The decay chain of U-238 includes many isotopes which give off beta and gamma radiation. Most of that energy is given off via alpha particles. But it's not true that a sheet of paper or your dead skin cells will block all if it.
Not quite. Its mostly alpha and beta emitters but no gamma emitters. That's why its not really so dangerous. Before it hurts you, you would get a sunburn. and probably move away. For the gamma emitters you are probably thinking of U-232 which is Uranium's answer to Pu-238. It glows red hot in high purities. It also matters what else is in the ore. If its U-238 decay products, its likely a lot more radioactive than your estimate because those decay products have much shorter half-lives than U-238 and thus emit more radiation per gram and their lower densities don't make up for the difference in half-life. Also, this radiation was almost entirely alpha radiation as evidenced by the fact it only was measurable less than 5ft from the buckets. Those measurement levels they gave were no joke and not the usual over hysteria about radiation. It would be like walking into an active x-ray machine but with no warning. That's probably not so great but not dangerous enough to lose your head over. Also, Uranium is poisonous. That's the greater danger here.
The report indicated radiation levels at "13.9 mR/hr" where the buckets were stored, and "800 mR/hr" on contact with the ore. Just 5 feet from the buckets, there was a zero reading. The abbreviation, "mR" typically stands for milliroentgen, a measurement roughly equivalent to a millirem, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
So if there was no reading 5 feet from the buckets, then the radiation was most entirely alpha decay. Those buckets must have been hot. The bigger problem is that they left a huge bucket of poison around children. The radiation thing is mostly a scare tactic unless you lived within 5 ft of those buckets. Also, I'm surprised they gave the units of measure they did. If they had used effective dose (Sieverts) it would have been 20x higher and much more scary.
"Is a lot of radiation in a short time worse than a small amount of radiation over a long period? We don't know but there does seem to be a base level of background radiation below which there is no harm."
The current scientific consensus is that there is no safe level below which there is no harm. There is a minority which claim otherwise but this but this is not the opinion of most scientists. Our best understanding of how ionizing radiation affects the body suggests that there is no safe level and large scale studies (.e.g from CT exposure) so far all agree with this even to relatively low levels.
Yea, but that's not what the data says. The data says that there is a level that's not harmful at a constant level and that level is several times higher than the amounts discussed in the article. And that's the problem. Its always easier to go with a higher degree of caution when it doesn't cost you anything. But it does cost us something. It costs use drastically higher amounts of CO2 production and that's almost certainly a bigger health risk to the population than changes to background radiation in the amounts discussed in the article. Amounts that were likely present in the past during our evolution.
And that's the problem. Risk telescoping. Ignoring the certain risk against a rare but possible bigger risk. Its like not saving for retirement on the theory you might get hit by a bus tomorrow.
As for curie... It has been an eternity I had anybody speak to me in that unit when speaking of exposure or absorbed dose. Is that an US holdover ?
Bq or Becquerel which is the SI unit is 19 orders of magnitude less than a Curie so for activity its really weird to use the SI unit. Rem or Gray are absorbed dose which is probably the best of the choices of units of measure for physical radiation. So that's probably the best unit for a legal standard as the most damaging radiation is also the most common in the environment normally and the easiest to block. But you are right that since people really care about biological impact more than a physical unit, mSv is used in the media and for legal standards.
By either measure, the current background radiation at near Chernobyl or Fukushima is lower than some places that have high natural background radiation. Places people have lived for thousands of years. That's why talking about radiation is so frustrating. With all the complex units and measures its hard to have a sense of perspective about what is and isn't dangerous. And even when we boil it down to Effective dose (mSv unit) its misleading as to potential harm. That's because (you probably already know this but) there probably isn't any alpha radiation at say 100 yards from the site of the reactor because alpha radiation is easy to block. What's coming out at that range is probably only Gamma radiation which are high energy photons. And those are hard to block and they probably have a completely different impact than high amounts of alpha radiation which you can get from living in the tropics with no sunscreen and little shade.
To give an example, the folks in the exclusion zone might have the same equivalent dose as our hypothetical desert living person, but that hypothetical desert person would have 1/20th the absorbed dose and as you imply same the rate of cancer (equivalent dose is accurate at low levels). However, if those exposures to different types of radiation (alpha vs gamma) would be compressed to a small amount of time, say an hour of intense radiation the relationship to levels of tissue damage and rates of cancer would likely be different (Gamma radiation is a bitch which makes equivalent dose less accurate here). That's why the equations computing effective dose are so complex, they try to capture these relationships but since we don't know completely the impact of time that's not a variable used by equivalent dose so when that variable changes, the measure becomes more or less accurate. Its science so its a constantly improving but ultimately imperfect approximating of reality.
Is a lot of radiation in a short time worse than a small amount of radiation over a long period? We don't know but there does seem to be a base level of background radiation below which there is no harm. We just don't seem to admit this or allow for a reasonable level to be set for it. 1Sv will make you physically and life-threateningly sick from radiation poisoning. 1/10th of that will give you symptoms of radiation poisoning but you will survive. Less than that gives you an elevated risk of cancer. But that last line is what we just don't know. Doing such research is unethical in the extreme so we just study populations that were exposed in the past and try to extrapolate out, usually with a huge safety margin. That's why you are quibbling about an amount of radiation that certainly wouldn't cause radiation sickness and probably wouldn't increase cancer risk to any measurable degree. It would likely take 17x that much radiation to cause a measurable increase in cancer rates and even then it would be a few percentage points at first. But at about 50x more radiation than the levels you mentioned, it would probably double cancer rates. So it is something to be tracked, just not something to be worried about at the levels you reference.
the environmental exposure is 2.4 to 3 mSv. A quick search on EPA for "17 micro Sv per day" reveal nothing, and all source I cited have that 3mSv. The only way I can get to 6 mSv per year is if you count *medical* exposure in addition to environmental.
While what you posting is sort of correct, it seems to lack any sort of understanding of background radiation. The first problem is that measuring radiation is really complex. Your unit of measure, the mSv is used for something called absorbed dose which takes into account things like how far you are from the radiation source and how quickly your body absorbs radiation. Its a measure of how much biological effect, but it isn't a measure of background radiation. We use Curries or Becquerels for that. The problem is that different types of ionizing radiation do different things and so have to be measured differently. Alpha radiation for instance can be blocked by clothes and sunscreen and is found in sunlight but does 20x the damage to the body per unit of energy so the amount of alpha radiation released is multiplied by 20 when calculating absorbed dose but not multiplied when calculating effective dose (a physical measure of an amount of radiation to which something was exposed)
As far as measuring the amount of radiation in an area, you can do that and everywhere around the world there is some background radiation. However, that amount varies wildly in a ratio of about 1:400. So there are natural places around the world where people have lived for >10,000 years which naturally have higher levels of background radiation than Chernobyl had just weeks after the accident (Congo, another in Iran, and in Brazil). Also, those places don't have higher than normal amounts of cancer which is weird. Also, flying will expose you to about 100x the radiation that you experience at the airport. And finally, you yourself and me and every other human ever born is slightly radioactive thanks to K40.
We just don't know the exact amounts and effects of high levels of radioactivity over time, but clearly the LNT (Linear no threshold) model we use is incorrect. But since using an overly cautious way to measure health effects is considered good, we do it. However, now that the fear of nuclear power is hurting us more than radiation ever could, perhaps that well-meaning decision (that the man who made the decision knew was overly cautious when he announced the theory) could be reevaluated. Maybe an acceptable level of radiation is a high background radiation found at naturally radioactive sites. Nah, the trial lawyers couldn't allow that...
Somehow I don't think anyone will ever be that stupid again. Basically, they simulated a meltdown by shutting off all the safety and power systems to see if the momentum of the spinning turbines could keep the cooling system going. Well, they couldn't so then they turned up the reactor to full power to keep them going which caused the reactor to get too hot and then try tried backing off the reactor but it was already out of control. And since all the safety systems were already disabled and couldn't quickly be re-enabled, the reaction ran out of control and produced a huge steam explosion. Since it never happened before or since, I'm not sure its as big a problem as you think. Also, considering the deaths per TWh for all other power sources are the same or (often much) worse than nuclear, I'm not sure this is quite the showstopping problem you imagine it is.
Also "overheated" is a rather obvious attempt to avoid the word "meltdown".
No, it's not. Overheating nuclear fuel is just that; hot material. Meltdown is nuclear fuel that has actually transitioned from solid to liquid form.
3 Mile Island is a good example of an overheating core that started to melt. Chernobyl and Fukushima are good examples of total meltdowns. Meltdowns breach containment vessels. Overheating cores just get SCRAM'd to capture neutrons and halted.
See also: Chernobyl Elephant's Foot.
Fukushima was not a total meltdown.
"Summary: Major fuel melting occurred early on in all three units, though the fuel remains essentially contained except for some volatile fission products vented early on, or released from unit 2 in mid-March, and some soluble ones which were leaking with the water, especially from unit 2, where the containment is evidently breached. Cooling is provided from external sources, using treated recycled water, with a stable heat removal path from the actual reactors to external heat sinks. Temperatures at the bottom of the reactor pressure vessels have decreased to well below boiling point and are stable. Access has been gained to all three reactor buildings, but dose rates remain high inside. Nitrogen is being injected into all three containment vessels and pressure vessels. Tepco declared "cold shutdown condition" in mid-December 2011 when radioactive releases had reduced to minimal levels."
From The world nuclear Association report on the accident. Basically the cores started to melt but never broke containment and then cooled down. Also, these are 60 year old plants. Can we please get licensing to make newer style plants that don't have the safety problems of LWRs. The anti-nuclear stance of the greens is getting brutally ironic.
If you're suggesting they can induce criticality by poking debris with a claw, you're dumber than I give you credit for.
Of course you can induce criticality that way. You can hit a small chunk of uranium with a hammer and reach criticality, at least for a moment. U-235 can reach criticality with a mass as small as 780 g under the right circumstances. And the presence of water, potentially
with some amount of uranium in solution, greatly raises the risk. Of course, it would only remain critical while compressed, and so such a small criticality event would likely be a risk only to the robots, because it would be small and self-contained.
Perhaps you meant that it cannot cause a nuclear explosion (which requires not just enough material and moderation to sustain a reaction, but also for it to increase exponentially and not burn itself out in a fraction of a second).
But since it was a 60's style LWR, there wouldn't be pure U-235 in the reactor. It would be LEU which is probably 4% U-235 and 96% U-238 or so as new fuel. Exactly what the isotopic distribution of this material is, I'm not exactly sure, but I'm 100% certain it doesn't contain more than a few percent of U-235. Since U-238 is a neutron poison, I seriously doubt that criticality could be induced accidentally. You probably couldn't induce criticality in this material without explosives (or lots of a moderator material) but I can't be sure of that. The hazard with this material is the fission products and all but the medium lived ones like Cs-137 and Sr-90 will have already burned out by now to stable elements. The long lived stuff like U-235 isn't very radioactive (but it is poisonous). The short lived stuff is now stable isotopes, mostly heavy metals. Its still a hazard to human life, but not in the dramatic fashion you imagine. Its more dangerous because of the amount of heavy metals which are poisonous to humans in high amounts and less dangerous because of nuclear issues at this point.
Containers are primarily used by programmers trying to do an end-run around systems and security engineers who are trying to protect the programmer and the organization.
That's funny. I always saw the ops folks being the ones pushing it. Or maybe they were the devops folks. Those non programmer types always change their job titles so quickly. But seriously, I've never seen a programmer push containers. I've always seen it pushed from ops or management. I've also never seen anyone happy with their container deployment...
We can achieve a "zero carbon" economy in one of two ways. The first is to revert to near stone age technology. Given the discoveries in science and technology I'm sure that our lives would not be nearly as poverty stricken, brutal, nasty, and short but we'd lose access to many luxuries we have today. Airplanes would be right out. People would need to resort to travel long distances by water, rail, or maybe lighter than air vessels.
You forgot the fact that without carbon/industrialization we can't feed most of the people on the planet. That will lead to lots of happy outcomes I'm sure. Other than that, spot on post. Mod parent up...without nuclear in the long run, we are done...all of us...
so why should China invite others for their power plants,..?
They already stole the US designs now they need others for comparison and to "innovate"
Stole? We put them on the the Internet for anyone to download. That's how sad the US's nuclear power research is now, we upload advanced nuclear designs to the Internet with the hope that someone, anyone will build it because we know our political shitshow won't allow us.
Nuclear power is a core component of US technology?
Considering the US was the first to develop almost everything in the nuclear space yes. We are just doing a shit job of commercializing it due to politics. And anytime anyone has nuclear technology, its a core component of their technology. Its just too important to not be. Even if you don't think so, I bet your grand-kids will agree (while cursing us if we don't develop it).
So instead of building something safe by design, they're going to dick around with Rube Goldberg cooling and control systems.
What is safe by design? There are no Gen IV reactors on the market at present. All of these inherently safe reactors are still in the R&D phase. In the meanwhile Gen III reactors feature plenty of passive safety systems and inherently safer design than earlier versions, and that include's Westinghouse's baby the AP1000 which would have been Westinghouse's bid should they have been allowed to play.
Safe by design means a reactor designed in such a way so if all the operators disappeared somehow all at once, the reactor would shutdown safely on its own, 100% of the time. That's called "walk away safe". We know how to build such designs. Instead we build incredibly complex reactors requiring large staffs of operators that can go wrong in several different ways. Reactors where the moderator and the coolant are the same material. Why is this bad? Well, in a nuclear reactor the moderator isn't the thing that slows down the reaction. Its the turbo charger that makes the reaction run more quickly. If you can't understand why this is a problem, please leave Earth.
LWRs were designed for submarines. The guy who designed them never thought they would be used for civilian power and designed MSRs for civilian power instead. But in the human tradition of poor risk assessment, we don't pursue these better (now 50 years old in some cases) designs because the thought is doing nothing is safe. That's the real danger. Doing nothing is always a risk. And all of our nuclear assessment assumes that doing nothing is 100% safe. Well, with climate change accelerating, doing nothing is becoming 100% risky and doing "risky" things (actually far safer but risk telescoping is a thing) becomes the safe option. Unless we start building nuclear at a large scale, we have no chance in the long run.
THE most important problem with nuclear power ? COST.
This article is about nuclear waste from weapons productions left over from the 60s. This has nothing to do with nuclear power. No civilian operation wants anything to do with the processes involved with Hanford. They used acid to separate Plutonium from Uranium. The acid mixed with the Uranium is the waste. Civilian nuclear power has never done anything like this, doesn't want to and almost certainly never will.
I'm not sure what you mean by the fuel being dangerous. Isn't the point that the reactor breeds a small quantity of plutonium from unenriched uranium?
That's exactly what the GP means by the fuel being dangerous. The Plutonium in the reactor is literally what you make nuclear bombs from. Now, it would have to be extracted from the Uranium and PUREX is a nasty, large and expensive process but it can be done. With a LFTR design, you use Thorium-232 to breed Uranium-233 which is very bad weapons material. But due to its consistent neutron economy over the entire spectrum of neutron energy levels, it makes a very good civilian, energy production material which is why it isn't favored by the military. Its better for them if they use Uranium. Its better for civilians to use Thorium. It has much nicer qualities from an anti-proliferation point of view. Also, it produces far less waste and burns up all the fuel instead of 1% like LWRs do. Plus the military already has a bunch of reactors at sea to make their Pu-239 from. They don't need it from civilian power infrastructure.
No. An MSR is actually fairly simple. The expensive part is all the regulatory BS, plus the endless lawsuits.
Another problem is they need to stay warm or risk rocking up; as well as issues of coolant reactions causing problems. The Soviets had several Alphas do that and as a result were decommissioned. They kept the reactors running even in port to key the bismuth warm. The US Navy tried a liquid sodium reactor in the Seawolf since it was a lot quieter than a water cooled reactor but wound up replacing it with one because of the problems maintaining it.
Liquid sodium explodes and is flammable. Its only suitable for military applications. Keeping MSRs running is more difficult, yes but its in exchange for not having to keep the reactor from running out of control. Anyone can see the obvious point of that change in design and all the benefits that brings. Basically, you control the moderating rods with something like a float, when the fuel expands, you pull them out a little. Then the fuel contracts, you push them in a little. Even if they wouldn't work for whatever reason, the natural change in density of the hotter liquid fuel would contain the reaction. Then on top of all of that, there is a plug in the bottom of frozen salt that will melt if the fuel mixture becomes too hot and drain the reactor to a vessel shaped so that nuclear chain reactions are not possible. Its a pretty simple and neat system that uses a lot of very simple components.
Now, I've drastically oversimplified all of this and there are many other issues to consider with MSRs (mostly the online fission product removal) but you can clearly see the safety and management benefits of such a design when compared with the LWRs. This is why folks keep pushing for them. I can understand your objections to LWRs (I don't agree but I understand). MSRs are an entirely different kettle of fish.
No, you are incredibly amazingly almost stupidly wrong. The tight tolerances in concrete is so that it withstands radiation embrittlement that destroys mixes and even the steel reinforcement. This is especially so the containment dome, and can't be ignored for any nuclear power plants of any design. Even a pebble bed reactor requires a containment dome. Check these two papers here on concrete and here on the steel. If you are going to advocate construction of new nuclear power plants you should at least understand the problems faced during construction of old ones. That's a baseline for comparisons, and the larger economic arguments are demonstrated by higher startup costs and higher operating costs than every other alternative.
Which is why you don't want high pressure in a reactor. With low pressure designs (like MSRs), you don't have all that concrete, just steel and lead and far less of it because you contain a much smaller area. The reason containment vessels are so big is because they have to contain a steam explosion. MSRs don't have that problem.
Can you name three breedees that are operated commercially?
Fast breeders are a bad idea we only followed because Nixon knew nothing about science and physicists like high energy things. The engineers wanted MSRs which are thermal breeders with liquid fuel. That's what many of the new nuclear technologies are. That's also why we need to develop them, they work and are much safer than current designs. Also, Thorium becomes a viable option in these MSRs and that's nice because the fission products only take 300 years to decay to safe levels. Plus the Thorium is already mined due to all the electric motors we need for EVs. The more you know about nuclear, the more you will like it. Its just, you know, physics and math which are never politically popular.
These days uranium is taken from open pit mines. Uranite is the least concentrated ore that we mine, so that means a bigger open pit per gram of usable material than any other substance. And of course, the mine tends to produce worse runoff than other types.
The Thorium we want to use is already mined. We bring it up every time we mine rare earths.
Not even close. Maybe in property losses, but 18,000 people died; it's closer to four orders of magnitude by that metric.
I tried looking up property losses, but what I ended up finding was total economic impact, which is too vaguely defined for this comparison.
Um what? 1600 people died in the tsunami. Another 1600 folks died in evacuations that weren't requested by the engineers/plant. Where did you get 18,000 from? And total economic impact is a much better measure than property losses. Something something bad at risk analysis...
"It was me. The thing you left out is that certain radio-isotopes are also toxic and they bio-accumulate in different ways."
They also left out the fact that one good hot particle in your body can kill you.
Yea, but you would never encounter that hot particle in real life if it got out of the reactor it would decay to something else too quickly to be dangerous to you. Basic principle of radioactivity, the longer the half-life, the lower the radiation. Th-232 with a half-life of 14b years is very low radioactivity (less than a banana). However, Th-230 has a half life of ~24,000 years so its very radioactive. Luckily, 99.9% of all Thorium on earth is Th-232 and not Th-230 and the Th-232 is the fuel and Th-230 is the anti-proliferation material.
The real problem is what AC said, bio-accumulation of Iodine (and also Potassium) in particular. But again, its about concentration. You would have to be very near (like inside the plant) to a MSR that was blown up with explosives to ever be exposed to enough of it to be dangerous.
There is a small amount of radioactive K-40 in us all the time. Its a part of the natural world and has always been so. Like everything else its dangerous in high amounts and high concentrations. That's why reactors are sized so that they never have high enough amounts to be dangerous outside of an exclusion zone. That's what an exclusion zone is, the area where in a worst case accident could cause isotopic concentrations that can accumulate to be dangerous to humans. We naturally process Iodine and Potassium so if you got too much of a bad isotope, it would process out of you over time. That's why Iodine is specifically mentioned, we process Iodine much more slowly than those other elements. But the dangers are often over blown and in some cases the fear of nuclear power is more dangerous than the radioactivity. In Japan, more people died as a result of unnecessary evacuations. Its questionable if anyone will die from radiation (1 case maybe) from that disaster but its likely more will fall off roofs than die from that radiation release.
1 To get a temporary waste repository in place. Note I don't say long term because what we call waste will be very very valuable, it's all transmuted isotopes most of which don't occur in nature.
2. Get the NRC out of the way and have them actually trim down and simplify the regulation of power plants.
3. Streamline the licensing so new plants can actually get built.
Spending money on new designs or upgrading and standardizing current design, would be great as well. Imagine if we had a national standard design that could be quickly deployed and licensed without endless approvals needed.
For once though I feel sorry for Mr. Gates, he is going to find just how much joy dealing with the idiocy environmentalism and the off grid hippies have injected into our society.
No, no, and no. And your beliefs about "regulation" are at least 30 years out of date, to the extent that they ever resembled reality at all.
Bullshit. Not a single MSR design or even a new design other than the AP-X line has been licensed in the US in almost a half century. Multiple lawsuits happen at every chance in the process of building a nuclear plant. If regulators don't want something to work, they will kill it. The nuclear regulation is the exact opposite of what the Republicans do with the EPA. If you put people in charge that don't want it to work, it won't.
Read about those AP-1000 plants in detail. The regulators had no desire to see the project complete successfully. They had to grade the site twice because regulators didn't like how the backfill was being placed. The fabricators fucked up royally as well but changes in regulation that happened while the plant was being build made the process much more complex and resulted in a worse overall quality of the construction due to changes in design during the building process. Changes in design that were entirely political and designed to kill the plant (like the requirement to withstand a commercial airliner, then it was a fighter jet, then a fighter jet with a full payload).
Anyone doing an research with radioactive materials will spend a good chunk of their day dealing with paperwork. Like half of their time. Often delays to get approval for necessary research, often this research is into safety systems, will take multiple years.
This isn't an area that's treated in the same way as other power sources and the level of regulation should be high, but more paperwork doesn't equal more safety. More and better safety systems equal more safety and we can't even do that work. The level of obstructionism is high enough that it clearly creates more risk than it avoids due to making us continue to use older and less safe methods. There is always a risk in doing nothing, that's where the logic of regulation falls apart. Especially in the area of scientific and commercialization research.
MSRs sound great, but the problems aren't trivial. Most of the salts are highly corrosive to materials that are good for pipes and other infrastructure, so materials selection becomes the biggest hurtle.
Not saying that's insurmountable, but we already know how to build AP-1000 reactors which are "passive safe" designs.
This isn't table salt we are talking about. The corrosion risk in MSRs is more from the radiation and the lost of efficiency due to oxidized material collecting on the pipes, not from corrosion like metal left in sea air or sea water. Due to the radiation, a material named Hastelloy-N has to be used and we have only about 5 years of experience with it due to a lack of working reactors. And we just haven't done enough corrosion testing of that material to know as much as we normally do about an industrial metal. Also, a very similar salt material is used in solar concentrator plants and its choice is partly due to its lack of corrosion. Fluoride salts are non-volatile, non-flammable and turns to a solid crystal at room temperature so it doesn't turn to dust and blow away. Its nearly an ideal choice for a nuclear coolant except for its poorer thermal qualities (at least poor when compared with sodium). It still seems to be the best choice though due to its high safety qualities.
After all, a lot of this waste won't be safe for hundreds of thousands of years. Can't just leave it in the pool until then.
And that's a big reason we want to make newer reactor designs. The old LWRs using the U-Pu fuel cycle makes some wastes that have a very long cooling period. The newer Th-U fuel cycle designs make waste that only takes 300 years to cool. And we already have at least 300 years worth of Thorium mined due to all the rare earth mines around the globe.
Most of what is holding back these new designs is ignorance. They are complex but have really interesting qualities and the fact that we won't license the world to develop these technologies is almost criminal.
The LFTR design for instance is being worked on in at least 3 places (US, China, and India). We created the technology (in the 60's) but we can't even get the licenses to commercialize it. A technology that makes enough power (and syn fuel) for the entire globe, can't meltdown, is a sealed solution, doesn't require mining, makes CO2 free power, and produces a grand total of 6 railroad boxcars worth of waste a year if it was used to provide 100% of the world's electricity and fuel needs.
It took 7 years for the engineers to get a license to just do the fluorination work necessary as part of the development of the LFTR. Even worse, as we refuse to do anything with nuclear we let older less safe plants stay online longer than we need to. So all this environmental obstructionism actual makes use less safe and helps the fossil fuel industry. Ignorance is truly our greatest enemy.
At one point in the future, you will overbuild the generation capacity and control load by intermittently synthesizing ammonia to replace fossil fuels used for the same purpose today. Just the current global consumption of ammonia would necessitate several hundred GW of extra average generation, so there's plenty of room for load management.
There is no way that will ever be economically efficient. Syn fuels are great but not a panacea. They have 2 basic inputs to make them: heat and fuel-stock. The fuel-stock is easier but still you need a lot of it and hopefully we can use plant material instead of coal. The real problem is that the heat needs to be consistent and of a specific temperature (at least 500C to be efficient) and getting that from electricity is very hard/inefficient/expensive. To make it efficient you really need nuclear (specifically MSRs running between 500-700C). Also, you need to make the fuel for cheaper than its currently available from the ground. You just can't do this without a very large source of consistent heat that you can only make economically from fossil fuels or nuclear. Also, for fun, the fuel market is just as big as electricity when measured in units of energy. Remind me again how we do that with solar or wind?
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The decay chain of U-238 includes many isotopes which give off beta and gamma radiation. Most of that energy is given off via alpha particles. But it's not true that a sheet of paper or your dead skin cells will block all if it.
Not quite. Its mostly alpha and beta emitters but no gamma emitters. That's why its not really so dangerous. Before it hurts you, you would get a sunburn. and probably move away. For the gamma emitters you are probably thinking of U-232 which is Uranium's answer to Pu-238. It glows red hot in high purities. It also matters what else is in the ore. If its U-238 decay products, its likely a lot more radioactive than your estimate because those decay products have much shorter half-lives than U-238 and thus emit more radiation per gram and their lower densities don't make up for the difference in half-life. Also, this radiation was almost entirely alpha radiation as evidenced by the fact it only was measurable less than 5ft from the buckets. Those measurement levels they gave were no joke and not the usual over hysteria about radiation. It would be like walking into an active x-ray machine but with no warning. That's probably not so great but not dangerous enough to lose your head over. Also, Uranium is poisonous. That's the greater danger here.
The report indicated radiation levels at "13.9 mR/hr" where the buckets were stored, and "800 mR/hr" on contact with the ore. Just 5 feet from the buckets, there was a zero reading. The abbreviation, "mR" typically stands for milliroentgen, a measurement roughly equivalent to a millirem, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
So if there was no reading 5 feet from the buckets, then the radiation was most entirely alpha decay. Those buckets must have been hot. The bigger problem is that they left a huge bucket of poison around children. The radiation thing is mostly a scare tactic unless you lived within 5 ft of those buckets. Also, I'm surprised they gave the units of measure they did. If they had used effective dose (Sieverts) it would have been 20x higher and much more scary.
"Is a lot of radiation in a short time worse than a small amount of radiation over a long period? We don't know but there does seem to be a base level of background radiation below which there is no harm."
The current scientific consensus is that there is no safe level below which there is no harm. There is a minority which claim otherwise but this but this is not the opinion of most scientists. Our best understanding of how ionizing radiation affects the body suggests that there is no safe level and large scale studies (.e.g from CT exposure) so far all agree with this even to relatively low levels.
Yea, but that's not what the data says. The data says that there is a level that's not harmful at a constant level and that level is several times higher than the amounts discussed in the article. And that's the problem. Its always easier to go with a higher degree of caution when it doesn't cost you anything. But it does cost us something. It costs use drastically higher amounts of CO2 production and that's almost certainly a bigger health risk to the population than changes to background radiation in the amounts discussed in the article. Amounts that were likely present in the past during our evolution.
And that's the problem. Risk telescoping. Ignoring the certain risk against a rare but possible bigger risk. Its like not saving for retirement on the theory you might get hit by a bus tomorrow.
As for curie... It has been an eternity I had anybody speak to me in that unit when speaking of exposure or absorbed dose. Is that an US holdover ?
Bq or Becquerel which is the SI unit is 19 orders of magnitude less than a Curie so for activity its really weird to use the SI unit. Rem or Gray are absorbed dose which is probably the best of the choices of units of measure for physical radiation. So that's probably the best unit for a legal standard as the most damaging radiation is also the most common in the environment normally and the easiest to block. But you are right that since people really care about biological impact more than a physical unit, mSv is used in the media and for legal standards.
By either measure, the current background radiation at near Chernobyl or Fukushima is lower than some places that have high natural background radiation. Places people have lived for thousands of years. That's why talking about radiation is so frustrating. With all the complex units and measures its hard to have a sense of perspective about what is and isn't dangerous. And even when we boil it down to Effective dose (mSv unit) its misleading as to potential harm. That's because (you probably already know this but) there probably isn't any alpha radiation at say 100 yards from the site of the reactor because alpha radiation is easy to block. What's coming out at that range is probably only Gamma radiation which are high energy photons. And those are hard to block and they probably have a completely different impact than high amounts of alpha radiation which you can get from living in the tropics with no sunscreen and little shade.
To give an example, the folks in the exclusion zone might have the same equivalent dose as our hypothetical desert living person, but that hypothetical desert person would have 1/20th the absorbed dose and as you imply same the rate of cancer (equivalent dose is accurate at low levels). However, if those exposures to different types of radiation (alpha vs gamma) would be compressed to a small amount of time, say an hour of intense radiation the relationship to levels of tissue damage and rates of cancer would likely be different (Gamma radiation is a bitch which makes equivalent dose less accurate here). That's why the equations computing effective dose are so complex, they try to capture these relationships but since we don't know completely the impact of time that's not a variable used by equivalent dose so when that variable changes, the measure becomes more or less accurate. Its science so its a constantly improving but ultimately imperfect approximating of reality.
Is a lot of radiation in a short time worse than a small amount of radiation over a long period? We don't know but there does seem to be a base level of background radiation below which there is no harm. We just don't seem to admit this or allow for a reasonable level to be set for it. 1Sv will make you physically and life-threateningly sick from radiation poisoning. 1/10th of that will give you symptoms of radiation poisoning but you will survive. Less than that gives you an elevated risk of cancer. But that last line is what we just don't know. Doing such research is unethical in the extreme so we just study populations that were exposed in the past and try to extrapolate out, usually with a huge safety margin. That's why you are quibbling about an amount of radiation that certainly wouldn't cause radiation sickness and probably wouldn't increase cancer risk to any measurable degree. It would likely take 17x that much radiation to cause a measurable increase in cancer rates and even then it would be a few percentage points at first. But at about 50x more radiation than the levels you mentioned, it would probably double cancer rates. So it is something to be tracked, just not something to be worried about at the levels you reference.
the environmental exposure is 2.4 to 3 mSv. A quick search on EPA for "17 micro Sv per day" reveal nothing, and all source I cited have that 3mSv. The only way I can get to 6 mSv per year is if you count *medical* exposure in addition to environmental.
While what you posting is sort of correct, it seems to lack any sort of understanding of background radiation. The first problem is that measuring radiation is really complex. Your unit of measure, the mSv is used for something called absorbed dose which takes into account things like how far you are from the radiation source and how quickly your body absorbs radiation. Its a measure of how much biological effect, but it isn't a measure of background radiation. We use Curries or Becquerels for that. The problem is that different types of ionizing radiation do different things and so have to be measured differently. Alpha radiation for instance can be blocked by clothes and sunscreen and is found in sunlight but does 20x the damage to the body per unit of energy so the amount of alpha radiation released is multiplied by 20 when calculating absorbed dose but not multiplied when calculating effective dose (a physical measure of an amount of radiation to which something was exposed)
As far as measuring the amount of radiation in an area, you can do that and everywhere around the world there is some background radiation. However, that amount varies wildly in a ratio of about 1:400. So there are natural places around the world where people have lived for >10,000 years which naturally have higher levels of background radiation than Chernobyl had just weeks after the accident (Congo, another in Iran, and in Brazil). Also, those places don't have higher than normal amounts of cancer which is weird. Also, flying will expose you to about 100x the radiation that you experience at the airport. And finally, you yourself and me and every other human ever born is slightly radioactive thanks to K40.
We just don't know the exact amounts and effects of high levels of radioactivity over time, but clearly the LNT (Linear no threshold) model we use is incorrect. But since using an overly cautious way to measure health effects is considered good, we do it. However, now that the fear of nuclear power is hurting us more than radiation ever could, perhaps that well-meaning decision (that the man who made the decision knew was overly cautious when he announced the theory) could be reevaluated. Maybe an acceptable level of radiation is a high background radiation found at naturally radioactive sites. Nah, the trial lawyers couldn't allow that...
... idiot operators.
Have we solved this problem yet?
Somehow I don't think anyone will ever be that stupid again. Basically, they simulated a meltdown by shutting off all the safety and power systems to see if the momentum of the spinning turbines could keep the cooling system going. Well, they couldn't so then they turned up the reactor to full power to keep them going which caused the reactor to get too hot and then try tried backing off the reactor but it was already out of control. And since all the safety systems were already disabled and couldn't quickly be re-enabled, the reaction ran out of control and produced a huge steam explosion. Since it never happened before or since, I'm not sure its as big a problem as you think. Also, considering the deaths per TWh for all other power sources are the same or (often much) worse than nuclear, I'm not sure this is quite the showstopping problem you imagine it is.
Also "overheated" is a rather obvious attempt to avoid the word "meltdown".
No, it's not. Overheating nuclear fuel is just that; hot material. Meltdown is nuclear fuel that has actually transitioned from solid to liquid form.
3 Mile Island is a good example of an overheating core that started to melt. Chernobyl and Fukushima are good examples of total meltdowns. Meltdowns breach containment vessels. Overheating cores just get SCRAM'd to capture neutrons and halted.
See also: Chernobyl Elephant's Foot.
Fukushima was not a total meltdown.
"Summary: Major fuel melting occurred early on in all three units, though the fuel remains essentially contained except for some volatile fission products vented early on, or released from unit 2 in mid-March, and some soluble ones which were leaking with the water, especially from unit 2, where the containment is evidently breached. Cooling is provided from external sources, using treated recycled water, with a stable heat removal path from the actual reactors to external heat sinks. Temperatures at the bottom of the reactor pressure vessels have decreased to well below boiling point and are stable. Access has been gained to all three reactor buildings, but dose rates remain high inside. Nitrogen is being injected into all three containment vessels and pressure vessels. Tepco declared "cold shutdown condition" in mid-December 2011 when radioactive releases had reduced to minimal levels."
From The world nuclear Association report on the accident. Basically the cores started to melt but never broke containment and then cooled down. Also, these are 60 year old plants. Can we please get licensing to make newer style plants that don't have the safety problems of LWRs. The anti-nuclear stance of the greens is getting brutally ironic.
Of course you can induce criticality that way. You can hit a small chunk of uranium with a hammer and reach criticality, at least for a moment. U-235 can reach criticality with a mass as small as 780 g under the right circumstances. And the presence of water, potentially with some amount of uranium in solution, greatly raises the risk. Of course, it would only remain critical while compressed, and so such a small criticality event would likely be a risk only to the robots, because it would be small and self-contained.
Perhaps you meant that it cannot cause a nuclear explosion (which requires not just enough material and moderation to sustain a reaction, but also for it to increase exponentially and not burn itself out in a fraction of a second).
But since it was a 60's style LWR, there wouldn't be pure U-235 in the reactor. It would be LEU which is probably 4% U-235 and 96% U-238 or so as new fuel. Exactly what the isotopic distribution of this material is, I'm not exactly sure, but I'm 100% certain it doesn't contain more than a few percent of U-235. Since U-238 is a neutron poison, I seriously doubt that criticality could be induced accidentally. You probably couldn't induce criticality in this material without explosives (or lots of a moderator material) but I can't be sure of that. The hazard with this material is the fission products and all but the medium lived ones like Cs-137 and Sr-90 will have already burned out by now to stable elements. The long lived stuff like U-235 isn't very radioactive (but it is poisonous). The short lived stuff is now stable isotopes, mostly heavy metals. Its still a hazard to human life, but not in the dramatic fashion you imagine. Its more dangerous because of the amount of heavy metals which are poisonous to humans in high amounts and less dangerous because of nuclear issues at this point.
Containers are primarily used by programmers trying to do an end-run around systems and security engineers who are trying to protect the programmer and the organization.
That's funny. I always saw the ops folks being the ones pushing it. Or maybe they were the devops folks. Those non programmer types always change their job titles so quickly. But seriously, I've never seen a programmer push containers. I've always seen it pushed from ops or management. I've also never seen anyone happy with their container deployment...
We can achieve a "zero carbon" economy in one of two ways. The first is to revert to near stone age technology. Given the discoveries in science and technology I'm sure that our lives would not be nearly as poverty stricken, brutal, nasty, and short but we'd lose access to many luxuries we have today. Airplanes would be right out. People would need to resort to travel long distances by water, rail, or maybe lighter than air vessels.
You forgot the fact that without carbon/industrialization we can't feed most of the people on the planet. That will lead to lots of happy outcomes I'm sure. Other than that, spot on post. Mod parent up...without nuclear in the long run, we are done...all of us...
so why should China invite others for their power plants, ..?
They already stole the US designs now they need others for comparison and to "innovate"
Stole? We put them on the the Internet for anyone to download. That's how sad the US's nuclear power research is now, we upload advanced nuclear designs to the Internet with the hope that someone, anyone will build it because we know our political shitshow won't allow us.
Nuclear power is a core component of US technology?
Considering the US was the first to develop almost everything in the nuclear space yes. We are just doing a shit job of commercializing it due to politics. And anytime anyone has nuclear technology, its a core component of their technology. Its just too important to not be. Even if you don't think so, I bet your grand-kids will agree (while cursing us if we don't develop it).
So instead of building something safe by design, they're going to dick around with Rube Goldberg cooling and control systems.
What is safe by design? There are no Gen IV reactors on the market at present. All of these inherently safe reactors are still in the R&D phase. In the meanwhile Gen III reactors feature plenty of passive safety systems and inherently safer design than earlier versions, and that include's Westinghouse's baby the AP1000 which would have been Westinghouse's bid should they have been allowed to play.
Safe by design means a reactor designed in such a way so if all the operators disappeared somehow all at once, the reactor would shutdown safely on its own, 100% of the time. That's called "walk away safe". We know how to build such designs. Instead we build incredibly complex reactors requiring large staffs of operators that can go wrong in several different ways. Reactors where the moderator and the coolant are the same material. Why is this bad? Well, in a nuclear reactor the moderator isn't the thing that slows down the reaction. Its the turbo charger that makes the reaction run more quickly. If you can't understand why this is a problem, please leave Earth.
LWRs were designed for submarines. The guy who designed them never thought they would be used for civilian power and designed MSRs for civilian power instead. But in the human tradition of poor risk assessment, we don't pursue these better (now 50 years old in some cases) designs because the thought is doing nothing is safe. That's the real danger. Doing nothing is always a risk. And all of our nuclear assessment assumes that doing nothing is 100% safe. Well, with climate change accelerating, doing nothing is becoming 100% risky and doing "risky" things (actually far safer but risk telescoping is a thing) becomes the safe option. Unless we start building nuclear at a large scale, we have no chance in the long run.
THE most important problem with nuclear power ? COST.
This article is about nuclear waste from weapons productions left over from the 60s. This has nothing to do with nuclear power. No civilian operation wants anything to do with the processes involved with Hanford. They used acid to separate Plutonium from Uranium. The acid mixed with the Uranium is the waste. Civilian nuclear power has never done anything like this, doesn't want to and almost certainly never will.
I'm not sure what you mean by the fuel being dangerous. Isn't the point that the reactor breeds a small quantity of plutonium from unenriched uranium?
That's exactly what the GP means by the fuel being dangerous. The Plutonium in the reactor is literally what you make nuclear bombs from. Now, it would have to be extracted from the Uranium and PUREX is a nasty, large and expensive process but it can be done. With a LFTR design, you use Thorium-232 to breed Uranium-233 which is very bad weapons material. But due to its consistent neutron economy over the entire spectrum of neutron energy levels, it makes a very good civilian, energy production material which is why it isn't favored by the military. Its better for them if they use Uranium. Its better for civilians to use Thorium. It has much nicer qualities from an anti-proliferation point of view. Also, it produces far less waste and burns up all the fuel instead of 1% like LWRs do. Plus the military already has a bunch of reactors at sea to make their Pu-239 from. They don't need it from civilian power infrastructure.
No. An MSR is actually fairly simple. The expensive part is all the regulatory BS, plus the endless lawsuits.
Another problem is they need to stay warm or risk rocking up; as well as issues of coolant reactions causing problems. The Soviets had several Alphas do that and as a result were decommissioned. They kept the reactors running even in port to key the bismuth warm. The US Navy tried a liquid sodium reactor in the Seawolf since it was a lot quieter than a water cooled reactor but wound up replacing it with one because of the problems maintaining it.
Liquid sodium explodes and is flammable. Its only suitable for military applications. Keeping MSRs running is more difficult, yes but its in exchange for not having to keep the reactor from running out of control. Anyone can see the obvious point of that change in design and all the benefits that brings. Basically, you control the moderating rods with something like a float, when the fuel expands, you pull them out a little. Then the fuel contracts, you push them in a little. Even if they wouldn't work for whatever reason, the natural change in density of the hotter liquid fuel would contain the reaction. Then on top of all of that, there is a plug in the bottom of frozen salt that will melt if the fuel mixture becomes too hot and drain the reactor to a vessel shaped so that nuclear chain reactions are not possible. Its a pretty simple and neat system that uses a lot of very simple components.
Now, I've drastically oversimplified all of this and there are many other issues to consider with MSRs (mostly the online fission product removal) but you can clearly see the safety and management benefits of such a design when compared with the LWRs. This is why folks keep pushing for them. I can understand your objections to LWRs (I don't agree but I understand). MSRs are an entirely different kettle of fish.
No, you are incredibly amazingly almost stupidly wrong. The tight tolerances in concrete is so that it withstands radiation embrittlement that destroys mixes and even the steel reinforcement. This is especially so the containment dome, and can't be ignored for any nuclear power plants of any design. Even a pebble bed reactor requires a containment dome. Check these two papers here on concrete and here on the steel. If you are going to advocate construction of new nuclear power plants you should at least understand the problems faced during construction of old ones. That's a baseline for comparisons, and the larger economic arguments are demonstrated by higher startup costs and higher operating costs than every other alternative.
Which is why you don't want high pressure in a reactor. With low pressure designs (like MSRs), you don't have all that concrete, just steel and lead and far less of it because you contain a much smaller area. The reason containment vessels are so big is because they have to contain a steam explosion. MSRs don't have that problem.
Can you name three breedees that are operated commercially?
Fast breeders are a bad idea we only followed because Nixon knew nothing about science and physicists like high energy things. The engineers wanted MSRs which are thermal breeders with liquid fuel. That's what many of the new nuclear technologies are. That's also why we need to develop them, they work and are much safer than current designs. Also, Thorium becomes a viable option in these MSRs and that's nice because the fission products only take 300 years to decay to safe levels. Plus the Thorium is already mined due to all the electric motors we need for EVs. The more you know about nuclear, the more you will like it. Its just, you know, physics and math which are never politically popular.
These days uranium is taken from open pit mines. Uranite is the least concentrated ore that we mine, so that means a bigger open pit per gram of usable material than any other substance. And of course, the mine tends to produce worse runoff than other types.
The Thorium we want to use is already mined. We bring it up every time we mine rare earths.
Not even close. Maybe in property losses, but 18,000 people died; it's closer to four orders of magnitude by that metric. I tried looking up property losses, but what I ended up finding was total economic impact, which is too vaguely defined for this comparison.
Um what? 1600 people died in the tsunami. Another 1600 folks died in evacuations that weren't requested by the engineers/plant. Where did you get 18,000 from? And total economic impact is a much better measure than property losses. Something something bad at risk analysis...
"It was me. The thing you left out is that certain radio-isotopes are also toxic and they bio-accumulate in different ways."
They also left out the fact that one good hot particle in your body can kill you.
Yea, but you would never encounter that hot particle in real life if it got out of the reactor it would decay to something else too quickly to be dangerous to you. Basic principle of radioactivity, the longer the half-life, the lower the radiation. Th-232 with a half-life of 14b years is very low radioactivity (less than a banana). However, Th-230 has a half life of ~24,000 years so its very radioactive. Luckily, 99.9% of all Thorium on earth is Th-232 and not Th-230 and the Th-232 is the fuel and Th-230 is the anti-proliferation material.
The real problem is what AC said, bio-accumulation of Iodine (and also Potassium) in particular. But again, its about concentration. You would have to be very near (like inside the plant) to a MSR that was blown up with explosives to ever be exposed to enough of it to be dangerous.
There is a small amount of radioactive K-40 in us all the time. Its a part of the natural world and has always been so. Like everything else its dangerous in high amounts and high concentrations. That's why reactors are sized so that they never have high enough amounts to be dangerous outside of an exclusion zone. That's what an exclusion zone is, the area where in a worst case accident could cause isotopic concentrations that can accumulate to be dangerous to humans. We naturally process Iodine and Potassium so if you got too much of a bad isotope, it would process out of you over time. That's why Iodine is specifically mentioned, we process Iodine much more slowly than those other elements. But the dangers are often over blown and in some cases the fear of nuclear power is more dangerous than the radioactivity. In Japan, more people died as a result of unnecessary evacuations. Its questionable if anyone will die from radiation (1 case maybe) from that disaster but its likely more will fall off roofs than die from that radiation release.
1 To get a temporary waste repository in place. Note I don't say long term because what we call waste will be very very valuable, it's all transmuted isotopes most of which don't occur in nature.
2. Get the NRC out of the way and have them actually trim down and simplify the regulation of power plants.
3. Streamline the licensing so new plants can actually get built.
Spending money on new designs or upgrading and standardizing current design, would be great as well. Imagine if we had a national standard design that could be quickly deployed and licensed without endless approvals needed.
For once though I feel sorry for Mr. Gates, he is going to find just how much joy dealing with the idiocy environmentalism and the off grid hippies have injected into our society.
No, no, and no. And your beliefs about "regulation" are at least 30 years out of date, to the extent that they ever resembled reality at all.
Bullshit. Not a single MSR design or even a new design other than the AP-X line has been licensed in the US in almost a half century. Multiple lawsuits happen at every chance in the process of building a nuclear plant. If regulators don't want something to work, they will kill it. The nuclear regulation is the exact opposite of what the Republicans do with the EPA. If you put people in charge that don't want it to work, it won't.
Read about those AP-1000 plants in detail. The regulators had no desire to see the project complete successfully. They had to grade the site twice because regulators didn't like how the backfill was being placed. The fabricators fucked up royally as well but changes in regulation that happened while the plant was being build made the process much more complex and resulted in a worse overall quality of the construction due to changes in design during the building process. Changes in design that were entirely political and designed to kill the plant (like the requirement to withstand a commercial airliner, then it was a fighter jet, then a fighter jet with a full payload).
Anyone doing an research with radioactive materials will spend a good chunk of their day dealing with paperwork. Like half of their time. Often delays to get approval for necessary research, often this research is into safety systems, will take multiple years.
This isn't an area that's treated in the same way as other power sources and the level of regulation should be high, but more paperwork doesn't equal more safety. More and better safety systems equal more safety and we can't even do that work. The level of obstructionism is high enough that it clearly creates more risk than it avoids due to making us continue to use older and less safe methods. There is always a risk in doing nothing, that's where the logic of regulation falls apart. Especially in the area of scientific and commercialization research.
MSRs sound great, but the problems aren't trivial. Most of the salts are highly corrosive to materials that are good for pipes and other infrastructure, so materials selection becomes the biggest hurtle.
Not saying that's insurmountable, but we already know how to build AP-1000 reactors which are "passive safe" designs.
This isn't table salt we are talking about. The corrosion risk in MSRs is more from the radiation and the lost of efficiency due to oxidized material collecting on the pipes, not from corrosion like metal left in sea air or sea water. Due to the radiation, a material named Hastelloy-N has to be used and we have only about 5 years of experience with it due to a lack of working reactors. And we just haven't done enough corrosion testing of that material to know as much as we normally do about an industrial metal. Also, a very similar salt material is used in solar concentrator plants and its choice is partly due to its lack of corrosion. Fluoride salts are non-volatile, non-flammable and turns to a solid crystal at room temperature so it doesn't turn to dust and blow away. Its nearly an ideal choice for a nuclear coolant except for its poorer thermal qualities (at least poor when compared with sodium). It still seems to be the best choice though due to its high safety qualities.
After all, a lot of this waste won't be safe for hundreds of thousands of years. Can't just leave it in the pool until then.
And that's a big reason we want to make newer reactor designs. The old LWRs using the U-Pu fuel cycle makes some wastes that have a very long cooling period. The newer Th-U fuel cycle designs make waste that only takes 300 years to cool. And we already have at least 300 years worth of Thorium mined due to all the rare earth mines around the globe.
Most of what is holding back these new designs is ignorance. They are complex but have really interesting qualities and the fact that we won't license the world to develop these technologies is almost criminal.
The LFTR design for instance is being worked on in at least 3 places (US, China, and India). We created the technology (in the 60's) but we can't even get the licenses to commercialize it. A technology that makes enough power (and syn fuel) for the entire globe, can't meltdown, is a sealed solution, doesn't require mining, makes CO2 free power, and produces a grand total of 6 railroad boxcars worth of waste a year if it was used to provide 100% of the world's electricity and fuel needs.
It took 7 years for the engineers to get a license to just do the fluorination work necessary as part of the development of the LFTR. Even worse, as we refuse to do anything with nuclear we let older less safe plants stay online longer than we need to. So all this environmental obstructionism actual makes use less safe and helps the fossil fuel industry. Ignorance is truly our greatest enemy.
At one point in the future, you will overbuild the generation capacity and control load by intermittently synthesizing ammonia to replace fossil fuels used for the same purpose today. Just the current global consumption of ammonia would necessitate several hundred GW of extra average generation, so there's plenty of room for load management.
There is no way that will ever be economically efficient. Syn fuels are great but not a panacea. They have 2 basic inputs to make them: heat and fuel-stock. The fuel-stock is easier but still you need a lot of it and hopefully we can use plant material instead of coal. The real problem is that the heat needs to be consistent and of a specific temperature (at least 500C to be efficient) and getting that from electricity is very hard/inefficient/expensive. To make it efficient you really need nuclear (specifically MSRs running between 500-700C). Also, you need to make the fuel for cheaper than its currently available from the ground. You just can't do this without a very large source of consistent heat that you can only make economically from fossil fuels or nuclear. Also, for fun, the fuel market is just as big as electricity when measured in units of energy. Remind me again how we do that with solar or wind?