Even a 747 fully loaded with fuel (9/11 style attack) wouldn't be enough to destroy the secondary (outer) and primary (inner) containment of a water cooled reactor. Plus both Chernobyl and Fukushima mandatory evacuation have been questioned if they shouldn't right now be optional instead. Nuclear experts continue to affirm there is a greater cancer risk of living in downtown Tokyo (from pollution) than in the Fukushima evac zone, yet, Tokyo isn't being evacuated. There is so much anti nuclear non sense in the absurd lies environmentalists say about nuclear power. Go educate yourself and know better. The world has places with over 10x the radiation level around Fukushima crawling with people. Without any measurable increase in Cancer levels over national average. Search radiation hormesis versus linear no threshold.
Just applied the latest beta channel update, my ext4 SD Card and USB Flash drive filesystems are being mounted automatically and visible on the "Files" app.
Corruption is a two party process, those who give the money and those who receive. Both are equally guilty. Its called active (giving) and passive (receiving) corruption here in Brazil. Its naive to think you can solve corruption by only attacking one side. But yeah, for all of their democracy, its really sick to see how many americans vote Republican just because they sell that "I'm angry like you" motto. Brazilians are 10x worse, but we don't have a decent public education system. We're not a rich country. "Democracy sucks. But its way better than the alternative" Winston Churchil (not his exact words, I added to spice to his original saying). Those that complain that democracy is filthy, dirty should look at the alternative of countries that used to be democratic and that today are de facto dictatorships like Venezuela, Bolivia, with Argentina+Brazil somewhere in between.
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.
Le me clarify this for you... I think this need to be stressed:
The DMSR requires mining of ~35 metric tons of Uranium to produce one GWe yr of electricity versus 250 metric tons of Uranium for similar energy production of a typical LWR reactor. A typical LWR fissions about half of its U-235 present in the fuel and another equivalent part of Pu fission from U-238, so at 6x the burnup it would mean something of the order of 4x better usage of U-238 / Plutonium for energy production than a regular reactor.
The reactor is so efficient neutronically that for its expected 30 years of operations, all solid fission products can be kept in and a little extra fuel be added every year, no need to reprocess. That is unthinkable for water cooled reactors. It is far closer to a fast reactor burnup than any water cooled reactor in operation.
With reprocessing, the DMSR might become fairly close to a iso breeder reactor (making almost as much of its energy from Plutonium made by itself), it might have its makeup fuel made from mostly from LWR SNF minus fission products (pyro reprocessing, the cheapest type of reprocessing), with perhaps a little reactor grade plutonium to keepup the fissile ratio.
Canada is hard at work with Thorium molten salt reactors, its greatest simplification, a K.I.S.S. variant of LFTR, the DMSR. Terrestrial Energy Inc, or look up Dr. David LeBlanc. The big difference on his DMSR talk vs more idealistic LFTR proponents like Dr. Kirk Sorensen is that Dr LeBlanc seems to actually have funding for his pre conceptual design work and backers interested in going to each of the next steps as long as costs match expectations. But Terrestrial Energy is going the Uranium burner road first. No, it can't be called a U-235 reactor, since it will produce a few times more energy from U-238->Pu-239 fission than pure U-235 fission, it could also be powered with reprocessed spent nuclear fuel for water cooled reactors (using Plutonium, Americium, Curium and U-235 left in the spent fuel). The most critical aspect of LFTR by far isn't Thorium. Its the molten salt part. If usage of 20% enriched Uranium is allowed, a 80% Thorium + 20% U fuel would offer much higher burnup and its reprocessed spent fuel would be much better than water cooled SNF (high U-233 content, which is a better fission fuel than both U-235 and Pu-239).
Depends on what you consider dangerously. Nuclear is the densest energy source available to mankind. This means operating the whole nuclear supply chain (mining, processing, enrichment, fabrication, fission, waste storage) requires far less people than the equivalent solar/wind industry. This allows for much tighter trainining, oversight, regulation. Its not by accident (pun intended) that nuclear power is the safest energy source in the USA for the last 10 years. A single person died in that industry (uranium mining accident), while dozens die yearly on the solar and wind supply chains (each). If you exclude Chernobyl, total nuclear power deaths worldwide (including military applications) is less than the total number of deaths natural gas causes yearly (10 thousand). But the fact is that at the heart of nuclear risks is high pressure operation of water / heavy water / helium coolant that is used for 99% of the world's operational nuclear reactors. High pressure operation means that the reactor is physically trying to leak out, with a massive internal and external containment used to keep it closed. Molten Salt Reactors (LFTR is one type of MSR) operates under near atmospheric pressure, using a coolant that is at the rock bottom of chemical stability, and is a dense coolant, meaning even if the reactor is blown to pieces (comet/meteor/military precision strike) the material inside wants to fall to the earth very quickly. In every way you look, MSRs are two orders of magnitude safer than current nuclear technology, MSRs can be designed to be fully walk away safe depending only on physics to shutdown in case of an accident / abnormal condition instead of depending on computers or humans to activate some system that shuts it down (using electricity and/or hydraulics). Those that still criticize MSR nuclear tech certainly aren't interested in studying it a single bit. A 10 minute intro presentation to MSR / LFTR you sell you on why its safe. And where LFTR comes is its the highest efficiency MSR design, which aims for fissioning 99+% of nuclear material fed to the reactor, meaning the reactor generates is 200x more efficient at electricity / process heat produced per ton of nuclear material fed to it. And 80% of its nuclear waste is stable in no more than a few decades, and the remaining 20% is stable in 300 years. In fact, in 200 years nuclear waste from a LFTR is LESS radioactive than uranium / thorium mined to fuel the reactor. When will we understand that COAL is deadly. For each ton of thorium that a LFTR fissions, a COAL power plant will output two million tons of CO2, and produce several tons of coal ASH that is severely poisonous (with material that is poisonous FOREVER like Cadmium, Mercury, Arsenic plus some radioactive materials), COAL burning produces so much poisonous materials its stored out in the open, and all it takes is a big rain to wash it down some river, polluting water supplies. Nuclear is what clean coal will never truly achieves, which is sequestration of its pollution in a safe way.
I believe you are wrong. Molten salt reactors are so safe it will take a comet / asteroid / military precision strike to cause a significant radioactivity release, and there is no water pressure on the inside to spit stuff out. If you want to make the reactor 99.999999999999999% safe just bury it deeper. conventional reactors are too big to be buried, molten salts are compact enough you could install them 10 feet underground (with 10ft of reinforced concrete above it), and have all of its connections first go sideways before go up. All three significant nuclear accidents (TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima) wouldn't have happened with a molten salt reactor. Coal kills. Natural gas kills. Oil kills. Coal kills 200k yearly worldwide. Natural gas and oil kills 10k yearly worldwide. When will we understand that fukushima radiation killed nobody and the real reason the quarantine is still going on is the result of unscientific fear of cancers that never materialized with any nuclear accident ? Three Mile Island killed zero people, caused zero detectable deviation from cancer rates (specially no thryreoid or leukemia cancer rate deviations, main cancer types from radiation). Chernobyl killed less than 200 people from radiation sickness and might eventually kill a whopping 6000 people from cancer compared to those that swear it kill one million, but can't list the names of even a couple thousand cancer cases (with names and diagnosis). If people would be allowed back into Fukushima one year after the accident, cancer rates from that population would be smaller than those of people living in downtown Tokyo. http://bravenewclimate.com/201... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... http://www.nbcnews.com/news/ot... The problem isn't the disaster but rather Linear no threshold radiation cancer models which were created by deeply anti nuclear weapon scientists desperate to instill fear on governments undergoing nuclear weapons tests. If LNT were true, cancer rates for people living above 10000ft / 3Km would be horrendous.
So one MWh produced by coal continously is more expensive that a MWh produced by wind, when the wind is blowing, excluding the transmission upgrades required to try to interconnect an entire continental grid to shift vasts volumes of electricity to where its actually needed ? Also not including the transmission losses ?
I am 100% pro solar and pro nuclear. But wind... If its that economical, lets end all per MWh wind energy credits. Then we'll see how many more wind turbines will be installed. Or at least zero out WEC for electricity sold to the grid at off peak hours (like 11PM-6AM), when the grid is often overloaded with too much power exactly due to too many wind turbines and no large scale energy storage.
Wind is a jobs program. It does generate electricity, but not in a reliable way, and when levelized (taking into account natural gas peak plants needed to compensate for when wind+solar is falling short) its is still WAY too expensive. Wind turbines are maintenance hogs. Solar economics is a cakewalk compared to wind turbines installed to catch peak wind from weather phenomena (like most USA wind turbines). Only wind installed in areas that get consistent wind all week long for months at a time makes sense, or with lots of hydro to load follow wind (specially if wind is stronger when its raining less, like in my Brazil northern shore).
See my post above. To my knowledge (and a quick google search), Rossi never produced electricity from his device. With the hot cat variant, there's no reason he couldn't, yet he never did. Plus the low grade steam device could be used to actually heat a large environment, in such scales the electricity bill would be enormous, yet, no such demonstration has been done. The only time his large device has been operated (1 MW) it had a big diesel generator producing its control electricity (like a 500kW generator). I'm not skeptical that there might be some physics we don't understand yet, that might explain Rossi's device, but his lack of effort in producing electricity is very fishy.
My issue is fairly simple. The original device only produced low temp steam (less than 150C) at that temp, electricity generation is very inefficient. Then he developed the hot cat, able to produce steam in the order of 1000C. Even at 350C 33% thermal to electricity generation efficiency is possible. At 700C 50% efficiency is possible. At 1000C we're over 60% efficiency. If Mr. Rossi actually wanted to prove his device is real, then he would have hooked up his hot cat to a steam turbine+generator plus a small battery and show an electricity surplus. But instead he (to my knowledge) have not produced a single kWh of electricity. So until he does, it does look like an ultra elaborated hoax. I really don't care about the physics when it comes to Rossi's e-cat, what I care about is a very large electricity surplus, since the device so far has required a significant electricity input for startup and some electricity input for "control", which could be fixed with a chemical battery and a generator replenishing the battery once the device is at full power output. Once he can show a closed circuit producing more electricity than it needs for control, then the whole contraption can be mobile and moved around a large floor, eliminating any hidden wires or some kind of induction coil transmission.
DSL is dead moving forward. Fiber is far more economical (moving forward). DSL is short range, requires an individual copper pair per customer. GPON is much cheaper for low and medium density markets, and in high density markets there is demand for ultra fast broadband, so again, its a must. Plus twisted copper is exactly what comcast doesn't have (it's CATV with its triple play upgrade, so either HFC or GPON network). I'm all for mandatory peering at common internet peering, but its totally optional both in Brazil and in the USA. The more competitive the market is without large players the more attractive open peering is.
You don't need to replace the whole routing backbone in a single step. This can be done in stages, migrating one sector of the network at a time. You can still design the network as a bunch of very large sectors, avoiding 80% of the L3 routers and keeping some L3 barriers to keep the whole thing a little more manageable. Of course, my forte is working strictly outside the box. So I sound very outlandish to most in the trade. The real bottleneck is those that actually dictate network topology aren't the backbone providers / ISP but rather Cisco / Juniper /... There once was a time when network engineers where actual engineers that knew bits and bytes, today they are mere systems integrators that don't actually understand how a router / switch works at the lower levels. They just follow cookbooks.
There are a few ways on how to do routing. You can do it the Cisco way which is always fairly expensive. You can do it the Global Crossing way, which maximizes L2 switching and minimizes L3 routing. There is no need for an L3 router handling 100% of transit traffic in every hop. The backbone can be strictly L2 switches with enterprise features with routers only at the edge of the network. Before L3 bought Global Crossing, one could traceroute from Brazil to Europe, with just two hops inside the Global Crossing network. One entering and one leaving. Much for the same reason big telecom people are afraid of adopting linux routing. Can't think outside the box. For instance, traceroute from my ISP (GVT) to br.advfn.com (France):
6 gvt-te-0-2-0-5.rt01.spo.gvt.net.br (187.115.213.98) 22.203 ms 21.021 ms 23.866 ms
7 xe-3-3-0.ar4.gru1.gblx.net (208.51.41.53) 52.638 ms 52.702 ms 52.796 ms
8 po1-20G.ar4.CDG2.gblx.net (67.16.138.10) 197.301 ms 197.552 ms po3.ar4.CDG2.gblx.net (67.16.138.118) 197.174 ms
9 4.68.63.229 (4.68.63.229) 198.301 ms 197.583 ms 197.523 ms 10 ae-1-60.edge5.Paris1.Level3.net (4.69.168.8) 195.276 ms ae-3-80.edge5.Paris1.Level3.net (4.69.168.136) 196.960 ms 196.793 ms 11 COLT-TELECO.edge5.Paris1.Level3.net (212.73.200.90) 199.115 ms 198.432 ms 198.020 ms Hop 6 is still in GVT. Hop 7 is Global Crossing in Sao Paulo (GRU) Hop 8 is Paris-France (CDG) Hop 9 is left the long distance global crossing network and entered Level3 In a traditional network, from GRU to CDG there would be some 4 to 6 routing hops.
We need to understand that outside of cell phone carriers, any mixing up of net neutrality and day to day traffic management policies don't make much sense. Current tech can transmit 100Gbps on a single fiber optical carrier and tens of Tbps over a pair of fiber strands (one tx one rx). Routing a Tbps worth of real traffic can be done with a cheap router. Routing 10Gbps worth of real traffic can be done with a dirt cheap router. GPON can multiplex over a gigabit of traffic from 64 users over a single fiber strand (from consumer up to the first aggregation point). What I mean is there is no technical reason for any rationing of bandwidth. The real reason for rationing of bandwidth with any modern wired ISP is to extract more $$$ from content generators, specially those that compete with Cable TV services provided by the same company. Cell phone broadband is another matter altogether. There you actually always have a spectrum shortage that makes it very hard to deliver high sustained speeds. High speeds can be reached as long as its a short burst interleaved between one customer and another. I know a thing or two about this market. I worked in the IP / Ethernet / ADSL world for a few years. I know this stuff (including costs) inside out.
I'm against mandating Comcast, Time Warner or other ISPs providing bandwidth on a mandatory basis to competitors. The natural supplier that sees this as a revenue opportunity instead is the power company (which already has access to utility poles, has an operational need for cheap fiber for its own grid control / smart grid needs). Electrical utilities have been a neutral fiber provider since fiber prices started to drop in the early 00s. The only peculiarity is they aren't used to providing mass consumer level access.
Sure enough, giving electricity utilities a very strong incentive to become the common carrier (using Fiber + passive splitting + GPON), would certainly be the best solution. Lots of ISPs would be interested in operating in such a scenario, but this is exactly what has been tried and exactly what Comcast and others have invested very hard against, with local govt lobbying, lawsuits and every dirty trick in the book. In the end, net neutrality mandated by the FCC would be a nationwide solution that would prevent the de facto monopoly Comcast + Time Warner have on the market for getting even worse. Oh Google Fiber, please multiply all over the country.
The merger sure isn't going to restart competition where it has already been suppressed. I don't see a single advantage to the public in this merger. What should happen is the other way around. Not only the merger is forbidden, but the two companies must start competing between each other or else ! The merger would only escalate the anti net neutrality position those companies employ and stop any new revolutionary netflix like initiative on its tracks.
Solar is a solution for all equatorial and tropical areas of the world, urban and rural. In Brazil, solar is already at grid scale parity, since we are a tropical+equatorial country. Since Feed In Tariffs were adopted a few months ago, solar can grow in urban areas as well. Brazil electricity right now is roughly 70% hydro, 20% natural gas, 2% nuclear, 2% solar+wind, the balance oil+biomass. With all the hydro we have, we can incorporate large scale wind with hydro doing load following. Most countries don't have a boatload of hydro to allow mass wind adoption. I hope we can move towards 65% hydro, 10% nuclear, 10% wind, 15% solar, getting rid of natural gas/coal/oil for electricity production, but it would attack one of the govt sacred cows which is the state owned Brazilian Oil company Petrobras.
So, solar generating 50% of world's electricity by 2050. And what about the rest ? We need 100% renewables by then, are you telling me that wind+hydro+biomass+geothermal will produce the balance ? Honestly, how much coal and natural gas will still be burned by then ? Per the usual, the anti nuclear wind+solar only ignore the real problems and focus only on the pleasant side of their ideas. We could get rid of 100% of coal and 50% natural gas far before that if we start adopting nuclear in mass scale right now. I'm not saying no to solar. I'm just saying, without nuclear there is no hope of fixing climate change in time. The other side of this scale is how winter heating will be done by 2050 ? Without nuclear heating, we'll be forced to keep burning natural gas and coal for heating. Wind can't scale in lockstep with solar. At least solar produces everyday. Wind can go for days without producing much. We have no hope of storing a week worth of grid production to allow mass scale wind energy production, even with far lower chemical battery costs. We need to get rid of 100% of coal by 2050 and the vast majority of all natural gas and petrol usage. This solar 50% electricity by 2050 scenario provides none of that. This whole hoopla is a carefully orchestrated movement to force the world to continue to use coal and natural gas as much as possible for as long as possible. Only nuclear can actually get us off burning fossil stuff quickly.
Germany is doing all of this solar+wind thing to keep burning lots of coal with solar+wind in the spotlight. There is no solution without nuclear to fully cleanup Germany's grid in less than 30 years. The technology for energy storage just isn't there. Nuclear is a deadly threat to coal and natural gas profits. Solar and wind isn't. That's the real reason for all of this solar+wind push. It just doesn't threaten the coal/gas interests for another 50 years. We should be mass installing nuclear now, continue with this solar+wind learning curve, so by the time the newly installed nuclear power plants are retired we could actually have the tech to migrate to solar (I'm not even sure wind will make sense in the long run, too intermittent).
We don't even need to invoke climate change to show nuclear saves lifes. Studies show that if all nuclear power plants in the world were instead coal power plants over 2 million lives would have been lost ! If we had 3x more nuclear in the world than today (going from 16% to around 50%) millions of lifes would be saved yearly. Nothing against deploying lots of solar and winds where it makes sense. Australia is doing a great job. In Germany its mass stupidity because solar is extremelly crappy in the winter and wind is just too intermittent. You need to install solar in equatorial/tropical places, and wind in areas that get near constant tradewinds or that have a boatload of hydro to load follow wind+solar without burning gas or coal. Brazil is great for solar and wind. USA not so much (very little hydro and very little wind installed in areas of regular wind intensity).
Yet, Coal kills 200 thousand people worldwide yearly. Gas and Oil kills conservatively 10 thousand people worldwide yearly. Hydro killed 200 thousand on its worst accident ever, and kills a few thousand every year. Nuclear has killed over its entire lifetime a fraction of what gas and oil kills every year. So your concerns are fears. Why don't you instead go demand all coal power plants in the world get shutdown with a year ? Every form of energy is dangerous. Rational stats show solar and wind kill a little more people than Nuclear per TWh of energy produced, because both solar and wind are intermittent, low energy density sources, Solar PV combines two of the deadliest professions (roofing and electrician). Nuclear is safe. We have solutions to make nuclear much safer, but we can't get it done in a world hostile to nuclear power. Politicians are too afraid to invest on nuclear power in modern democracies.
You can't move to Fukushima or Chernobyl, local govt has made those areas mandatory evac zones. They must be afraid of people moving back and living their lives normally, no cancers or anything. Actually, people have moved back to Pripyat, Ukraine, walking through the forest to avoid the evac checkpoints. They have been visited by reporters, they claim no cancers or any health problems. Radioactivity is everywhere. If radioactivity levels were a problem, me and my whole family would be dead from cancer a long time ago. I have spent cumulatively around one year in Guarapari-ES-Brazil, where radiation levels everywhere are many times higher than Fukushima or Chernobyl, in the beach my family sunbathes every summer radioactivity levels are over 10x Fukushima or Chernobyl nowadays. If the radioactivity levels in Fukushima or Chernobyl were a problem, then we would be forbidden from living in Denver, CO, Salt Lake City, UT and from living anywhere above 6000ft. Airlines would be forbidden from flying, as we get over 30x more radiation flying on an airliner at 35k ft than at sea level. Get your facts straight. Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... And this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Slashdot Mirror
Even a 747 fully loaded with fuel (9/11 style attack) wouldn't be enough to destroy the secondary (outer) and primary (inner) containment of a water cooled reactor.
Plus both Chernobyl and Fukushima mandatory evacuation have been questioned if they shouldn't right now be optional instead.
Nuclear experts continue to affirm there is a greater cancer risk of living in downtown Tokyo (from pollution) than in the Fukushima evac zone, yet, Tokyo isn't being evacuated.
There is so much anti nuclear non sense in the absurd lies environmentalists say about nuclear power. Go educate yourself and know better.
The world has places with over 10x the radiation level around Fukushima crawling with people. Without any measurable increase in Cancer levels over national average.
Search radiation hormesis versus linear no threshold.
Just applied the latest beta channel update, my ext4 SD Card and USB Flash drive filesystems are being mounted automatically and visible on the "Files" app.
Corruption is a two party process, those who give the money and those who receive. Both are equally guilty.
Its called active (giving) and passive (receiving) corruption here in Brazil.
Its naive to think you can solve corruption by only attacking one side.
But yeah, for all of their democracy, its really sick to see how many americans vote Republican just because they sell that "I'm angry like you" motto. Brazilians are 10x worse, but we don't have a decent public education system. We're not a rich country.
"Democracy sucks. But its way better than the alternative" Winston Churchil (not his exact words, I added to spice to his original saying).
Those that complain that democracy is filthy, dirty should look at the alternative of countries that used to be democratic and that today are de facto dictatorships like Venezuela, Bolivia, with Argentina+Brazil somewhere in between.
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.
Le me clarify this for you... I think this need to be stressed:
The DMSR requires mining of ~35 metric tons of Uranium to produce one GWe yr of electricity versus 250 metric tons of Uranium for similar energy production of a typical LWR reactor. A typical LWR fissions about half of its U-235 present in the fuel and another equivalent part of Pu fission from U-238, so at 6x the burnup it would mean something of the order of 4x better usage of U-238 / Plutonium for energy production than a regular reactor.
The reactor is so efficient neutronically that for its expected 30 years of operations, all solid fission products can be kept in and a little extra fuel be added every year, no need to reprocess. That is unthinkable for water cooled reactors. It is far closer to a fast reactor burnup than any water cooled reactor in operation.
With reprocessing, the DMSR might become fairly close to a iso breeder reactor (making almost as much of its energy from Plutonium made by itself), it might have its makeup fuel made from mostly from LWR SNF minus fission products (pyro reprocessing, the cheapest type of reprocessing), with perhaps a little reactor grade plutonium to keepup the fissile ratio.
Canada is hard at work with Thorium molten salt reactors, its greatest simplification, a K.I.S.S. variant of LFTR, the DMSR.
Terrestrial Energy Inc, or look up Dr. David LeBlanc.
The big difference on his DMSR talk vs more idealistic LFTR proponents like Dr. Kirk Sorensen is that Dr LeBlanc seems to actually have funding for his pre conceptual design work and backers interested in going to each of the next steps as long as costs match expectations.
But Terrestrial Energy is going the Uranium burner road first. No, it can't be called a U-235 reactor, since it will produce a few times more energy from U-238->Pu-239 fission than pure U-235 fission, it could also be powered with reprocessed spent nuclear fuel for water cooled reactors (using Plutonium, Americium, Curium and U-235 left in the spent fuel).
The most critical aspect of LFTR by far isn't Thorium. Its the molten salt part. If usage of 20% enriched Uranium is allowed, a 80% Thorium + 20% U fuel would offer much higher burnup and its reprocessed spent fuel would be much better than water cooled SNF (high U-233 content, which is a better fission fuel than both U-235 and Pu-239).
Depends on what you consider dangerously.
Nuclear is the densest energy source available to mankind. This means operating the whole nuclear supply chain (mining, processing, enrichment, fabrication, fission, waste storage) requires far less people than the equivalent solar/wind industry. This allows for much tighter trainining, oversight, regulation.
Its not by accident (pun intended) that nuclear power is the safest energy source in the USA for the last 10 years. A single person died in that industry (uranium mining accident), while dozens die yearly on the solar and wind supply chains (each).
If you exclude Chernobyl, total nuclear power deaths worldwide (including military applications) is less than the total number of deaths natural gas causes yearly (10 thousand).
But the fact is that at the heart of nuclear risks is high pressure operation of water / heavy water / helium coolant that is used for 99% of the world's operational nuclear reactors. High pressure operation means that the reactor is physically trying to leak out, with a massive internal and external containment used to keep it closed.
Molten Salt Reactors (LFTR is one type of MSR) operates under near atmospheric pressure, using a coolant that is at the rock bottom of chemical stability, and is a dense coolant, meaning even if the reactor is blown to pieces (comet/meteor/military precision strike) the material inside wants to fall to the earth very quickly.
In every way you look, MSRs are two orders of magnitude safer than current nuclear technology, MSRs can be designed to be fully walk away safe depending only on physics to shutdown in case of an accident / abnormal condition instead of depending on computers or humans to activate some system that shuts it down (using electricity and/or hydraulics).
Those that still criticize MSR nuclear tech certainly aren't interested in studying it a single bit. A 10 minute intro presentation to MSR / LFTR you sell you on why its safe.
And where LFTR comes is its the highest efficiency MSR design, which aims for fissioning 99+% of nuclear material fed to the reactor, meaning the reactor generates is 200x more efficient at electricity / process heat produced per ton of nuclear material fed to it. And 80% of its nuclear waste is stable in no more than a few decades, and the remaining 20% is stable in 300 years. In fact, in 200 years nuclear waste from a LFTR is LESS radioactive than uranium / thorium mined to fuel the reactor.
When will we understand that COAL is deadly. For each ton of thorium that a LFTR fissions, a COAL power plant will output two million tons of CO2, and produce several tons of coal ASH that is severely poisonous (with material that is poisonous FOREVER like Cadmium, Mercury, Arsenic plus some radioactive materials), COAL burning produces so much poisonous materials its stored out in the open, and all it takes is a big rain to wash it down some river, polluting water supplies.
Nuclear is what clean coal will never truly achieves, which is sequestration of its pollution in a safe way.
I take those Troll mods as a badge of honor. Its from those that don't want to debate nuclear facts vs anti nuclear FUD.
I believe you are wrong. Molten salt reactors are so safe it will take a comet / asteroid / military precision strike to cause a significant radioactivity release, and there is no water pressure on the inside to spit stuff out.
If you want to make the reactor 99.999999999999999% safe just bury it deeper. conventional reactors are too big to be buried, molten salts are compact enough you could install them 10 feet underground (with 10ft of reinforced concrete above it), and have all of its connections first go sideways before go up.
All three significant nuclear accidents (TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima) wouldn't have happened with a molten salt reactor.
Coal kills. Natural gas kills. Oil kills. Coal kills 200k yearly worldwide. Natural gas and oil kills 10k yearly worldwide. When will we understand that fukushima radiation killed nobody and the real reason the quarantine is still going on is the result of unscientific fear of cancers that never materialized with any nuclear accident ?
Three Mile Island killed zero people, caused zero detectable deviation from cancer rates (specially no thryreoid or leukemia cancer rate deviations, main cancer types from radiation).
Chernobyl killed less than 200 people from radiation sickness and might eventually kill a whopping 6000 people from cancer compared to those that swear it kill one million, but can't list the names of even a couple thousand cancer cases (with names and diagnosis).
If people would be allowed back into Fukushima one year after the accident, cancer rates from that population would be smaller than those of people living in downtown Tokyo.
http://bravenewclimate.com/201...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/ot...
The problem isn't the disaster but rather Linear no threshold radiation cancer models which were created by deeply anti nuclear weapon scientists desperate to instill fear on governments undergoing nuclear weapons tests.
If LNT were true, cancer rates for people living above 10000ft / 3Km would be horrendous.
So one MWh produced by coal continously is more expensive that a MWh produced by wind, when the wind is blowing, excluding the transmission upgrades required to try to interconnect an entire continental grid to shift vasts volumes of electricity to where its actually needed ? Also not including the transmission losses ?
I am 100% pro solar and pro nuclear. But wind... If its that economical, lets end all per MWh wind energy credits. Then we'll see how many more wind turbines will be installed. Or at least zero out WEC for electricity sold to the grid at off peak hours (like 11PM-6AM), when the grid is often overloaded with too much power exactly due to too many wind turbines and no large scale energy storage.
Wind is a jobs program. It does generate electricity, but not in a reliable way, and when levelized (taking into account natural gas peak plants needed to compensate for when wind+solar is falling short) its is still WAY too expensive. Wind turbines are maintenance hogs. Solar economics is a cakewalk compared to wind turbines installed to catch peak wind from weather phenomena (like most USA wind turbines). Only wind installed in areas that get consistent wind all week long for months at a time makes sense, or with lots of hydro to load follow wind (specially if wind is stronger when its raining less, like in my Brazil northern shore).
See my post above. To my knowledge (and a quick google search), Rossi never produced electricity from his device.
With the hot cat variant, there's no reason he couldn't, yet he never did.
Plus the low grade steam device could be used to actually heat a large environment, in such scales the electricity bill would be enormous, yet, no such demonstration has been done.
The only time his large device has been operated (1 MW) it had a big diesel generator producing its control electricity (like a 500kW generator).
I'm not skeptical that there might be some physics we don't understand yet, that might explain Rossi's device, but his lack of effort in producing electricity is very fishy.
My issue is fairly simple.
The original device only produced low temp steam (less than 150C) at that temp, electricity generation is very inefficient.
Then he developed the hot cat, able to produce steam in the order of 1000C. Even at 350C 33% thermal to electricity generation efficiency is possible. At 700C 50% efficiency is possible. At 1000C we're over 60% efficiency.
If Mr. Rossi actually wanted to prove his device is real, then he would have hooked up his hot cat to a steam turbine+generator plus a small battery and show an electricity surplus. But instead he (to my knowledge) have not produced a single kWh of electricity.
So until he does, it does look like an ultra elaborated hoax.
I really don't care about the physics when it comes to Rossi's e-cat, what I care about is a very large electricity surplus, since the device so far has required a significant electricity input for startup and some electricity input for "control", which could be fixed with a chemical battery and a generator replenishing the battery once the device is at full power output.
Once he can show a closed circuit producing more electricity than it needs for control, then the whole contraption can be mobile and moved around a large floor, eliminating any hidden wires or some kind of induction coil transmission.
DSL is dead moving forward. Fiber is far more economical (moving forward). DSL is short range, requires an individual copper pair per customer. GPON is much cheaper for low and medium density markets, and in high density markets there is demand for ultra fast broadband, so again, its a must.
Plus twisted copper is exactly what comcast doesn't have (it's CATV with its triple play upgrade, so either HFC or GPON network).
I'm all for mandatory peering at common internet peering, but its totally optional both in Brazil and in the USA.
The more competitive the market is without large players the more attractive open peering is.
You don't need to replace the whole routing backbone in a single step. ... There once was a time when network engineers where actual engineers that knew bits and bytes, today they are mere systems integrators that don't actually understand how a router / switch works at the lower levels. They just follow cookbooks.
This can be done in stages, migrating one sector of the network at a time.
You can still design the network as a bunch of very large sectors, avoiding 80% of the L3 routers and keeping some L3 barriers to keep the whole thing a little more manageable.
Of course, my forte is working strictly outside the box. So I sound very outlandish to most in the trade.
The real bottleneck is those that actually dictate network topology aren't the backbone providers / ISP but rather Cisco / Juniper /
There are a few ways on how to do routing. You can do it the Cisco way which is always fairly expensive.
You can do it the Global Crossing way, which maximizes L2 switching and minimizes L3 routing.
There is no need for an L3 router handling 100% of transit traffic in every hop.
The backbone can be strictly L2 switches with enterprise features with routers only at the edge of the network.
Before L3 bought Global Crossing, one could traceroute from Brazil to Europe, with just two hops inside the Global Crossing network. One entering and one leaving.
Much for the same reason big telecom people are afraid of adopting linux routing. Can't think outside the box.
For instance, traceroute from my ISP (GVT) to br.advfn.com (France):
6 gvt-te-0-2-0-5.rt01.spo.gvt.net.br (187.115.213.98) 22.203 ms 21.021 ms 23.866 ms
7 xe-3-3-0.ar4.gru1.gblx.net (208.51.41.53) 52.638 ms 52.702 ms 52.796 ms
8 po1-20G.ar4.CDG2.gblx.net (67.16.138.10) 197.301 ms 197.552 ms po3.ar4.CDG2.gblx.net (67.16.138.118) 197.174 ms
9 4.68.63.229 (4.68.63.229) 198.301 ms 197.583 ms 197.523 ms
10 ae-1-60.edge5.Paris1.Level3.net (4.69.168.8) 195.276 ms ae-3-80.edge5.Paris1.Level3.net (4.69.168.136) 196.960 ms 196.793 ms
11 COLT-TELECO.edge5.Paris1.Level3.net (212.73.200.90) 199.115 ms 198.432 ms 198.020 ms
Hop 6 is still in GVT.
Hop 7 is Global Crossing in Sao Paulo (GRU)
Hop 8 is Paris-France (CDG)
Hop 9 is left the long distance global crossing network and entered Level3
In a traditional network, from GRU to CDG there would be some 4 to 6 routing hops.
We need to understand that outside of cell phone carriers, any mixing up of net neutrality and day to day traffic management policies don't make much sense.
Current tech can transmit 100Gbps on a single fiber optical carrier and tens of Tbps over a pair of fiber strands (one tx one rx). Routing a Tbps worth of real traffic can be done with a cheap router. Routing 10Gbps worth of real traffic can be done with a dirt cheap router. GPON can multiplex over a gigabit of traffic from 64 users over a single fiber strand (from consumer up to the first aggregation point).
What I mean is there is no technical reason for any rationing of bandwidth. The real reason for rationing of bandwidth with any modern wired ISP is to extract more $$$ from content generators, specially those that compete with Cable TV services provided by the same company.
Cell phone broadband is another matter altogether. There you actually always have a spectrum shortage that makes it very hard to deliver high sustained speeds. High speeds can be reached as long as its a short burst interleaved between one customer and another.
I know a thing or two about this market. I worked in the IP / Ethernet / ADSL world for a few years. I know this stuff (including costs) inside out.
I'm against mandating Comcast, Time Warner or other ISPs providing bandwidth on a mandatory basis to competitors.
The natural supplier that sees this as a revenue opportunity instead is the power company (which already has access to utility poles, has an operational need for cheap fiber for its own grid control / smart grid needs).
Electrical utilities have been a neutral fiber provider since fiber prices started to drop in the early 00s. The only peculiarity is they aren't used to providing mass consumer level access.
Sure enough, giving electricity utilities a very strong incentive to become the common carrier (using Fiber + passive splitting + GPON), would certainly be the best solution. Lots of ISPs would be interested in operating in such a scenario, but this is exactly what has been tried and exactly what Comcast and others have invested very hard against, with local govt lobbying, lawsuits and every dirty trick in the book.
In the end, net neutrality mandated by the FCC would be a nationwide solution that would prevent the de facto monopoly Comcast + Time Warner have on the market for getting even worse.
Oh Google Fiber, please multiply all over the country.
The merger sure isn't going to restart competition where it has already been suppressed.
I don't see a single advantage to the public in this merger.
What should happen is the other way around.
Not only the merger is forbidden, but the two companies must start competing between each other or else !
The merger would only escalate the anti net neutrality position those companies employ and stop any new revolutionary netflix like initiative on its tracks.
Solar is a solution for all equatorial and tropical areas of the world, urban and rural.
In Brazil, solar is already at grid scale parity, since we are a tropical+equatorial country. Since Feed In Tariffs were adopted a few months ago, solar can grow in urban areas as well.
Brazil electricity right now is roughly 70% hydro, 20% natural gas, 2% nuclear, 2% solar+wind, the balance oil+biomass.
With all the hydro we have, we can incorporate large scale wind with hydro doing load following. Most countries don't have a boatload of hydro to allow mass wind adoption.
I hope we can move towards 65% hydro, 10% nuclear, 10% wind, 15% solar, getting rid of natural gas/coal/oil for electricity production, but it would attack one of the govt sacred cows which is the state owned Brazilian Oil company Petrobras.
So, solar generating 50% of world's electricity by 2050.
And what about the rest ? We need 100% renewables by then, are you telling me that wind+hydro+biomass+geothermal will produce the balance ?
Honestly, how much coal and natural gas will still be burned by then ?
Per the usual, the anti nuclear wind+solar only ignore the real problems and focus only on the pleasant side of their ideas.
We could get rid of 100% of coal and 50% natural gas far before that if we start adopting nuclear in mass scale right now.
I'm not saying no to solar. I'm just saying, without nuclear there is no hope of fixing climate change in time.
The other side of this scale is how winter heating will be done by 2050 ? Without nuclear heating, we'll be forced to keep burning natural gas and coal for heating.
Wind can't scale in lockstep with solar. At least solar produces everyday. Wind can go for days without producing much. We have no hope of storing a week worth of grid production to allow mass scale wind energy production, even with far lower chemical battery costs.
We need to get rid of 100% of coal by 2050 and the vast majority of all natural gas and petrol usage. This solar 50% electricity by 2050 scenario provides none of that.
This whole hoopla is a carefully orchestrated movement to force the world to continue to use coal and natural gas as much as possible for as long as possible. Only nuclear can actually get us off burning fossil stuff quickly.
Germany is doing all of this solar+wind thing to keep burning lots of coal with solar+wind in the spotlight. There is no solution without nuclear to fully cleanup Germany's grid in less than 30 years. The technology for energy storage just isn't there.
Nuclear is a deadly threat to coal and natural gas profits. Solar and wind isn't. That's the real reason for all of this solar+wind push. It just doesn't threaten the coal/gas interests for another 50 years. We should be mass installing nuclear now, continue with this solar+wind learning curve, so by the time the newly installed nuclear power plants are retired we could actually have the tech to migrate to solar (I'm not even sure wind will make sense in the long run, too intermittent).
We don't even need to invoke climate change to show nuclear saves lifes.
Studies show that if all nuclear power plants in the world were instead coal power plants over 2 million lives would have been lost !
If we had 3x more nuclear in the world than today (going from 16% to around 50%) millions of lifes would be saved yearly.
Nothing against deploying lots of solar and winds where it makes sense. Australia is doing a great job. In Germany its mass stupidity because solar is extremelly crappy in the winter and wind is just too intermittent. You need to install solar in equatorial/tropical places, and wind in areas that get near constant tradewinds or that have a boatload of hydro to load follow wind+solar without burning gas or coal. Brazil is great for solar and wind. USA not so much (very little hydro and very little wind installed in areas of regular wind intensity).
Yet, Coal kills 200 thousand people worldwide yearly. Gas and Oil kills conservatively 10 thousand people worldwide yearly. Hydro killed 200 thousand on its worst accident ever, and kills a few thousand every year.
Nuclear has killed over its entire lifetime a fraction of what gas and oil kills every year.
So your concerns are fears. Why don't you instead go demand all coal power plants in the world get shutdown with a year ?
Every form of energy is dangerous. Rational stats show solar and wind kill a little more people than Nuclear per TWh of energy produced, because both solar and wind are intermittent, low energy density sources, Solar PV combines two of the deadliest professions (roofing and electrician).
Nuclear is safe. We have solutions to make nuclear much safer, but we can't get it done in a world hostile to nuclear power. Politicians are too afraid to invest on nuclear power in modern democracies.
You can't move to Fukushima or Chernobyl, local govt has made those areas mandatory evac zones. They must be afraid of people moving back and living their lives normally, no cancers or anything. Actually, people have moved back to Pripyat, Ukraine, walking through the forest to avoid the evac checkpoints. They have been visited by reporters, they claim no cancers or any health problems.
Radioactivity is everywhere. If radioactivity levels were a problem, me and my whole family would be dead from cancer a long time ago. I have spent cumulatively around one year in Guarapari-ES-Brazil, where radiation levels everywhere are many times higher than Fukushima or Chernobyl, in the beach my family sunbathes every summer radioactivity levels are over 10x Fukushima or Chernobyl nowadays.
If the radioactivity levels in Fukushima or Chernobyl were a problem, then we would be forbidden from living in Denver, CO, Salt Lake City, UT and from living anywhere above 6000ft. Airlines would be forbidden from flying, as we get over 30x more radiation flying on an airliner at 35k ft than at sea level.
Get your facts straight. Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...