real world without a path to regulatory approval, and today's regulations are tailored for traditional reactors, making it almost impossible to commercialize new ones. "Both the right's fear of government and the left's fear of technology have jointly stunted our nuclear energy policy," concludes Thiel. "supporting nuclear power with more than words is the litmus test for seriousness about climate change. Like Nixon's going to China, this is something only Mr. Obama can do. If this president clears the path for a new atomic age, American scientists are ready to build it."
Fast reactors.
This.
This article is a biased, unsupported, garble..
Renewables are winning against everything on economic grounds... as long as they're *massively* subsidized, yes. And as long as they're backed up with non-renewables that can pick up the slack when renewables can't supply the energy needed from them, which is constantly. But otherwise they're great, yeah.
Right. And nuclear isn't subsidized?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Uranium fueled reactors are the result of a premature optimization... they aren't reactive enough to work with oxides as fuel.. so you end up having to do all sorts of engineering to try to keep it from oxidizing, whilst only a small barrier away from water. It was never a good idea. The hydrogen bubble that almost made 3 mile island even worse is a result of this chemistry at work. Not only that, when Uranium splits, it only yields 90% of the energy immediately, the remaining 10% takes millions of years, which means a reactor producing 1GW of heat at load will still generate 100 Megawatts when you stop the chain reaction... and if you can't cool it, the thing will melt down.
Thorium yields 99% of the energy immediately, which reduces the need for cooling after the fact by a factor of 10... plus in a Thorium reactor, the fuel is a liquid fluoride, which means you just have to divide the critical mass in the event of an emergency, and you're done with it. A few flat wide steel tanks encased in concrete would do the trick, even if dry.
I'd happily live down the street from a Thorium reactor.
Melting aluminium is an *ideal* use for unreliable power: the primary cells can run at variable rates or even in reverse to stabilize the grid, or some of the molten product can be staged for running optimized Al air batteries. Germany is already doing this,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
From that link, other energy-intensive processes may be suitable, "including those used to manufacture cement, paper, and chemicals. Making chlorine, used to produce paper, plastic, fabric, paint, drugs, and antiseptics, also requires electrolysis."
With reprocessing, breeder reactors can theoretically generate no waste at all. In practice they do tend to produce small amounts, but the half-life is on the order of 30-40 years, instead of the 25,000 years stuff we produce now.
We already have a solution for nuclear waste - the one we are currently using by default. After a few years cooling in a pond simply keep the spent fuel rods in above-ground 10 ton concrete casks permanently. Currently the casks are kept on the reactor site, but it would be better to move them to a few remote central sites for long term monitoring (in the U.S. the Chiricahua Apache have suggested their reservation as such a storage site).
The fuel rods are perfectly stable in the casks for thousands of years.
Also, if we should ever desire to reprocess them (currently a fantastically uneconomic idea) they would be easy to retrieve.
That this is not being treated as a final storage solution is due to political, not technological issues.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
> Breeder reactors could burn up all that waste.
Breeder reactors could burn up *some* of that waste, which is, I'll admit, an advantage. However, in order to do so they need a core fueled by weapons grade material, and the economics are complete pants. The cost of the fuel for the core is higher than the value of the electricity, so the breeder operates at a loss. That's fine, depending on the value of the waste you transmute, but to date the people who have a say have said "no".
Here's a paper on a related concept that covers the economic issues:
http://www.ralphmoir.com/media/tenneyMerged.pdf
It's mostly on the fission-fusion hybrid, but the equations work for any breeder design, including thorium.
Thorium yields 99% of the energy immediately, which reduces the need for cooling after the fact by a factor of 10... plus in a Thorium reactor...
I just wanted to say thanks for fulfilling the third slot in the Slashdot nuclear energy discussion trifecta.
Every time nuclear power comes up here, there's always bound to be three main types of posts:
(1) "Well, duh, we should be using nuclear reactors all the time. Hell, I'd build one in my basement... well, it's my Mom's basement, actually. They're clean and wonderful and shoot out magical rainbow unicorns!" This may also be coupled with conspiracy theory laden rant about why nuclear isn't popular.
(2) "ACK! Nuclear! Do you know how long that stuff takes to decay?! I'm generally a libertarian wacko (like everyone else here) who is into legalized everything, but nuclear? NIMBY!!" This may also be coupled with a conspiracy theory laden rant about why other alternative energies haven't taken over sooner.
(3) "Thorium's the answer, obviously!" This may also be coupled with a conspiracy theory laden rant about why thorium isn't used everywhere.
I'm thankful that you fulfilled category (3), so now I can stop reading this Slashdot thread.
What you're talking about is not a "thorium reactor": the correct term is Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), which is a type of Molten Salt Reactor (MSR).
Sure, "LFTR" has "Thorium" in its name, but it's not because an LFTR can't work with Uranium; in fact, it's the exact opposite.
Th-232 (the most common isotope of Thorium) is not a fissile material, as are U-235 or U-238; it has to be converted in Uranium-233 by means of a neutron absorption and some decay, and only then can be used as nuclear fuel.
One of the commercial types of LFTR being worked on nowadays is the one by Flibe Energy[1]: it's a dual-fluid design, meaning that, in addition to the molten salt core where the U-233 fissions, there's an external blanked of molten salt with Th-232 dissolved in it; while the reactor is running, extra neutrons from the fission get absorbed by the Thorium, such that it can transform into U-233 later on (after being reprocessed by a local chemical plant). This is the "best" type of reactor, because it can produce its own fuel from the raw material, and doesn't need an external facility to provide the purified fuel. The downside is its much greater complexity, both in mechanical construction and chemical/neutronic modelling.
There are other types of Molten Salt Reactors; for example, the ThorCon[2] reactor is the simplest design you can possibly get, and one that in my opinion has the greatest chance to starting being commercialized in the short term (its designers estimate about 5 years and 700 million dollars to complete design&research and to build a prototype 1 GW plant).
Both of those reactors are intended to be used in a Th-232/U-233 fuel cycle, but MSRs in general don't have to be: reactors such as the one from Transatomic Power[3] are intended to be used with actual nuclear waste from existing LWR plants or from nuclear weapons.
[1] http://flibe-energy.com/
[2] http://thorconpower.com/
[3] http://www.transatomicpower.com/
(3) "Thorium's the answer, obviously!" This may also be coupled with a conspiracy theory laden rant about why thorium isn't used everywhere.
It's not much of a conspiracy when it's plain history: just read about Alain Weinberg and the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. We're not using that technology because Nixon chose to go with the LMFBR and cut funding for all other research.
No conspiracy; just politicians being ignorant as always.
Berlin already gets 40% of its energy from renewables, like the rest of germany.
Or do you mean a Berlin in the states?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That was however a complete different beast than today is talked about.
E.g. it used thorium/uranium filled graphite balls. The way that particular thing worked had many drawbacks, reprocessing e.g. was impossible, the outer layers of the graphite would start to "melt" and got slimy in a way that they stuck together and made control difficult (control rods could not move freely)
In our days, if people talk about thorium they mean molten slat reactors ... which have different drawbacks.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.