Go ahead and buy a metric ton of ultracaps on ebay, that's 2200 pounds for the weirdos out there still using such units. Like the Burmese or Liberians... or that one other country in the world....
It's untested, but easy to do. It's all a matter of basic chemistry and neutron cross sections. Other than that, the reactor concept is best I've seen so far - especially when fission products are continously removed. Nothing can be released from any reactor in the accident that wasn't in the reactor in the first place. (Current designs keep the fission product inventory of over half a year of operation in the core.) And it works fine for U/Pu, we have lots and lots of that stuff. The US has about 1mio tons of U-238 in depleted uranium and spent fuel. That's enough to generate 100GW for 10,000 years. No thorium or uranium mining required.
Erm, you can make nuclear bombs from just about anything. It's just that the US is insanely paranoid as it wants nobody else to have them. Hint: The plutonium in the Hiroshima bomb was made in a reactor running on natural uranium, using graphite as moderator..
That's also what the UK was doing in Sellafield, when the air-cooled(!) reactor caught fire (surprise!) and the magnesium clad fuel capsules (a brightly burning idea!) caused a mess in 1957.
You could easily put some natural uranium into a thorium reactor and chemically seperate the plutonium from the rest, as only the U-238 will create Pu-239. The U-233 will only turn into U-234 (and U-235 and U-236 and Np-237 and a very very very tiny fraction of Pu-238) and not contaminate the Pu-239 for your nuke. It's a pretty good Pu breeder actually, just not in regular operation
After the mess in Sellafield the British figured that pressurized CO2 would be a much better and less flamable coolant in the so-called Magnox reactors. And ever since they use steel-clad fuel rods in the AGRs I even trust them not to cause too much of a mess, even in a blackout (when they are cooled by convection of the gas), unless somebody drops a bomb on one - the implications of which being a mess all of its own. And, oh yes, both Magnox and AGRs are great breeders for weapon-grade plutonium if you want it. Why do you ask?
Building nuclear bombs is dead simple. Or how else could a country like North Korea build such a bomb, with or without foreign help? Or how could the US build one 11 years after the neutron was discovered and just 5 years after the fission chainreaction was found out to be possible at all? It's dead simple unless we go back to 18th century technology and destroy all scientific knowledge ever created and make sure it's not going to be re-created. We have to deal with their existence instead of denying reality.
As for liquid salt reactors, yes I do like the concept. Let's hope somebody builds another one... it's been half a century since the last one after all.
Too difficult to produce at scale. Even lab samples of experimental ultra caps store no more than 85 kWh/ton. The best currently available (and most expensive) manage a mere 35 kWh/ton. In order to store 3.5TWh you would need 100 million tons of capacitors - which is just enough for short-term variations of Germany (about 1% of world population).
You know, for some time I thought he might be right. (I'm not perfect.)
You may now know where my prejudice against environmentalists comes from... (I prejudice I keep challenging though, after all, just because it's probably a lie, doesn't mean it's wrong.)
I think you underestimate the size of the storage problem. The main problem with wind and solar are seasonal variations - even though we currently can't even manage to cope with the short-term ones. You will need at least 2 months of storage to deal with the time around winter when demand is largest and supply is smallest. (That's without some extra reserves to deal with unforeseen events.) For Germany that's 100TWh. For short-term variations about 2 days or so could be sufficient, about 3-4 TWh. Pumped storage in Germany has a capacity of about 0.04 TWh. (Of course, 40GWh sound a lot more impressive, but really isn't.)
The elephant in the room is of course that the majority of energy use is not electricity, but oil and gas used for transport, process heat and heating, only some of those can be significantly reduced through the use of electricity. (Process heat, for example, is too hot for effective use of heat pumps. 1kWh of heat takes 1kWh of electricity there. For space heaters, you may get 4kWh of heat for 1kWh of electricity.) About 30% of the primary energy (30% of about 15000 PJ) in Germany is converted into electricity - with some 40% efficiency. Thus, current electricity generation (600TWh per year, or 2200PJ or 70 GW) is just a small fraction of total energy use (15000PJ per year or 480 GW). Electricty supply would need to at least double, more likely triple, to replace oil and gas. Which is a pretty optimistic assessment - you're doing with perhaps 5000PJ per year (160GW) of electricity what used to take 15000PJ (480GW) of energy.
As for storage? Well, batteries are not enough for long term storage, but short term, they are a very efficient and very expensive alternative. The bulk will inevitably need to be some derivative of hydrogen, probably methane (for much easier storage). The problem with that is that efficiency is quite bad - some 33% round-trip. (Not accounting for energy used in liquification or pressurization for storage. But 33% is a reasonable estimate if you take probable technological improvements into account. This is limited by turbine efficiency, which is actually better than fuel cells for large, multiple stage, plants.) So, you will need to roughly double the figure of electricity generated by wind or solar, if you want to know what you will get out. So, you're now talking about generating on the order of 8000PJ per year (250GW) with wind and solar. (Biofuel and hydro is not scalable, tidal quickly gets huge, but so does wind and solar at this kind of scale.)
On average, Germany is now producing 2.75 GW of solar (with 27GW installed capacity) and 4.5GW of wind power (also 27GW installed capacity - but without current downtimes due to electricity net congestion, it could be over 6GW). So, you would need roughly a 25 fold increase wind and solar, as the only scalable renewables, provide renewable energy to Germany. And that is huge all by itself.
That's wrong. French nuclear power plants have load factors of only about 75% instead of the usual 90% precisely because they do follow loads. As for renewables: Germany has not increased its share of wind power generation. Installed capacity has increased by about 30% over the last 5 years, but amount of energy generated has not grown at all. That's because the electricity grid cannot transmit wind power from where it is generated (north and east) to where it is needed (south and west).
Biogas and bioethanol production did increase and means that Germany will import grain this year, because it is burning too much of its own production. Germany has been a grain exporter for over half a century. Biofuels and biogas are the main culprits for the vanishing supply of global grain markets and the hugely increased prices. (Some 85% - only about 15% can be attributed to speculation.) 10% of the world grain harvest in currently being burned for "sustainable energy", a receipt for sustained famines.
Lets compare: Greenpeace - not known for being either honest or supporters of nuclear power - claims that German nuclear power received some 350bn Euro of subsidies. But this includes research for nuclear fusion, particle accelerators, "research" reactors that provide hospitals with all the isotopes needed for medical diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other illnesses. Basically anything with "atoms in it". Nuclear power provided over 20% of electricity for over 30 years - about as much as hard coal used to. This figure (for coal) will rise.
Compare that with some 150bn euro of subsidies (so far) in legal obligations to be received over the next 20 years for solar power, providing about 3% of electricity on average, though only when the sun is shining. Unlike other people I do not subtract a market price of 8ct per kWh for the electricity generated in that time - for the simple reason that Greenpeace doesn't do that in its own figures either.
That's the story that's being told in the newspapers. The truth is rather different.
Peak demand for electricity is in the evening hours - about 6pm. But sunset is before that in winter and Germany certainly didn't export any electricity to France during that time of peak demand. Rather, the exports were at noon, when solar power has its peak production. And since the decentralized eletricity grid in Germany is incapable of transmitting solar power to other parts of Germany beyond narrow margins (power plants are built within 50-100km of demand, with limited transmission capacity beyond that), the only place for solar power in south-west Germany to go is France. (And southern Germany is the place where the rich house owners live who can afford to put solar cells on their roofs - paid for by all private customers, regardless of how poor they are.)
In the evening, none of this was there. France did make do with its own reserves and all German reserves had to be used for Germany. Had the environmentalists of the BUND had their way, there would have been no reserve capacity at all - all of which was in fact needed during peak demand, even reserves in Austria had to be used to meet the needs in Germany when temperatures dropped. All that without any major technical problems, no powerlines cut, not major faults in power stations.
Ok, fine. Just use hydrazine - not turning into any greenhouse gases and merely being poisonous for everyone handling the stuff. Combined with the joys of red fuming nitric acid, you can be sure to save the planet that way. Or how about using solid propellants, spraying the environment with Chlorine and hydrochloric acid?
Seriously, the annual oil production of Germany (about 3mio tons and perfectly insignificant in the grant scheme of things) would be enough to put as much stuff into orbit as people put there since 1957 several times over. Kerosine is among the most environmentally friendly rocket fuels out there - especially since hydrogen is usually (~95%) made by simply turning the carbon in methane molecules into CO2, closing your eyes and pretending that the hydrogen that's left is a clean fuel.
Do you have actual scientifically valid evidence that they are not a statistically representative sample or did you just pull that out of your ass?
That's what the original article said:
"The reason for the radical reappraisal of ice melting in Asia is the different ways in which the current and previous studies were conducted. Until now, estimates of meltwater loss for all the world's 200,000 glaciers were based on extrapolations of data from a few hundred monitored on the ground. Those glaciers at lower altitudes are much easier for scientists to get to and so were more frequently included, but they were also more prone to melting. The bias was particularly strong in Asia."
But those 0.075% are not a statistically representative sample. They are those glaciers located conveniently enough to have regular measurments taken. Hence the lack of data from the much more inconvenient high-altitude glaciers of Asia. Same story goes for the rest of the world.
It is impossible to determine sealevel rise from the amount of melt water entering the oceans.
If you want to determine the content of any system, you must account for both everything entering it as well as all the stuff leaving it. If you count 500 people leaving the exit of a building, you should not conclude that there are now 500 more people outside the building - because you didn't count the number of people going in.
That's not cherry picking, that's pumpkin picking.
10-15% is for PV in temperate climate zones, 10% specifically in Central Europe. Even prefect conditions (desert near equator) yield no more than 20%. Windpower depends upon local conditions. Germany currently averages just under 17%, it could be on the order of 25%, but for lack of power lines (and law suits filed by the green party against building more) and storage capacity (also blocked by law suits of the same) wind turbines must be shut down more and more often for lack of demand. In fact, wind power generation has been flat since 2007/8 despite a 30% increase in generating capacity.
Finally, in order to provide even as much as 30% of the electricity needs of Germany (21GW) you need to install 300% of the power requirement in peak power - 210GW. Unfortunately, the absolute peak power demand of Germany is 100GW, so you'd waste at least half the solar power generated at noon along with all the wind power and all other electricity generated if you don't have any means of storage. Storage isn't just necessary, it is vital.
1KW of PV generates as much energy as 0.1-0.15 kW of coventional power plants. And that's not counting losses for necessary storage (at least 50% of energy) not to talk about the cost of that storage. Sorry to tell you, but you fell for the propaganda.
They did work out the scenarios, they knew exactly how a meltdown in a Mark I BWR containment would work out and they were proved right. Countermeasures were worked out - look up "common cause failure", "filtered containment vents" and "passive autocatalytic recombiners" (PAR).
Alas, none of those were present in Fukushima Daiichi and consequently couldn't work. The emergency generators were neither enough nor laid out to avoid common cause failure. Containments could not be vented to the outside through a filter (or any other system for that purpose) and consequently weren't until pressure rose high enough that steam, hydrogen and radionuclides were released uncontrolled into the reactor buildings. (The attempt to vent through a jury-rigged system in reactor 3 led to hydrogen intrusions into reactor building 4.) Without catalysers (the PARs), hydrogen reached explosive concentrations and did what this tends to do. (The PARs are a redundant system, in case the venting fails or hydrogen seeps through the containment seals.)
If you need to blanket a whole country with solar cells and still don't have enough power for all people, you shouldn't talk about a drawback. You should talk about it being useless for this purpose.
If you blanket all of Germany with cells of this type, you'll get 13.6 GW on average, assuming perfect and unlimited storage - Germany needs 70GW of electricity. And of course, you'd have to blanket *all* of the country, so you'd have to say goodbye to forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, fields... or an unblocked view of the sky for that matter.
Well, there is, for example a three year old paper by Tamada describing the process in some detail. And besides, there was a paper published 48 years ago on the 8th place of the search result that I've shown before that described several methods for uranium extraction, including the predecessors of the approach pursued it Tamada's paper.
This casts some doubt on your ability to research the claims your are making. E.g.: "Nobody extracted anything they just suggested it might be possible", "That makes any cost estimates an exercise in wishful thinking since they don't have a clue what is needed"
In fact, it's so incredibly difficult and expensive, that it had to be done by Japanese who figured out that it would cost $300 per kg - about 4-5 times of current market prices.
So, you mean extrapolation of prices is a difficult and error prone process and they could easily be off by a factor of 10? You're right! But does it matter? No!
1kg of Thorium/Uranium/Plutonium (it really doesn't matter much in breeding reactors) is sufficient to produce 1MW of electricity for one year. That's almost 9 million kWh. Even if the cost estimate was off by a factor of 1000 and a kg of Uranium extracted from sea water cost $300,000 - the cost of extraction would add no more than $0.03 per kWh to the cost of electricity.
Their existence, while not sufficient, would go a long way. To quote the article: "there is no evidence of long-distance uranium contamination from the plant."
Why is the existence not sufficient? The radioactivity in Uranium ores, that is indeed problematic in the (comparably) extremely high concentrations that can be found in sub-surface mines, is *not* caused by the Uranium itself. This is exactly the paradox that made Marie Curie investigate what does make this stuff so radioactive. Because the Uranium sure wasn't enough. And the answer turned out to answer to names like radium, radon, polonium, lead-214, lead-210 and a bunch of other elements and isotopes building up over tens of thousands to millions of years or so, with the decay of Uranium to Radium being the crucial step that is just not going to occur in Fukushima Daiichi in historical time periods.
You mean minute quantities in addition to the 4.5 billion tons of Uranium already in the oceans? Exactly what does it take to make people realize that Uranium is a perfectly natural part of the Earth?
Slashdot Mirror
Go ahead and buy a metric ton of ultracaps on ebay, that's 2200 pounds for the weirdos out there still using such units. Like the Burmese or Liberians ... or that one other country in the world ....
It's untested, but easy to do. It's all a matter of basic chemistry and neutron cross sections. Other than that, the reactor concept is best I've seen so far - especially when fission products are continously removed. Nothing can be released from any reactor in the accident that wasn't in the reactor in the first place. (Current designs keep the fission product inventory of over half a year of operation in the core.) And it works fine for U/Pu, we have lots and lots of that stuff. The US has about 1mio tons of U-238 in depleted uranium and spent fuel. That's enough to generate 100GW for 10,000 years. No thorium or uranium mining required.
Erm, you can make nuclear bombs from just about anything. It's just that the US is insanely paranoid as it wants nobody else to have them. Hint: The plutonium in the Hiroshima bomb was made in a reactor running on natural uranium, using graphite as moderator..
... it's been half a century since the last one after all.
That's also what the UK was doing in Sellafield, when the air-cooled(!) reactor caught fire (surprise!) and the magnesium clad fuel capsules (a brightly burning idea!) caused a mess in 1957.
You could easily put some natural uranium into a thorium reactor and chemically seperate the plutonium from the rest, as only the U-238 will create Pu-239. The U-233 will only turn into U-234 (and U-235 and U-236 and Np-237 and a very very very tiny fraction of Pu-238) and not contaminate the Pu-239 for your nuke. It's a pretty good Pu breeder actually, just not in regular operation
After the mess in Sellafield the British figured that pressurized CO2 would be a much better and less flamable coolant in the so-called Magnox reactors. And ever since they use steel-clad fuel rods in the AGRs I even trust them not to cause too much of a mess, even in a blackout (when they are cooled by convection of the gas), unless somebody drops a bomb on one - the implications of which being a mess all of its own. And, oh yes, both Magnox and AGRs are great breeders for weapon-grade plutonium if you want it. Why do you ask?
Building nuclear bombs is dead simple. Or how else could a country like North Korea build such a bomb, with or without foreign help? Or how could the US build one 11 years after the neutron was discovered and just 5 years after the fission chainreaction was found out to be possible at all? It's dead simple unless we go back to 18th century technology and destroy all scientific knowledge ever created and make sure it's not going to be re-created. We have to deal with their existence instead of denying reality.
As for liquid salt reactors, yes I do like the concept. Let's hope somebody builds another one
Too difficult to produce at scale. Even lab samples of experimental ultra caps store no more than 85 kWh/ton. The best currently available (and most expensive) manage a mere 35 kWh/ton. In order to store 3.5TWh you would need 100 million tons of capacitors - which is just enough for short-term variations of Germany (about 1% of world population).
... no.
Sorry, but
You know, for some time I thought he might be right. (I'm not perfect.)
... (I prejudice I keep challenging though, after all, just because it's probably a lie, doesn't mean it's wrong.)
You may now know where my prejudice against environmentalists comes from
I think you underestimate the size of the storage problem. The main problem with wind and solar are seasonal variations - even though we currently can't even manage to cope with the short-term ones. You will need at least 2 months of storage to deal with the time around winter when demand is largest and supply is smallest. (That's without some extra reserves to deal with unforeseen events.) For Germany that's 100TWh. For short-term variations about 2 days or so could be sufficient, about 3-4 TWh. Pumped storage in Germany has a capacity of about 0.04 TWh. (Of course, 40GWh sound a lot more impressive, but really isn't.)
The elephant in the room is of course that the majority of energy use is not electricity, but oil and gas used for transport, process heat and heating, only some of those can be significantly reduced through the use of electricity. (Process heat, for example, is too hot for effective use of heat pumps. 1kWh of heat takes 1kWh of electricity there. For space heaters, you may get 4kWh of heat for 1kWh of electricity.) About 30% of the primary energy (30% of about 15000 PJ) in Germany is converted into electricity - with some 40% efficiency. Thus, current electricity generation (600TWh per year, or 2200PJ or 70 GW) is just a small fraction of total energy use (15000PJ per year or 480 GW). Electricty supply would need to at least double, more likely triple, to replace oil and gas. Which is a pretty optimistic assessment - you're doing with perhaps 5000PJ per year (160GW) of electricity what used to take 15000PJ (480GW) of energy.
As for storage? Well, batteries are not enough for long term storage, but short term, they are a very efficient and very expensive alternative. The bulk will inevitably need to be some derivative of hydrogen, probably methane (for much easier storage). The problem with that is that efficiency is quite bad - some 33% round-trip. (Not accounting for energy used in liquification or pressurization for storage. But 33% is a reasonable estimate if you take probable technological improvements into account. This is limited by turbine efficiency, which is actually better than fuel cells for large, multiple stage, plants.) So, you will need to roughly double the figure of electricity generated by wind or solar, if you want to know what you will get out. So, you're now talking about generating on the order of 8000PJ per year (250GW) with wind and solar. (Biofuel and hydro is not scalable, tidal quickly gets huge, but so does wind and solar at this kind of scale.)
On average, Germany is now producing 2.75 GW of solar (with 27GW installed capacity) and 4.5GW of wind power (also 27GW installed capacity - but without current downtimes due to electricity net congestion, it could be over 6GW). So, you would need roughly a 25 fold increase wind and solar, as the only scalable renewables, provide renewable energy to Germany. And that is huge all by itself.
That's wrong. French nuclear power plants have load factors of only about 75% instead of the usual 90% precisely because they do follow loads. As for renewables: Germany has not increased its share of wind power generation. Installed capacity has increased by about 30% over the last 5 years, but amount of energy generated has not grown at all. That's because the electricity grid cannot transmit wind power from where it is generated (north and east) to where it is needed (south and west).
Biogas and bioethanol production did increase and means that Germany will import grain this year, because it is burning too much of its own production. Germany has been a grain exporter for over half a century. Biofuels and biogas are the main culprits for the vanishing supply of global grain markets and the hugely increased prices. (Some 85% - only about 15% can be attributed to speculation.) 10% of the world grain harvest in currently being burned for "sustainable energy", a receipt for sustained famines.
Lets compare: Greenpeace - not known for being either honest or supporters of nuclear power - claims that German nuclear power received some 350bn Euro of subsidies. But this includes research for nuclear fusion, particle accelerators, "research" reactors that provide hospitals with all the isotopes needed for medical diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other illnesses. Basically anything with "atoms in it". Nuclear power provided over 20% of electricity for over 30 years - about as much as hard coal used to. This figure (for coal) will rise.
Compare that with some 150bn euro of subsidies (so far) in legal obligations to be received over the next 20 years for solar power, providing about 3% of electricity on average, though only when the sun is shining. Unlike other people I do not subtract a market price of 8ct per kWh for the electricity generated in that time - for the simple reason that Greenpeace doesn't do that in its own figures either.
That's the story that's being told in the newspapers. The truth is rather different.
Peak demand for electricity is in the evening hours - about 6pm. But sunset is before that in winter and Germany certainly didn't export any electricity to France during that time of peak demand. Rather, the exports were at noon, when solar power has its peak production. And since the decentralized eletricity grid in Germany is incapable of transmitting solar power to other parts of Germany beyond narrow margins (power plants are built within 50-100km of demand, with limited transmission capacity beyond that), the only place for solar power in south-west Germany to go is France. (And southern Germany is the place where the rich house owners live who can afford to put solar cells on their roofs - paid for by all private customers, regardless of how poor they are.)
In the evening, none of this was there. France did make do with its own reserves and all German reserves had to be used for Germany. Had the environmentalists of the BUND had their way, there would have been no reserve capacity at all - all of which was in fact needed during peak demand, even reserves in Austria had to be used to meet the needs in Germany when temperatures dropped. All that without any major technical problems, no powerlines cut, not major faults in power stations.
But hey, physics is just a corporate conspiracy.
Ok, fine. Just use hydrazine - not turning into any greenhouse gases and merely being poisonous for everyone handling the stuff. Combined with the joys of red fuming nitric acid, you can be sure to save the planet that way. Or how about using solid propellants, spraying the environment with Chlorine and hydrochloric acid?
Seriously, the annual oil production of Germany (about 3mio tons and perfectly insignificant in the grant scheme of things) would be enough to put as much stuff into orbit as people put there since 1957 several times over. Kerosine is among the most environmentally friendly rocket fuels out there - especially since hydrogen is usually (~95%) made by simply turning the carbon in methane molecules into CO2, closing your eyes and pretending that the hydrogen that's left is a clean fuel.
Actually, it's more like a hundred tons of CO2, or just a bit more than a fully fuelled Gulfstream 650. (Per passenger.)
Do you have actual scientifically valid evidence that they are not a statistically representative sample or did you just pull that out of your ass?
That's what the original article said:
"The reason for the radical reappraisal of ice melting in Asia is the different ways in which the current and previous studies were conducted. Until now, estimates of meltwater loss for all the world's 200,000 glaciers were based on extrapolations of data from a few hundred monitored on the ground. Those glaciers at lower altitudes are much easier for scientists to get to and so were more frequently included, but they were also more prone to melting. The bias was particularly strong in Asia."
But those 0.075% are not a statistically representative sample. They are those glaciers located conveniently enough to have regular measurments taken. Hence the lack of data from the much more inconvenient high-altitude glaciers of Asia. Same story goes for the rest of the world.
It is impossible to determine sealevel rise from the amount of melt water entering the oceans.
If you want to determine the content of any system, you must account for both everything entering it as well as all the stuff leaving it. If you count 500 people leaving the exit of a building, you should not conclude that there are now 500 more people outside the building - because you didn't count the number of people going in.
That's not cherry picking, that's pumpkin picking.
Just doesn't work.
The science is settled? No. The science is shoddy.
10-15% is for PV in temperate climate zones, 10% specifically in Central Europe. Even prefect conditions (desert near equator) yield no more than 20%. Windpower depends upon local conditions. Germany currently averages just under 17%, it could be on the order of 25%, but for lack of power lines (and law suits filed by the green party against building more) and storage capacity (also blocked by law suits of the same) wind turbines must be shut down more and more often for lack of demand. In fact, wind power generation has been flat since 2007/8 despite a 30% increase in generating capacity.
Finally, in order to provide even as much as 30% of the electricity needs of Germany (21GW) you need to install 300% of the power requirement in peak power - 210GW. Unfortunately, the absolute peak power demand of Germany is 100GW, so you'd waste at least half the solar power generated at noon along with all the wind power and all other electricity generated if you don't have any means of storage. Storage isn't just necessary, it is vital.
1KW of PV generates as much energy as 0.1-0.15 kW of coventional power plants. And that's not counting losses for necessary storage (at least 50% of energy) not to talk about the cost of that storage. Sorry to tell you, but you fell for the propaganda.
They did work out the scenarios, they knew exactly how a meltdown in a Mark I BWR containment would work out and they were proved right. Countermeasures were worked out - look up "common cause failure", "filtered containment vents" and "passive autocatalytic recombiners" (PAR).
Alas, none of those were present in Fukushima Daiichi and consequently couldn't work. The emergency generators were neither enough nor laid out to avoid common cause failure. Containments could not be vented to the outside through a filter (or any other system for that purpose) and consequently weren't until pressure rose high enough that steam, hydrogen and radionuclides were released uncontrolled into the reactor buildings. (The attempt to vent through a jury-rigged system in reactor 3 led to hydrogen intrusions into reactor building 4.) Without catalysers (the PARs), hydrogen reached explosive concentrations and did what this tends to do. (The PARs are a redundant system, in case the venting fails or hydrogen seeps through the containment seals.)
If you need to blanket a whole country with solar cells and still don't have enough power for all people, you shouldn't talk about a drawback. You should talk about it being useless for this purpose.
... or an unblocked view of the sky for that matter.
If you blanket all of Germany with cells of this type, you'll get 13.6 GW on average, assuming perfect and unlimited storage - Germany needs 70GW of electricity. And of course, you'd have to blanket *all* of the country, so you'd have to say goodbye to forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, fields
Well, there is, for example a three year old paper by Tamada describing the process in some detail. And besides, there was a paper published 48 years ago on the 8th place of the search result that I've shown before that described several methods for uranium extraction, including the predecessors of the approach pursued it Tamada's paper.
This casts some doubt on your ability to research the claims your are making. E.g.: "Nobody extracted anything they just suggested it might be possible", "That makes any cost estimates an exercise in wishful thinking since they don't have a clue what is needed"
"Results 1 - 10 of about 28,500"
Wrong.
In fact, it's so incredibly difficult and expensive, that it had to be done by Japanese who figured out that it would cost $300 per kg - about 4-5 times of current market prices.
So, you mean extrapolation of prices is a difficult and error prone process and they could easily be off by a factor of 10? You're right! But does it matter? No!
1kg of Thorium/Uranium/Plutonium (it really doesn't matter much in breeding reactors) is sufficient to produce 1MW of electricity for one year. That's almost 9 million kWh. Even if the cost estimate was off by a factor of 1000 and a kg of Uranium extracted from sea water cost $300,000 - the cost of extraction would add no more than $0.03 per kWh to the cost of electricity.
Their existence, while not sufficient, would go a long way. To quote the article: "there is no evidence of long-distance uranium contamination from the plant."
Why is the existence not sufficient? The radioactivity in Uranium ores, that is indeed problematic in the (comparably) extremely high concentrations that can be found in sub-surface mines, is *not* caused by the Uranium itself. This is exactly the paradox that made Marie Curie investigate what does make this stuff so radioactive. Because the Uranium sure wasn't enough. And the answer turned out to answer to names like radium, radon, polonium, lead-214, lead-210 and a bunch of other elements and isotopes building up over tens of thousands to millions of years or so, with the decay of Uranium to Radium being the crucial step that is just not going to occur in Fukushima Daiichi in historical time periods.
You mean minute quantities in addition to the 4.5 billion tons of Uranium already in the oceans? Exactly what does it take to make people realize that Uranium is a perfectly natural part of the Earth?