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China Will Spend $3.3 Billion to Research Molten Salt Nuclear-Powered Drones (scmp.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader WindBourne tipped us off to some news from The South China Morning Post:
China is to spend 22 billion yuan (US$3.3 billion) trying to perfect a form of technology largely discarded in the cold war which could produce a safer but more powerful form of nuclear energy. The cash is to develop two "molten salt" reactors in the Gobi Desert in northern China. Researchers hope that if they can solve a number of technical problems the reactors will lead to a range of applications, including nuclear-powered warships and drones. The technology, in theory, can create more heat and power than existing forms of nuclear reactors that use uranium, while producing only one thousandth of the radioactive waste. It also has the advantage for China of using thorium as its main fuel. China has some of the world's largest reserves of the metal...
The reactors use molten salt rather than water as a coolant, allowing them to create temperatures of over 800 degrees Celsius, nearly three times the heat produced by a commercial nuclear plant fuelled with uranium. The superhot air has the potential to drive turbines and jet engines and in theory keep a bomber flying at supersonic speed for days.
One Beijing researcher says these drones "would serve as a platform for surveillance, communication or weapon delivery to deter nuclear and other threats from hostile countries." He asked not to be named, but provided one more advantage for a nuclear-powered drone flying at high-altitudes over the ocean.
"It will also have more public acceptance. If an accident happens, it crashes into the sea."
The reactors use molten salt rather than water as a coolant, allowing them to create temperatures of over 800 degrees Celsius, nearly three times the heat produced by a commercial nuclear plant fuelled with uranium. The superhot air has the potential to drive turbines and jet engines and in theory keep a bomber flying at supersonic speed for days.
One Beijing researcher says these drones "would serve as a platform for surveillance, communication or weapon delivery to deter nuclear and other threats from hostile countries." He asked not to be named, but provided one more advantage for a nuclear-powered drone flying at high-altitudes over the ocean.
"It will also have more public acceptance. If an accident happens, it crashes into the sea."
They can now take air superiority over the South China Sea and if any of the other countries with claims to the area shoot the drone down, they're the bad guys for causing an ecological disaster.
Darren Bane
While China is exerting its technical superiority, here in the US, the regime in power has banned the use of the phrases, "science-based" and "evidence-based" from government-funded scientific organizations.
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
We are so fucked.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Project Pluto, a nuclear-powered cruise missile popping out H-bombs like Pez. One of the "advantages" of the thing was the radioactive exhaust from its air-cooled reactor, also known as "halitosis" -- it was a weapon in itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Molten salt is probably better than direct-cycle air-cooled, but it will still be an ecological disaster if it crashes into the sea. Also, why bother vs satellites and solar or fuel-powered drones (for surveillance) and conventional missiles (for attacking things).
Conventional hardware (ex solar) might not be able to stay in flight for as long, but a country can make more of them for a fraction of the cost of nuclear-powered drones.
Hopefully in 50-100 years we will be using renewable power everywhere, and dirty tech like coal and nuclear, while they had their day, are unnecessary. Molten salt is a big reduction in waste, but the fuel is still dangerous and the waste not easily managed.
It does not create weapons grade radioactive materials. If you have a thorium based nuclear reactor you end up with low amounts of radioactive waste and can not build nuclear bombs. If you use the more traditional nuclear power plants, you get all this fun stuff that can be used to build a nuclear bomb.
The USA wanted nuclear bombs, so we ignored this technology.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Storage absolutely is viable, or at least on the cusp of being so. The the economics of storing renewable energy is different from the economics of storing non-renewable energy. Even if you lost 90% of the solar energy you tried to store, it's energy you got for free. As long as the cost of conversion and storage is low enough, waste isn't critical. That wouldn't be true of energy you generate from stuff you have to buy, like oil.
I read a few years ago about a group experimenting with photovoltaic housepaint. Its conversion rate was abysmal, but if they could get the price down low enough it wouldn't matter because you've got to paint the house anyway.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Betting the planet on a speculative technology that isn't quite there yet would not seem to be tremendously sensible.
In contrast we could build nuclear plants (using half-century old designs, even) that would work, and by any reasonable standard would deserve to be called "clean".
But let's go back to our regular scheduled anti-nuclear fear-mongering. It's not like frying the planet is anything to worry about.
The United States did some work on the idea of nuclear powered military aircraft way back when-- it was always a pretty whacked idea. Like, part of the design involved shielding just the pilot compartment and spewing radiation to the rear and the sides (thus discouraging pursuit aircraft! Win-win!). They got as far as building a gigagntic "hot-cell" to park the thing in so it could be worked on without killing yourself.
As Freeman Dyson once put it, ideas like this might be most charitably be regarded as welfare programs for engineers and scientists.
Are they telling themselves that if they're drones they won't need any shielding at all? And that they'll use remote manipulators to do cargo-handling and maintenance work?
I don't have anything against research in molten-salt reactors though, and I guess if you need to say "drones" to sell a project, we might politely look the other way. (Why not motlen-salt mobile smart phones?)
Climate change is real. Solar has a low capacity factor(20>-30%), and storage is not viable.
Not a problem. Solar is becoming cheap enough that even with the extra capacity required it is still economical. And there is also wind, even cheaper, which blows at night. And storage is viable right now. Pumped water storage is a commercially viable proven technology. And with the nearly century old technology of high voltage DC power lines (no, they do not have to be "superconductive") the power can be shipped from where ever it is generated to where ever the demand or storage sites are, and likewise from storage to demand.
There is a reason a super majority of scientist support nuclear power.
Too bad the capitalists who build power plants for profit consider it a bad investment. Not so renewable power. The hard-nosed businessmen have spoken. The age of nuclear power plants has passed.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Flying nuclear reactors are never a clever idea. Fukushima produced detectable nuclear contamination across the entire Pacific ocean due to a leak. How much worse will it be if the containment vessel shatters due to a high speed impact? Plus, even if they spend most of their time over the ocean they have to land somewhere and a crash on land will cause a lot of contamination. The technology is interesting but let's hope they are clever and stick to land and sea-based applications.
The SCMP article, being a typical simplified newspaper account, talks only about using molten salt as a reactor coolant. Salt is already used for heat transfer in many industrial processes, including solar thermal plants like Ivanpah, because of its high specific heat (heat absorption per unit mass) combined with its much higher boiling point than water. This would mean a more compact reactor that operates at ambient pressure.
But this research is a lot more advanced than that. The designs being investigated use fuel dissolved in the coolant, with graphite rods as a moderator, the opposite arrangement from existing commercial designs. This allows a greater range of fuels, including thorium and spent fuel from current reactors. Some of the designs being investigated are breeders, producing fissile fuel from U-238 and thorium.
China did not think of this design first; the US did, and ran a test reactor for years at ORNL. Now a science-friendly country will carry on where we left off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Base load" is a fancy word for "inflexible production which can't follow demand". Which is exactly what solar and wind power is.
There is absolutely no problem with solar and wind taking over the inflexible power generation. They just need the flexible power generation for when their output doesn't line up with the load. Exactly like nuclear or coal. On the upside, at least they are reasonably easy to throttle on short notice, unlike traditional nuclear, and you never have a gigawatt of wind or solar offline for a few months because of maintenance or safety problems.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Betting the planet on a speculative technology that isn't quite there yet would not seem to be tremendously sensible.
No bet at all. It's no-risk, all-reward, results are practically guaranteed. I mean yeah, the planet COULD be hit by an asteroid, rendering the investment ineffective, but so what?
In contrast we could build nuclear plants (using half-century old designs, even) that would work, and by any reasonable standard would deserve to be called "clean".
There have been numerous delays, flaws, and bankruptcies resulting in all but one single nuclear plant in the US being canceled, and that previous plant was started in the 1970s. Apparently we cannot build them.
But let's go back to our regular scheduled anti-nuclear fear-mongering. It's not like frying the planet is anything to worry about.
No need to fear monger, EVERY PENNY WASTED (and that total is billions) on nuclear power since say, 2005, could have been reinvested in insulation, home construction, light bulbs, cool roofs, window-replacement, and delivered better results. No need to even put money into wind, solar, hydro, tide, or geothermal energy.
The fact is, like it or not, the nuclear demon is not the problem. The nuclear wastrel is.