Exactly, precisely. Fukushima isn't proof Nuclear is bad. It's proof that we are capable of mitigating horrendous disasters. The Fukushima Daichi is the result of about four events in chain plus one really stupid decision. Should any of the four events didn't happen or the stupid decision wasn't undertaken, the Fukushima Daichi situation would be proof nuclear is extremely safe ! If we did to the airlines what some want us do to with nuclear, all airlines would be shutdown forever.
Except for Chernobyl, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, nuclear have killed thoughout it's lifetime less people than natural gas kills every year. But when you account for the fact that Nuclear is the only solution that could offset all fossil fuel utilization worldwide, and that if it weren't for nuclear, we would have more coal, then quickly you would find out that nuclear has saved millions of lives from not having to breath coal smog, from not killing coal miners, from not killing people from coal mercury, cadmium, arsenic and other nasty chemicals that coal dump both on the atmosphere and on its tailing piles.
The problem isn't even Uranium. The problem is solid fuel, water cooled reactors. And to a lesser extent reactors cooled by materials that react violently with air or water (like Sodium). Molten salt reactors have the freeze plug, catch pan and emergency dump tanks that combined with the chemical nature of the coolant salts make every single nuclear fission accident to date be a non event, every single one of them. The coolant is a solid at room temperature, so even if the reactor is torn to pieces (precision military or comet strike) the nuclear material won't be blown miles away, even if the secondary containment structure is blown to pieces along with the reactor perhaps the material could spread over a 50 meters radius. And it will solidify quickly, making it fairly easy to collect compared to a chernobyl style accident. The FLiBe coolant is actually a solid even around 300C (572F). The emergency dump tanks are only possible on molten fuel, molten coolant reactors. The reactor primary configuration is designed to sustain fission and only loose heat through the heat exchangers. The emergency dump tanks are designed to hold the fuel + coolant, halting fission very quickly and aggressively dissipating heat to the surrounding environment. Finally the coolant material runs at less than 2 atmospheres in the highest pressure part of the reactor, compared to light water 150 atm (2200 psi), heavy water 75 atm ! It's like comparing a internal combustion engine with a jet engine. The internal combustion one is essentially trying to rip itself apart continuously (like the extreme pressures water cooled reactors operate), while jet engines are just turning nicely (low pressure of molten salt reactors). The reason molten salts are typically thought of with Thorium instead of Uranium is cause another goal is very high utilization of nuclear material, which for uranium essentially means fast reactors (with all of its disadvantages), while with Thorium it can be done in the thermal spectrum (minimum nuclear material required, easier to assure totally safe passive shutdown with the emergency dump tanks - without requiring neutron absorption material). But a Thorium molten salt reactor could be started with uranium spent nuclear fuel, and could be used to slowly burn uranium spent nuclear long term. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Double taxes on gasoline, triple taxes on coal. Everyone making up to 40000 dollars/year gets a 100% exemption from payroll and federal income taxes (to offset the higher taxes on dirty fossil fuels). This would fix climate change, replace the minimum wage increase, offer a serious incentive for heavy telecommuting and make alternate fuel vehicles really get going. There you have, either you telecommute, live close to work, or move to an alternate fuel vehicle (electric, natural gas or ethanol). Only the USA offers cheap gas to its citizens, every country with serious traffic gridlock problems charges about twice as much as the USA for gas (except for countries that are large oil exporters). The problem with the USA is you don't want real solutions, you prefer to keep living in traffic hell. I think this will be the only substantive suggestion made in this whole debate.
I'm not saying fusion will absolutely never happen. What I am saying is yeah: "Bunker Mentality". They are not interested in being honest about the real hurdles ahead. Their first priority is to secure funding, without an ounce of respect to the tax payer withholding everything they know still needs to be done (and that will take far more than the 20 years Michio Kaku claims). But my real problem isn't truly the researchers, it's the politicians funding them. They are the ones that really are in the con. They are in cahoots with the fossil fuel industry, withholding everything they can from nuclear fission, that is available now, in cahoots with solar+wind radicals, because they know that a solar+wind+biomass+geothermal world still requires significant technological breakthroughs. It's a game that knows that nuclear fission isn't perfect but it's actually safer than wind and solar (as in deaths per GWh produced) by a long shot. It's a game of paid propagandists. I was really surprised to discover some anti nuclear + climate change deniers fundamentalists. They don't need to tell me they are funded by the Koch Brothers and their gang, that's just transparent from their ignorant attitude. It's a game that very few defending it actually have the blueprints of the whole game, they are mainly being either brain washed or money washed to play it. In that level the fusion scientist are just peons in that game. I care about stopping climate change. My city will be in a world of pain if the Atlantic Ocean climbs another meter. The city will be flooded for days when we have strong rains at high tide. And there are hundreds of other cities in the same situation, over a hundred million people on the line. And we're not a little island in the Pacific that will truly have to abandon ship and migrate elsewhere.
That's right, the US government is pouring billions on solar, wind, fusion research and nothing to fission, except for incremental solutions that keep the current extremely low efficiency for solid fuel reactors (best case scenario is 1,5% for heavy water reactors utilization of fissile+fertile material, and 0,7% efficiency for light water solid fuel reactors). The reality is that entrenched interests on fission are against a fission revolution. They would rather keep their uranium fuel supply contracts than move to fluid fuel reactors that require no fuel fabrication, and that could operate on a comparatively free fuel, Thorium versus Uranium.
There are startups in USA, Canada that have zero grants because of this policy. People that believe so much in this technology they quit jobs in Universities and NASA to pursue this, they are walking a tight rope to find private funding to make this happen. And the best hope for any US public funding is the off chance of a contract with DoD for small modular reactors that can be operated in remote bases with no grid electricity availability and expensive cost to truck fuel for generators.
The NRC has zero mandate to help nuclear work. Their job is solely to use the heavy hand of government to make the nuclear industry as expensive as they want to. The DOE would be the party that could get funding to help development on this. Thorium Molten Salt reactors would be mostly development, with some chemical research into some materials, the nuclear part is well understood.
It's always like that, we know it works, but, there are lots of poops that are conveniently hidden. My opinion is quite simple, the people making decisions don't really want fusion to work, they want to say they are funding it, while it's always ways out in the future. Fission is commercial, and could be an order of magnitude safer and two orders of magnitude more efficient (per ton of radioactive material mined) if we invest about 10% TOTAL of what's being spent every 10 years on fusion, or just one years funding of fusion. But the US government is only interested in funding fission in a game of market cards where only be big boys get to play. Until we take the gas and oil paws off government this will continue. Notice hydrogen fuel cells were always in the future. It took Elon Musk making electric cars viable now, and the whole speech changed into fuel cell cars in the market in the next 12-24 months. Call me crazy, but If you are defending fusion either you are coning us or you are in the con. Lets first perfect fission, let's make nuclear fission reactors that use 99% of radioactivity (two orders of magnitude safer than today), let's make nuclear fission reactors that are neither gigantic pressure cookers nor use tons of material that react violently with sodium. Let's end the self fulfilling prophecy that fission must be expensive and unsafe. The we can perfect fusion over the next 50 years.
Except Fusion is a pipe dream. And research into Fission is only being funded on a half govt half private funding model that prevents new entrants to the field (and discourages anybody but billionaires from trying to fund revolutionary fission).
The Price-Anderson Act has never caused the US government to step in and pay for damages. Before the Price-Anderson Act steps is, there is a large pool of cash sitting there on standby. Billions worth. The last time that pool was drown upon was three mile island ! 35 years ago. There is no problem with the Price-Anderson Act. The problem is the anti nuclear people that equate a nuclear power plant to a nuclear bomb explosion. The problem isn't that natural gas made nuclear uneconomical. The problem is people don't want nukes, that chokes the whole nuclear industry into a self fulfilling prophecy. If we used the current anti nuclear attitude towards airlines, they would all be shutdown for good. Instead we learn from every accident and make reactors better. But now we can't install those, because nobody wants nuclear. Natural gas kills too, it's causing climate change, that is already killing people worldwide with major floods, stronger hurricanes, stronger super typhoons. Nuclear saves lives. That's a fact. Stop with the non sense.
I would rather limit the old 2nd Generation nukes be limited to 60 years. Even better limit to 50 yrs (forcing their replacements to start building now). The problem isn't a valve here or a pipe there. The problem is those older reactors that are hitting 40 years of operation are extremely old designs that have been patched again and again. But the people is against building new replacement reactors, so nuclear operators end up with this continual patch it up work. But the basic reality is the NRC helps keep old reactors operating but make it uneconomical to build new ones. Take a new Westinghouse AP1000. There are over a dozen in construction. But if a nuclear operator decides to build another one, it essentially must be re-certified. As if this was the very first AP1000 installation. There is zero assurance the project will be approved if it complies to a clearly known set of requirements. So construction can't start until certification is reached (with the NRC charging US$ 300/hr for over 10000 hours of certification "work"). Its insane !
There are quite a few solutions to put the spent nuclear fuel to good use. It's still 99% fissionable material. But as long as the nuclear is bad movement continues to pollute the debate, nothing will get done. If all spent nuclear fuel in the USA were used in efficient reactors designed to use that material efficiently, that would be about 70 years worth of USA electricity (replacing all current sources of electricity, not just fossil fuels, like over 100 years replacing only coal, natural gas and petrol for electricity).
If a nuclear reactor expected to operate for 40 years could last 80 years, then it has just become half as expensive to build per GWh of electricity produced over its lifetime. And they keep saying nuclear is too expensive. And the same guys saying nuclear is too expensive keep on fueling all anti nuclear intervention to make nuclear even more expensive. Nuclear is cheaper than coal in countries that are serious about doing nuclear. China, South Korea and India are doing it at a modest cost due to standardization, and a concerted effort to build lots of reactors. If only USA, Germany, Italy and a few other delusional countries would accept that.
Before firing meaningless words, please read about it. Technically, it's a Uranium 233 fueled reactor (mostly). U-233 / U-235 / Pu-239 is fissioned in the core (U-235, Pu-239, Pu-240, Am-241 from LWR SNF is used for startup, due to U-233 scarcity). Uranium is kept a tetrafluoride in the core and in the blanket. It's fluorinated to hexa fluoride in the volatility column to move newly produced U-233 from the blanket to the core. But it's reduced back to UF4 before insertion into the core. Formation of UF6 in the core is dificult, since fission keeps demanding more and more Fluoride as U is split into two atoms needing at least 4 F atoms. The blanket contains ThF4 to receive neutrons and make Pa233 (which decays to U233 with 27 day half life).
Anyhow, I'm not a nuclear engineer. Please take a look at www.energyfromthorium.com also youtube search LFTR reactor. You will find at least 6 nuclear engineers (most with their PhDs) with in depth presentations of how this will work, and prior work done (some of it in the 1960s and early 70s).
Not only this is possible, as well as breeding U-233 from Th-232 has been demonstrated, as well as a U-233 fueled fission.
The bottom line is a molten salt thermal reactor is better any solid fuel, water cooled reactor, due to online removal of Xe135, possibility of online reprocessing of other fission products (since the fuel is liquid, it's easy to drain a few dozen Kg of core fluid into a pyro reprocessing facility designed to only remove fission products and return both the core salt and nuclear fuel back into the reactor), preventing neutron poisoning, avoiding the need to have excess reactivity like solid fuel reactors require. There are variants, like the DMSR (denatured molten salt reactor, that is operated on a mix of Th-232, U-233, U-235, U-238 and Pu/Am/Cu on purpose to make the fuel as difficult to use for nukes as a solid uranium fuel rods).
A Canadian company is promising an operational DMSR (with focus on maximum simplicity) in 8 years time. Look up David LeBlanc (terrestrial energy) on youtube.
It's a chicken egg problem. We don't build enough new reactors, and those require extensive on site construction. So they end up being soo much more expensive than upgrading and maintaining the existing ones. And there's zero incentive on investing making new reactors cheaper, because there's not much demand. Until we tell the anti nuclear folks to shut up and go home, this will continue. Well actually, I'm from Brazil, we have 2 nukes operating, building a 3rd one, plans for starting construction of another 5 in the near future. We don't have more cause we have plenty of hydro, 70% of our electricity comes from Hydro. But I lived in the USA for 8 years, so I fell like I'm a dual citizen. I use we, when I really should use you...
But in the USA Hydro is mainly tapped out, so the way forward should be more nuclear, but how can you blame a nuclear supplier for not investing on new revolutionary nuclear designs when we acknowledge that political climate makes it impossible to install more nuclear reactors in California or New England ?
There's an interesting point about solar+wind co existing with nuclear. Nuclear likes to operate at 100% power 24x7. Solar and wind produce when they can. Because the Obama administration is poisoned with idiots that think nuclear is unnecessary and solar+wind is the way forward, nuclear is seen as a problem because lots of wind+solar require lots of agile load following electricity sources to make up for the crappy/unstable/unreliable nature of solar+wind.
If solar+wind were a great thing, Hawaii would be running 100% on renewables already, it uses ultra expensive low efficiency petrol electricity. If solar+wind+biomass+geothermal was a great solution, Hawaii would already be running 100% on it. Instead we get: Google: "hawaii problems with too much solar"
In order to operate a nuclear reactor in the USA so much documentation is required that I would say there's zero chance of the USA running out of people capable of operating the older reactors. The real problem is newer similar technology reactors should be cheaper (because they should be simpler). But in reality after three mile island the world drastically reduced construction of new reactors making new reactors far more expensive due to lack of economies of scale. So instead of installing brand new reactors, they keep upgrading and maintaining them, because new ones are too expensive. I have no problem with extending operation of nukes to 80 years if they are situated on safe areas with no serious natural problems. On the other hand, places like Fukushima (and many other coastal japanese reactors) I would force them to migrate to Gen III reactors. People working on newer revolutionary reactors call the current generation Westinghouse AP1000, what light water reactors were supposed to be 30 years ago ! If the original Manhattan project were still alive and could speak freely, they would say: C'mon guys, you are still building light water reactors ???? Perhaps there would be a curse mid sentense, nah those guys where all polite PhD nerds, the cursing would be all mine. The reality is most nuclear reactors are the cash cow of electrical companies. They are paid off, and their fuel costs are a fraction of natural gas costs.
That's the main problem with the current stratospheric regulatory cost of nuclear power in the USA. There's way too much copying of ultra expensive US Navy regulations to the civilian side. There are many aspects the regulation could be done in a much more logical way (aka far less expensive to comply). The whole concept of light water uranium nuclear reactor (at 150 atmospheres pressure cooker) is a very dumb way to do nuclear. Guess who decided on that design, that's right, the USA Navy. The reason the US Navy doesn't have lots of nuclear accidents, is they have this rigid hierarchy and insane training program that drills procedures in the heads of those that operate the reactor. The interesting fact is that nuclear reactors aren't unsafe, the brand new ones are extremely safe, it's just the ginormous cost of making that pressure cooker contained in every conceivable scenario that is extremely expensive. You might think I'm anti nuclear, but I'm very much pro nuclear, just not a fan of the way nuclear was implemented. PS: I have no problem with a Gen III light water reactor operating 80 years. My problem with Generation II light water reactors isn't with the possibility of operating them to 80 years. Its having the older designs operating in areas with extremely strong earthquakes/tsunamis/level 5 hurricanes/maximum category tornadoes. The reason I want better nukes than water cooled ones are: 1 - Far cheaper 2 - Far cheaper 3 - Much safer 4 - Require mining of 1/100th of the total nuclear material versus water cooled ones. Light water nukes use only 0,65% of the original uranium mined, even with reprocessing, they wouldn't ever manage using 10% of the original uranium mined (after dozens of reprocessing cycles), fission products have half lives 30 years or less, the problem with nuclear waste is the plutonium, americium and curium (half lifes around 10000 years) that light water reactor produce and that must be removed from the reactor after the nuclear fuel is "spent", it's not spent, it's the Xenom that formed inside the fuel rod that is threatening the integrity of the rod (swelling, threatening to fracture the rod).
A molten salt reactor requires just one ton of mined thorium to produce one GW of electricity for one year (one GW year). A light water reactor requires mining 250 tons of uranium, which after enrichment becomes 35 tons of lightly enriched uranium, of which only 1,5 tons actually get fissioned. And for those 1,5 tons of fission products, there is 250 kg of Plutonium (and tens of Kg of Americium + Curium). Molten salt reactors keep the Plutonium, Americium, Curium inside the reactor until it gets fissioned. The gaseous fission products bubble up and are collected in the top of the reactor, so there's no fuel swelling due to Xenom (Xenom also generates many other problems on reactors that keep the Xenom inside the reactor, it's a huge neutron poison, which forces reactors to have control rods and to be engineered with extra reactivity than otherwise required if the Xenom were continuously removed).
Molten Salt reactors are engineered to be safe from their basic characteristics (laws of physics). Light water reactors are safe due to an insane numbers of extra safety features.
Wear and tear I think. But it's likely they will last much longer if you don't drive much. The thing about electric motors is they don't have parts that needs periodic replacing, oiling, greasing, but when they fail, it's something critical that shorts, or something serious. If they last 15 years, they are probably designed to be recycled instead of repaired. But the electric motor is probably cheaper than the battery pack, and the pack is expected to last half as much anyhow.
Thorium LFTR is was fusion pretended to be. Cheap, safe, efficient, clean. Without costing a trillion dollars to develop. Like not even 10 billion, perhaps 5 billion to having a LFTR production line fully operational. When are we going to start to be outraged that we don't have the money to spend on money pits. Stop all fusion research now. The problem with fission isn't fission in general, no corporations are interested in doing major, risky investment, quite the opposite, corporations are risk adverse, so we got the least efficient nuclear reactors, cause that's what the US navy decided to do !
I believe that doesn't include any types of credits. It means the average cost of making the car versus the average revenues from selling them. Of course it indirectly includes consumer credits, since they are a rebate on the sticker price, the consumers get that credit, not Tesla.
Should be 15 years with higher than average usage. Elon Musk is known to be very conservative on this kind of statement, so I expect the cars to last even more than advertised.
Tesla's are expensive due to:
1-Extensive Aluminum construction, Aluminum is called bottled electricity due to costing far more in electricity than anything else to make it. But Aluminum can be recycled. And electricity could come from solar, wind or nuclear. Steel pretty much needs to be made with coal (metalurgical coal), melting aluminium doesn't require putting all that electricity in again
2-Battery components are expensive, but much like Aluminum, can also be recycled And yeah, Tesla is expensive because it's a startup company that is growing with cash flow instead of borrowed money. They already have a 25% gross margin on the car. And unless they drop the price, in 3 or 4 years that margin should get above 30% with the battery cell cost reduction from the giga factory and other economies of scale. Sure, Steel can be recycled, but it's not as expensive to make to begin with. Musk said raw materials alone on a li-ion battery pack costs US$ 80 / kWh, or US$ 6800 on the big 85 kWh alone. I bet the aluminium costs another US$ 25k. But there's one factor you are ignoring. A Tesla durability should easily exceed a regular car except for the battery pack and motor, Aluminium doesn't corrode like steel (over decades). Tesla already states that except for the battery, the model S should last 15 years, essentially requiring replacing the motor by then. If you keep your model S for 15 years and drive about 20k miles / year, just the hard cash savings on gas and maintenance will fully pay the car compared to a non hybrid car. For a heavy commuter or a cab, it might pay itself (as in the whole cost of the car) in 10 years.
If you want to be green, keep your car for 10 years or more.
The cheapest Tesla can be had after credits for about 60 grand. It's just that most people don't want the small 40kWh (software limited 60kWh) battery.
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Exactly, precisely. Fukushima isn't proof Nuclear is bad. It's proof that we are capable of mitigating horrendous disasters.
The Fukushima Daichi is the result of about four events in chain plus one really stupid decision. Should any of the four events didn't happen or the stupid decision wasn't undertaken, the Fukushima Daichi situation would be proof nuclear is extremely safe !
If we did to the airlines what some want us do to with nuclear, all airlines would be shutdown forever.
Except for Chernobyl, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, nuclear have killed thoughout it's lifetime less people than natural gas kills every year. But when you account for the fact that Nuclear is the only solution that could offset all fossil fuel utilization worldwide, and that if it weren't for nuclear, we would have more coal, then quickly you would find out that nuclear has saved millions of lives from not having to breath coal smog, from not killing coal miners, from not killing people from coal mercury, cadmium, arsenic and other nasty chemicals that coal dump both on the atmosphere and on its tailing piles.
Nice try big coal propagandist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Where is my mod points when I need them. Oh, I posted here, wouldn't do any good.
But if I could, I would give you +3 points.
The problem isn't even Uranium. The problem is solid fuel, water cooled reactors. And to a lesser extent reactors cooled by materials that react violently with air or water (like Sodium).
Molten salt reactors have the freeze plug, catch pan and emergency dump tanks that combined with the chemical nature of the coolant salts make every single nuclear fission accident to date be a non event, every single one of them.
The coolant is a solid at room temperature, so even if the reactor is torn to pieces (precision military or comet strike) the nuclear material won't be blown miles away, even if the secondary containment structure is blown to pieces along with the reactor perhaps the material could spread over a 50 meters radius. And it will solidify quickly, making it fairly easy to collect compared to a chernobyl style accident.
The FLiBe coolant is actually a solid even around 300C (572F).
The emergency dump tanks are only possible on molten fuel, molten coolant reactors.
The reactor primary configuration is designed to sustain fission and only loose heat through the heat exchangers.
The emergency dump tanks are designed to hold the fuel + coolant, halting fission very quickly and aggressively dissipating heat to the surrounding environment.
Finally the coolant material runs at less than 2 atmospheres in the highest pressure part of the reactor, compared to light water 150 atm (2200 psi), heavy water 75 atm !
It's like comparing a internal combustion engine with a jet engine. The internal combustion one is essentially trying to rip itself apart continuously (like the extreme pressures water cooled reactors operate), while jet engines are just turning nicely (low pressure of molten salt reactors).
The reason molten salts are typically thought of with Thorium instead of Uranium is cause another goal is very high utilization of nuclear material, which for uranium essentially means fast reactors (with all of its disadvantages), while with Thorium it can be done in the thermal spectrum (minimum nuclear material required, easier to assure totally safe passive shutdown with the emergency dump tanks - without requiring neutron absorption material).
But a Thorium molten salt reactor could be started with uranium spent nuclear fuel, and could be used to slowly burn uranium spent nuclear long term.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Double taxes on gasoline, triple taxes on coal. Everyone making up to 40000 dollars/year gets a 100% exemption from payroll and federal income taxes (to offset the higher taxes on dirty fossil fuels).
This would fix climate change, replace the minimum wage increase, offer a serious incentive for heavy telecommuting and make alternate fuel vehicles really get going.
There you have, either you telecommute, live close to work, or move to an alternate fuel vehicle (electric, natural gas or ethanol).
Only the USA offers cheap gas to its citizens, every country with serious traffic gridlock problems charges about twice as much as the USA for gas (except for countries that are large oil exporters).
The problem with the USA is you don't want real solutions, you prefer to keep living in traffic hell.
I think this will be the only substantive suggestion made in this whole debate.
I'm not saying fusion will absolutely never happen.
What I am saying is yeah: "Bunker Mentality". They are not interested in being honest about the real hurdles ahead. Their first priority is to secure funding, without an ounce of respect to the tax payer withholding everything they know still needs to be done (and that will take far more than the 20 years Michio Kaku claims).
But my real problem isn't truly the researchers, it's the politicians funding them. They are the ones that really are in the con. They are in cahoots with the fossil fuel industry, withholding everything they can from nuclear fission, that is available now, in cahoots with solar+wind radicals, because they know that a solar+wind+biomass+geothermal world still requires significant technological breakthroughs.
It's a game that knows that nuclear fission isn't perfect but it's actually safer than wind and solar (as in deaths per GWh produced) by a long shot.
It's a game of paid propagandists. I was really surprised to discover some anti nuclear + climate change deniers fundamentalists. They don't need to tell me they are funded by the Koch Brothers and their gang, that's just transparent from their ignorant attitude.
It's a game that very few defending it actually have the blueprints of the whole game, they are mainly being either brain washed or money washed to play it. In that level the fusion scientist are just peons in that game.
I care about stopping climate change. My city will be in a world of pain if the Atlantic Ocean climbs another meter. The city will be flooded for days when we have strong rains at high tide. And there are hundreds of other cities in the same situation, over a hundred million people on the line. And we're not a little island in the Pacific that will truly have to abandon ship and migrate elsewhere.
That's right, the US government is pouring billions on solar, wind, fusion research and nothing to fission, except for incremental solutions that keep the current extremely low efficiency for solid fuel reactors (best case scenario is 1,5% for heavy water reactors utilization of fissile+fertile material, and 0,7% efficiency for light water solid fuel reactors).
The reality is that entrenched interests on fission are against a fission revolution. They would rather keep their uranium fuel supply contracts than move to fluid fuel reactors that require no fuel fabrication, and that could operate on a comparatively free fuel, Thorium versus Uranium.
There are startups in USA, Canada that have zero grants because of this policy. People that believe so much in this technology they quit jobs in Universities and NASA to pursue this, they are walking a tight rope to find private funding to make this happen. And the best hope for any US public funding is the off chance of a contract with DoD for small modular reactors that can be operated in remote bases with no grid electricity availability and expensive cost to truck fuel for generators.
The NRC has zero mandate to help nuclear work. Their job is solely to use the heavy hand of government to make the nuclear industry as expensive as they want to. The DOE would be the party that could get funding to help development on this. Thorium Molten Salt reactors would be mostly development, with some chemical research into some materials, the nuclear part is well understood.
Correction: Call me crazy, but If you are defending fusion either you are coning us or you are being conned.
It's always like that, we know it works, but, there are lots of poops that are conveniently hidden.
My opinion is quite simple, the people making decisions don't really want fusion to work, they want to say they are funding it, while it's always ways out in the future.
Fission is commercial, and could be an order of magnitude safer and two orders of magnitude more efficient (per ton of radioactive material mined) if we invest about 10% TOTAL of what's being spent every 10 years on fusion, or just one years funding of fusion.
But the US government is only interested in funding fission in a game of market cards where only be big boys get to play.
Until we take the gas and oil paws off government this will continue.
Notice hydrogen fuel cells were always in the future. It took Elon Musk making electric cars viable now, and the whole speech changed into fuel cell cars in the market in the next 12-24 months.
Call me crazy, but If you are defending fusion either you are coning us or you are in the con.
Lets first perfect fission, let's make nuclear fission reactors that use 99% of radioactivity (two orders of magnitude safer than today), let's make nuclear fission reactors that are neither gigantic pressure cookers nor use tons of material that react violently with sodium. Let's end the self fulfilling prophecy that fission must be expensive and unsafe.
The we can perfect fusion over the next 50 years.
Except Fusion is a pipe dream.
And research into Fission is only being funded on a half govt half private funding model that prevents new entrants to the field (and discourages anybody but billionaires from trying to fund revolutionary fission).
The Price-Anderson Act has never caused the US government to step in and pay for damages.
Before the Price-Anderson Act steps is, there is a large pool of cash sitting there on standby. Billions worth.
The last time that pool was drown upon was three mile island ! 35 years ago.
There is no problem with the Price-Anderson Act. The problem is the anti nuclear people that equate a nuclear power plant to a nuclear bomb explosion.
The problem isn't that natural gas made nuclear uneconomical. The problem is people don't want nukes, that chokes the whole nuclear industry into a self fulfilling prophecy.
If we used the current anti nuclear attitude towards airlines, they would all be shutdown for good. Instead we learn from every accident and make reactors better.
But now we can't install those, because nobody wants nuclear.
Natural gas kills too, it's causing climate change, that is already killing people worldwide with major floods, stronger hurricanes, stronger super typhoons.
Nuclear saves lives. That's a fact. Stop with the non sense.
I would rather limit the old 2nd Generation nukes be limited to 60 years. Even better limit to 50 yrs (forcing their replacements to start building now).
The problem isn't a valve here or a pipe there. The problem is those older reactors that are hitting 40 years of operation are extremely old designs that have been patched again and again.
But the people is against building new replacement reactors, so nuclear operators end up with this continual patch it up work.
But the basic reality is the NRC helps keep old reactors operating but make it uneconomical to build new ones.
Take a new Westinghouse AP1000. There are over a dozen in construction.
But if a nuclear operator decides to build another one, it essentially must be re-certified. As if this was the very first AP1000 installation.
There is zero assurance the project will be approved if it complies to a clearly known set of requirements.
So construction can't start until certification is reached (with the NRC charging US$ 300/hr for over 10000 hours of certification "work").
Its insane !
There are quite a few solutions to put the spent nuclear fuel to good use. It's still 99% fissionable material.
But as long as the nuclear is bad movement continues to pollute the debate, nothing will get done.
If all spent nuclear fuel in the USA were used in efficient reactors designed to use that material efficiently, that would be about 70 years worth of USA electricity (replacing all current sources of electricity, not just fossil fuels, like over 100 years replacing only coal, natural gas and petrol for electricity).
Natural gas is cheap now, but will it be cheap 10 or 20 years from now ?
Look at long term natural gas charts.
It's a limited resource.
If a nuclear reactor expected to operate for 40 years could last 80 years, then it has just become half as expensive to build per GWh of electricity produced over its lifetime.
And they keep saying nuclear is too expensive.
And the same guys saying nuclear is too expensive keep on fueling all anti nuclear intervention to make nuclear even more expensive.
Nuclear is cheaper than coal in countries that are serious about doing nuclear.
China, South Korea and India are doing it at a modest cost due to standardization, and a concerted effort to build lots of reactors.
If only USA, Germany, Italy and a few other delusional countries would accept that.
Before firing meaningless words, please read about it.
Technically, it's a Uranium 233 fueled reactor (mostly).
U-233 / U-235 / Pu-239 is fissioned in the core (U-235, Pu-239, Pu-240, Am-241 from LWR SNF is used for startup, due to U-233 scarcity).
Uranium is kept a tetrafluoride in the core and in the blanket.
It's fluorinated to hexa fluoride in the volatility column to move newly produced U-233 from the blanket to the core.
But it's reduced back to UF4 before insertion into the core.
Formation of UF6 in the core is dificult, since fission keeps demanding more and more Fluoride as U is split into two atoms needing at least 4 F atoms.
The blanket contains ThF4 to receive neutrons and make Pa233 (which decays to U233 with 27 day half life).
Anyhow, I'm not a nuclear engineer. Please take a look at www.energyfromthorium.com also youtube search LFTR reactor. You will find at least 6 nuclear engineers (most with their PhDs) with in depth presentations of how this will work, and prior work done (some of it in the 1960s and early 70s).
Not only this is possible, as well as breeding U-233 from Th-232 has been demonstrated, as well as a U-233 fueled fission.
The bottom line is a molten salt thermal reactor is better any solid fuel, water cooled reactor, due to online removal of Xe135, possibility of online reprocessing of other fission products (since the fuel is liquid, it's easy to drain a few dozen Kg of core fluid into a pyro reprocessing facility designed to only remove fission products and return both the core salt and nuclear fuel back into the reactor), preventing neutron poisoning, avoiding the need to have excess reactivity like solid fuel reactors require.
There are variants, like the DMSR (denatured molten salt reactor, that is operated on a mix of Th-232, U-233, U-235, U-238 and Pu/Am/Cu on purpose to make the fuel as difficult to use for nukes as a solid uranium fuel rods).
A Canadian company is promising an operational DMSR (with focus on maximum simplicity) in 8 years time. Look up David LeBlanc (terrestrial energy) on youtube.
It's a chicken egg problem. We don't build enough new reactors, and those require extensive on site construction. So they end up being soo much more expensive than upgrading and maintaining the existing ones.
And there's zero incentive on investing making new reactors cheaper, because there's not much demand. Until we tell the anti nuclear folks to shut up and go home, this will continue.
Well actually, I'm from Brazil, we have 2 nukes operating, building a 3rd one, plans for starting construction of another 5 in the near future. We don't have more cause we have plenty of hydro, 70% of our electricity comes from Hydro. But I lived in the USA for 8 years, so I fell like I'm a dual citizen. I use we, when I really should use you...
But in the USA Hydro is mainly tapped out, so the way forward should be more nuclear, but how can you blame a nuclear supplier for not investing on new revolutionary nuclear designs when we acknowledge that political climate makes it impossible to install more nuclear reactors in California or New England ?
There's an interesting point about solar+wind co existing with nuclear. Nuclear likes to operate at 100% power 24x7. Solar and wind produce when they can. Because the Obama administration is poisoned with idiots that think nuclear is unnecessary and solar+wind is the way forward, nuclear is seen as a problem because lots of wind+solar require lots of agile load following electricity sources to make up for the crappy/unstable/unreliable nature of solar+wind.
If solar+wind were a great thing, Hawaii would be running 100% on renewables already, it uses ultra expensive low efficiency petrol electricity. If solar+wind+biomass+geothermal was a great solution, Hawaii would already be running 100% on it.
Instead we get:
Google: "hawaii problems with too much solar"
In order to operate a nuclear reactor in the USA so much documentation is required that I would say there's zero chance of the USA running out of people capable of operating the older reactors.
The real problem is newer similar technology reactors should be cheaper (because they should be simpler). But in reality after three mile island the world drastically reduced construction of new reactors making new reactors far more expensive due to lack of economies of scale.
So instead of installing brand new reactors, they keep upgrading and maintaining them, because new ones are too expensive.
I have no problem with extending operation of nukes to 80 years if they are situated on safe areas with no serious natural problems.
On the other hand, places like Fukushima (and many other coastal japanese reactors) I would force them to migrate to Gen III reactors.
People working on newer revolutionary reactors call the current generation Westinghouse AP1000, what light water reactors were supposed to be 30 years ago !
If the original Manhattan project were still alive and could speak freely, they would say: C'mon guys, you are still building light water reactors ???? Perhaps there would be a curse mid sentense, nah those guys where all polite PhD nerds, the cursing would be all mine.
The reality is most nuclear reactors are the cash cow of electrical companies. They are paid off, and their fuel costs are a fraction of natural gas costs.
That's the main problem with the current stratospheric regulatory cost of nuclear power in the USA.
There's way too much copying of ultra expensive US Navy regulations to the civilian side.
There are many aspects the regulation could be done in a much more logical way (aka far less expensive to comply).
The whole concept of light water uranium nuclear reactor (at 150 atmospheres pressure cooker) is a very dumb way to do nuclear. Guess who decided on that design, that's right, the USA Navy.
The reason the US Navy doesn't have lots of nuclear accidents, is they have this rigid hierarchy and insane training program that drills procedures in the heads of those that operate the reactor.
The interesting fact is that nuclear reactors aren't unsafe, the brand new ones are extremely safe, it's just the ginormous cost of making that pressure cooker contained in every conceivable scenario that is extremely expensive.
You might think I'm anti nuclear, but I'm very much pro nuclear, just not a fan of the way nuclear was implemented.
PS: I have no problem with a Gen III light water reactor operating 80 years. My problem with Generation II light water reactors isn't with the possibility of operating them to 80 years. Its having the older designs operating in areas with extremely strong earthquakes/tsunamis/level 5 hurricanes/maximum category tornadoes.
The reason I want better nukes than water cooled ones are:
1 - Far cheaper
2 - Far cheaper
3 - Much safer
4 - Require mining of 1/100th of the total nuclear material versus water cooled ones. Light water nukes use only 0,65% of the original uranium mined, even with reprocessing, they wouldn't ever manage using 10% of the original uranium mined (after dozens of reprocessing cycles), fission products have half lives 30 years or less, the problem with nuclear waste is the plutonium, americium and curium (half lifes around 10000 years) that light water reactor produce and that must be removed from the reactor after the nuclear fuel is "spent", it's not spent, it's the Xenom that formed inside the fuel rod that is threatening the integrity of the rod (swelling, threatening to fracture the rod).
A molten salt reactor requires just one ton of mined thorium to produce one GW of electricity for one year (one GW year).
A light water reactor requires mining 250 tons of uranium, which after enrichment becomes 35 tons of lightly enriched uranium, of which only 1,5 tons actually get fissioned. And for those 1,5 tons of fission products, there is 250 kg of Plutonium (and tens of Kg of Americium + Curium).
Molten salt reactors keep the Plutonium, Americium, Curium inside the reactor until it gets fissioned. The gaseous fission products bubble up and are collected in the top of the reactor, so there's no fuel swelling due to Xenom (Xenom also generates many other problems on reactors that keep the Xenom inside the reactor, it's a huge neutron poison, which forces reactors to have control rods and to be engineered with extra reactivity than otherwise required if the Xenom were continuously removed).
Molten Salt reactors are engineered to be safe from their basic characteristics (laws of physics). Light water reactors are safe due to an insane numbers of extra safety features.
Wear and tear I think. But it's likely they will last much longer if you don't drive much.
The thing about electric motors is they don't have parts that needs periodic replacing, oiling, greasing, but when they fail, it's something critical that shorts, or something serious. If they last 15 years, they are probably designed to be recycled instead of repaired.
But the electric motor is probably cheaper than the battery pack, and the pack is expected to last half as much anyhow.
Thorium LFTR is was fusion pretended to be.
Cheap, safe, efficient, clean.
Without costing a trillion dollars to develop.
Like not even 10 billion, perhaps 5 billion to having a LFTR production line fully operational.
When are we going to start to be outraged that we don't have the money to spend on money pits. Stop all fusion research now.
The problem with fission isn't fission in general, no corporations are interested in doing major, risky investment, quite the opposite, corporations are risk adverse, so we got the least efficient nuclear reactors, cause that's what the US navy decided to do !
I believe that doesn't include any types of credits.
It means the average cost of making the car versus the average revenues from selling them.
Of course it indirectly includes consumer credits, since they are a rebate on the sticker price, the consumers get that credit, not Tesla.
Should be 15 years with higher than average usage.
Elon Musk is known to be very conservative on this kind of statement, so I expect the cars to last even more than advertised.
Tesla's are expensive due to:
1-Extensive Aluminum construction, Aluminum is called bottled electricity due to costing far more in electricity than anything else to make it. But Aluminum can be recycled. And electricity could come from solar, wind or nuclear. Steel pretty much needs to be made with coal (metalurgical coal), melting aluminium doesn't require putting all that electricity in again
2-Battery components are expensive, but much like Aluminum, can also be recycled
And yeah, Tesla is expensive because it's a startup company that is growing with cash flow instead of borrowed money. They already have a 25% gross margin on the car. And unless they drop the price, in 3 or 4 years that margin should get above 30% with the battery cell cost reduction from the giga factory and other economies of scale.
Sure, Steel can be recycled, but it's not as expensive to make to begin with.
Musk said raw materials alone on a li-ion battery pack costs US$ 80 / kWh, or US$ 6800 on the big 85 kWh alone. I bet the aluminium costs another US$ 25k.
But there's one factor you are ignoring. A Tesla durability should easily exceed a regular car except for the battery pack and motor, Aluminium doesn't corrode like steel (over decades).
Tesla already states that except for the battery, the model S should last 15 years, essentially requiring replacing the motor by then.
If you keep your model S for 15 years and drive about 20k miles / year, just the hard cash savings on gas and maintenance will fully pay the car compared to a non hybrid car. For a heavy commuter or a cab, it might pay itself (as in the whole cost of the car) in 10 years.
If you want to be green, keep your car for 10 years or more.
The cheapest Tesla can be had after credits for about 60 grand. It's just that most people don't want the small 40kWh (software limited 60kWh) battery.