There's something I seem to remember from the FD coverage, which seems to be completely missing from the IEEE article - wasn't there some additional emergency cooling system in Reactor one, called a torus or toroid - basically a big donut filled with water, which like, cracked and leaked all it's water so it didn't provide the emergency cooling it was supposed to?
If that's the case, isn't that a huge, huge omission from the article?
If you're going to keep your passwords, or a master password, in the house, then you probably should invest in a fireproof, waterproof safe and keep it in there. Otherwise there's a small, but not-zero, chance, that if the reason you die is a fire or flood, the password might be lost with you.
I'm thinking I'm going to keep a local copy in a safe, and maybe give a copy to an estate lawyer or something to hold in trust until I die. That way, hopefully one of the two copies will survive.
Oh, I agree, don't get me wrong. I think climate change will have a lot of negative consequences. I just fully expect a certain part of the population to brush climate change of as being something they don't really expect to negatively affect us "that much".
You've skipped over one point we'll have to travel in the narrative. . .
Climate change isn't happening
Man isn't causing or contributing to climate change
Man's role in climate change is minor and unimportant
So what? Climate has always been changing and is continuing to change. Let's just build seawalls, pumps, canals, etc and get on with life. (In other words - *I* haven't been too badly affected by climate change - my property won't be flooded, so I don't care)
Here that? That's the sound of you completely missing my point. I *know* that the box doesn't move or produce electricity. It produces heat, which gets converted by a turbine. That was my point *exactly*. A video of the ecat device "in operation" would be a very boring video - it would be video of a box (or cylinder, some sort of three-dimensional volume) sitting in a room.
Yeah, they could video the other parts of the plant in operation, but I don't think you can really *see* much of what happens in an operating power plant - it's all sealed up in metal housings.
"Refuting my assumptions with your own unsubstantiated statements isn't much of a refutation;-)"
Are you referring to the claim about needing about 3 and 1/2 times more nameplate capacity? Because I did substantiate it. I talked about the difference in capacity factors, which is where I derived that figure from. If the capacity factor of wind is 35%, you need almost 3 times as much capacity to generate the same power. If the capacity factor of Solar is, at best, 20%, you need a bit more than 4 times as much capacity.
See, this is one of those writeups that sounds entirely plausible, but isn't quantified.
You are assuming an aweful lot. This is NOT a rigorous defense of the claim. Has anyone done an actual study, which has been peer-reviewed and accepted as reasonable, which really tries to put some defensible numbers on such claims?
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying, I don't see the data. I think a lot of people underestimate just how much infrastructure you need to get a lot of "renewable" power.
Let's take, for example, one of your claims:
"location - your power plants can be on your own roof/backyard, so much less transmission capacity is needed. "
This is wrong. It's not wrong that you can put solar panels on your roof. What's wrong is that you still need all the same infrastructure PLUS your solar panels? Why? Unless you are going to completely disconnect from the grid, then you need all the same infrastructure.
ALSO: Some buildings are not suitable for being powered by rooftop solar panels - high-rise office buildings, high-rise apartments/dorms, high-rise anything. Even "regular" non-high-rise apartment buildings would likely not be able to provide enough power from just their roofs, because the population density of the building, and thus the energy-consumed per square foot, would be higher - more fridges, stoves, hot water heaters, lights, TVs, washers, dryers, etc per square foot. High-energy use buildings like grocery stores (all those fridges and freezers probably mean you can't get enough power from just the roof alone), restaurants, hospitals, factories.
It might be that putting solar panels on every roof can cut down our need for off-site power, but it *cannot* eliminate it for a very significant number of buildings.
So, we will still need "The Grid". But, we're trying to get most of our power from wind or solar, so people suggest, let's build lots of industrial wind/solar farms out in the hinterlands. Now, we've just added a whole new, additional set of "Grid" infrastructure that's necessary to transport all that power around.
Let's look at your other claim: That because they don't need fuel, it stands to reason they need less mining activity, ultimately, than oil, coal, or nuclear. That may or may not be the case. The thing is, you need about 3 and a 1/2 times as much 'nameplate capacity' for wind or solar to equal a fuel-based power plant.
Why is that? Because most fuel-based power plants have a capacity factor of about 80-90% (varies by type - nuclear currently has capacity factors around 90%, for example). Roughly speaking, capacity factor is how much power a plant actually produces, verse the theoretical maximum capacity. So, a 1 GW Nuclear Plant will *actually* produce about 900MW of power, overall.
According to the Wikipedia page on Capacity factor, Wind farms typically get around 30% capacity factors. Solar PV gets around 15% (in Arizona, one of the most ideal locations on earth, that jumps all the way up to 19%, woo).
You can overcome the capacity factor gap - by building more capacity, and/or some sort of storage.
So, now the million dollar question: Does the additional mining and manufacturing activity necessary to build massive amounts of renewable energy infrastructure offset the 'gains' you expect from not needing fuel. I think it's entirely possible that could possibly be the case.
I hope someone know of any study that actually compares these things. I'm sure it would be very interesting, enlightening reading. Especially if compared against nuclear energy, since nuclear power plants don't emit any pollution, except in extraordinary events that only happen to one plant every 15 or 30 years (though there is some pollution in the fuel mining, enrichment and manufacturing).
Ok, so since it's ultimately driven by electricity, it sounds like you could use other sources like hydro, geothermal, nuclear, or wind. The artificial leaf is a novel idea, but I'm also interested in how useful this application might be for industrial-scale hydrogen production using non-fossil-fuel energy sources other than sunlight.
This is a statement I see repeated very frequently (in some form or another) by environmentalists. It may even be true. The problem is, I've yet to see a rigorous defense of this claim. . .
Most environmentalists don't seem to take into account:
The rare earths and toxic compounds needed to build lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of Wind Turbines, Solar PV panels, or Solar reflectors (for concentrated solar-thermal power plants).
When you mine rare-earths, you will probably also generate waste streams. How toxic or radioactive are those "tailings" going to be? What is the plan for safely dealing with the tailings?
The massive amounts of concrete, aluminum, steel, and other resources which will need to be produced to build lots, and lots, and lots of wind turbines and solar systems?
The fuel which will be burned by all the construction equipment (bulldozers, concrete trucks, cranes, transport trucks for the components to build these things)?
Right now, I'm a bit worried that the "green" revolution will end up doing more harm to the environment than good, though I hope to be wrong.
Wait, so you're saying that we were already at 100% efficiency? My understanding of it (which may be flawed), is that previously, with electrolysis, a lot of energy was being *wasted*? That is, it wasn't being used to split they water, but I dunno, generate waste heat or something?
So, unless you are at 100% efficiency, you should be able to generate hydrogen with less energy if you can find a way to reduce the *wasted* part of the energy. There is, sure, an upper limit on how low the energy can go, since I do agree that there is an absolute amount of energy always necessary to split the compound apart.
Well, yeah, but those moving parts are all "common" to any heat-engine electric plant - coal, oil, nuclear. Those aren't the interesting bits in this case, the interesting bit is the "black box".
Do you still run electricity through the water, but first you 'dope' the water with the catalyst, and the hydrogen/oxygen separation happens with same rate with less energy input/faster rate with same input?
They mentioned something in the article about an "artificial leaf", so does that mean that you use sunlight as the energy input instead of electricity, and the sunlight drives the reaction with the catalyst?
Slight slip up while typing. What I typed was, "Water is a Hydrogen atom plus an oxygen atom.". What I *meant* to type is, "Water is two Hydrogen atoms plus an oxygen atom."
Chemical reactions do not destroy or change the elements in the compounds. Water is a Hydrogen atom plus an oxygen atom. Nature has been splitting water, then re-forming it for those same billions of years you're talking about. We're not really doing anything new here. We're just doing it in a new way.
When the hydrogen gets used, mostly it'll be "used" by recombining it with oxygen, either in a combustion reaction, in which case the water is re-formed and vented into the atmosphere where it will eventually become part of the rain, or it's recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell to generate electricity, at which point the water is re-formed, vents to the atmosphere, and becomes part of the rain.
Oh, also - we've 'liberated' a lot of 'new' water in the past 150 years - when we pull coal, oil, natural gas, and peat out of the earth to burn it, there's hydrogen in all those fuel sources (as well as carbon). Hydrogen which had been locked away for millions or billions of years, and reacts with oxygen in the atmosphere to form water (technically, it's not 'new water', really, since it started as water aeons ago, and was absorbed into the living plants, mosses, bacteria etc which eventually turned into coal, oil, natural gas, and peat).
I'd keep getting up in the morning, going to work, and paying my electric and heat bill. Perhaps when I'm an old man, my energy bills will be lower or about the same as they are now (instead of rising with inflation).
If you take short positions on oil and gas, you, uhhh, lose your shorts.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, this is actually legit. It'll take a decade or two, at least, before enough of these are built to even make a small dent in the international energy market. Shorting stock is a game of predicting that the stock will lose value within the next *week*. Plus, if this is real, I expect the current energy giants to get a stranglehold on the technology, so that they control the technology (or they own most of the nickel mines, or whatever else goes into the e-cat to make it work, so they continue to control the resources).
The e-cat is essentially a "black box", with no moving parts, which produces electricity. What will the video be showing? The readout of an electric meter showing volts/watts/amperes? I suppose mostly it'll show reaction from whoever they got to attend the event?
You don't have to use the MAC address if you don't want. You can setup a DHCP server to assign addresses randomly if you really want to. However, I think the reason auto-config uses it by default is that:
A) It's already guaranteed to be unique (unless you've changed it), without having to resort to any additional logic to check for conflicts on the network.
B) For network administration, it's often nice to know which machine traffic is coming from (although, of course, for the local network admin there's other ways to track this which don't involve exposing the MAC address to the rest of the world).
One thing I don't really understand is why people get so hung up on the MAC address being embedded in the IP address. You can already be tracked by IP address, and with IPv6, even if you don't use MAC addresses, that can likely still be resolved to a specific computer.
But, as I said before, and others have said a thousand times before on other IPv6 threads - you don't *have* to use the MAC address, so please quit whining.
Ok, I just found what you were talking about Tritium with regards to LFTR - the Lithium in the Flibe salt will, over time, capture neutrons, and release some tritium. However, I found a post on the energyfromthorium.com forums which discusses the problem, and mentions some ways they can mediate the tritium problem:
Sodium? There's no Sodium in a LFTR. I think you're confusing the LFTR with Liquid Metal Fast Reactor (like the Integral Fast Reactor which is sometimes discussed).
When I first heard about IFR, I was somewhat interested, but then as I learned about it's dependence on Sodium, I backed away from my interest in it because of the reasons you mentioned.
LFTR uses molten *salt* not molten *metal*. The salts are toxic, from what I understand, but they don't release any gas, operate at low pressure while a liquid, and won't boil until something like 1300 or 1500 centigrade. They are non-flamamable.
There are some gaseous fission products, but those, from what I've been told, will be continuously removed, so they don't build up to large concentrations in a LFTR like they do in solid fuel (where fuel stays in the reactor for 2-3 years, building up waste products the whole time). They can then be safely stored and moved off-site where an incident with the reactor can't release them.
You really should look more at the LFTR - I think you don't understand the technology I'm referring to, from some of your statements, like the statement about Tritiated Fluorhydric acid. I think there's different salts that might be used, but the people I've heard talking about LFTR seem to favor Flibe - Fluoride, Lithium, and Beryllium. No hydrogen present to become tritiated?
As for running the turbine, I suppose you could use water for steam, but the people I've seen discussing it all say it makes more sense to use a high-temperature inert gas like helium, CO2, or Nitrogen, because then you have no water present, and you can run at higher efficiencies, while having less waste heat to dispose of (which, they say, means you could put one of these in a desert and air-cool it).
"and even if they had piping for the venting it would still be difficult and costly to build a watertight seal around them."
Buh, wha? Haven't you ever seen the chimneys on an old ship? They shape them like candy-canes, so that water would have to go UP the chimney.
So, you build the generators in a rugged, water-tight building, run some chimneys (both fresh air intake, and exhaust) up nice and high, far higher than any tsunami will ever possibly get (or so high it would be an extinction event in the area anyhow), then bend the tops down a few feet so rainwater can't fall down in. You now have a properly vented diesel generator inside a rugged building.
I bet that building with high chimneys is a cheaper alternative to a long high thick seawall.
Maybe the real solution is, perhaps, that all plants should be designed to, in the worst case scenario, *meltdown gracefully*.
One such design is a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor - technically it always operates melted down, and in an emergency, the molten fuel salt just drains into a cooling tank that allows the molten salt to cool off passively into the surrounding environment. There's no water in the LFTR design, so you don't have to worry about high pressure radioactive steam being vented, nor about hydrogen explosions.
But, even with more traditional designs, I've heard of something called a "Core Catcher". That wikipedia article mentions several designs with core catchers. Makes total sense to me - make the plant so that you don't have to avoid a meltdown at all costs - make it so that meltdown is a viable outcome that results in no significant damage or release of radioactive material outside of the reactor containment building.
It's ridiculous to assume you can prevent meltdown in all cases. Design for meltdown in addition to designing to avoid meltdown, if possible (it's obviously preferable not to meltdown in the first place, because maybe the plant can be saved and continue to operate if you avoid the meltdown, but there's no reason a meltdown should be a "disaster").
Yeah, those loans are also in a special class all by themselves. You cannot "escape" from them through bankruptcy. I should think those DOE Student Loans are some of the safest loans on the market as a result.
Unless the rates of people who either A) die before they can pay them back, or B) Are never able to achieve high enough salaries to pay back those loans in their lifetime, so only pay back a fraction of what they borrowed, are somewhat high, then the loan guarantees should cost the government fairly little money.
These loan guarantees are different than the sort that was given to Solyndra, because student loans are tied to people for their life until they pay them back.
If the government gets paid back (or in the case of DOE loans, they don't even lend the money, private lenders do. . . or, well, did when I was taking out student loans; I think that might've changed a couple years ago, not sure), then how is it a subsidy?
If I borrow money from the government, to get a degree or build a house, then over the next 20 years I pay back the principle plus interest, how is that a subsidy? I'm paying $250/mo on my "subsidy" right now and have been for several years now. Sure doesn't feel like a subsidy to me. I also sure the hell don't view student loans as free money and never have. Signing my master promissory note was one of the most terrifying and "weighty" days for me as a young adult.
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There's something I seem to remember from the FD coverage, which seems to be completely missing from the IEEE article - wasn't there some additional emergency cooling system in Reactor one, called a torus or toroid - basically a big donut filled with water, which like, cracked and leaked all it's water so it didn't provide the emergency cooling it was supposed to?
If that's the case, isn't that a huge, huge omission from the article?
If you're going to keep your passwords, or a master password, in the house, then you probably should invest in a fireproof, waterproof safe and keep it in there. Otherwise there's a small, but not-zero, chance, that if the reason you die is a fire or flood, the password might be lost with you.
I'm thinking I'm going to keep a local copy in a safe, and maybe give a copy to an estate lawyer or something to hold in trust until I die. That way, hopefully one of the two copies will survive.
Oh, I agree, don't get me wrong. I think climate change will have a lot of negative consequences. I just fully expect a certain part of the population to brush climate change of as being something they don't really expect to negatively affect us "that much".
You've skipped over one point we'll have to travel in the narrative. . .
*whoosh*
Here that? That's the sound of you completely missing my point. I *know* that the box doesn't move or produce electricity. It produces heat, which gets converted by a turbine. That was my point *exactly*. A video of the ecat device "in operation" would be a very boring video - it would be video of a box (or cylinder, some sort of three-dimensional volume) sitting in a room.
Yeah, they could video the other parts of the plant in operation, but I don't think you can really *see* much of what happens in an operating power plant - it's all sealed up in metal housings.
"Refuting my assumptions with your own unsubstantiated statements isn't much of a refutation ;-)"
Are you referring to the claim about needing about 3 and 1/2 times more nameplate capacity? Because I did substantiate it. I talked about the difference in capacity factors, which is where I derived that figure from. If the capacity factor of wind is 35%, you need almost 3 times as much capacity to generate the same power. If the capacity factor of Solar is, at best, 20%, you need a bit more than 4 times as much capacity.
See, this is one of those writeups that sounds entirely plausible, but isn't quantified.
You are assuming an aweful lot. This is NOT a rigorous defense of the claim. Has anyone done an actual study, which has been peer-reviewed and accepted as reasonable, which really tries to put some defensible numbers on such claims?
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying, I don't see the data. I think a lot of people underestimate just how much infrastructure you need to get a lot of "renewable" power.
Let's take, for example, one of your claims:
"location - your power plants can be on your own roof/backyard, so much less transmission capacity is needed. "
This is wrong. It's not wrong that you can put solar panels on your roof. What's wrong is that you still need all the same infrastructure PLUS your solar panels? Why? Unless you are going to completely disconnect from the grid, then you need all the same infrastructure.
ALSO: Some buildings are not suitable for being powered by rooftop solar panels - high-rise office buildings, high-rise apartments/dorms, high-rise anything. Even "regular" non-high-rise apartment buildings would likely not be able to provide enough power from just their roofs, because the population density of the building, and thus the energy-consumed per square foot, would be higher - more fridges, stoves, hot water heaters, lights, TVs, washers, dryers, etc per square foot. High-energy use buildings like grocery stores (all those fridges and freezers probably mean you can't get enough power from just the roof alone), restaurants, hospitals, factories.
It might be that putting solar panels on every roof can cut down our need for off-site power, but it *cannot* eliminate it for a very significant number of buildings.
So, we will still need "The Grid". But, we're trying to get most of our power from wind or solar, so people suggest, let's build lots of industrial wind/solar farms out in the hinterlands. Now, we've just added a whole new, additional set of "Grid" infrastructure that's necessary to transport all that power around.
Let's look at your other claim: That because they don't need fuel, it stands to reason they need less mining activity, ultimately, than oil, coal, or nuclear. That may or may not be the case. The thing is, you need about 3 and a 1/2 times as much 'nameplate capacity' for wind or solar to equal a fuel-based power plant.
Why is that? Because most fuel-based power plants have a capacity factor of about 80-90% (varies by type - nuclear currently has capacity factors around 90%, for example). Roughly speaking, capacity factor is how much power a plant actually produces, verse the theoretical maximum capacity. So, a 1 GW Nuclear Plant will *actually* produce about 900MW of power, overall.
According to the Wikipedia page on Capacity factor, Wind farms typically get around 30% capacity factors. Solar PV gets around 15% (in Arizona, one of the most ideal locations on earth, that jumps all the way up to 19%, woo).
You can overcome the capacity factor gap - by building more capacity, and/or some sort of storage.
So, now the million dollar question: Does the additional mining and manufacturing activity necessary to build massive amounts of renewable energy infrastructure offset the 'gains' you expect from not needing fuel. I think it's entirely possible that could possibly be the case.
I hope someone know of any study that actually compares these things. I'm sure it would be very interesting, enlightening reading. Especially if compared against nuclear energy, since nuclear power plants don't emit any pollution, except in extraordinary events that only happen to one plant every 15 or 30 years (though there is some pollution in the fuel mining, enrichment and manufacturing).
Ok, so since it's ultimately driven by electricity, it sounds like you could use other sources like hydro, geothermal, nuclear, or wind. The artificial leaf is a novel idea, but I'm also interested in how useful this application might be for industrial-scale hydrogen production using non-fossil-fuel energy sources other than sunlight.
"plus the lower environmental impact."
This is a statement I see repeated very frequently (in some form or another) by environmentalists. It may even be true. The problem is, I've yet to see a rigorous defense of this claim. . .
Most environmentalists don't seem to take into account:
The rare earths and toxic compounds needed to build lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of Wind Turbines, Solar PV panels, or Solar reflectors (for concentrated solar-thermal power plants).
When you mine rare-earths, you will probably also generate waste streams. How toxic or radioactive are those "tailings" going to be? What is the plan for safely dealing with the tailings?
The massive amounts of concrete, aluminum, steel, and other resources which will need to be produced to build lots, and lots, and lots of wind turbines and solar systems?
The fuel which will be burned by all the construction equipment (bulldozers, concrete trucks, cranes, transport trucks for the components to build these things)?
Right now, I'm a bit worried that the "green" revolution will end up doing more harm to the environment than good, though I hope to be wrong.
Wait, so you're saying that we were already at 100% efficiency? My understanding of it (which may be flawed), is that previously, with electrolysis, a lot of energy was being *wasted*? That is, it wasn't being used to split they water, but I dunno, generate waste heat or something?
So, unless you are at 100% efficiency, you should be able to generate hydrogen with less energy if you can find a way to reduce the *wasted* part of the energy. There is, sure, an upper limit on how low the energy can go, since I do agree that there is an absolute amount of energy always necessary to split the compound apart.
So, does this catalyst reduce the waste?
Well, yeah, but those moving parts are all "common" to any heat-engine electric plant - coal, oil, nuclear. Those aren't the interesting bits in this case, the interesting bit is the "black box".
Do you still run electricity through the water, but first you 'dope' the water with the catalyst, and the hydrogen/oxygen separation happens with same rate with less energy input/faster rate with same input?
They mentioned something in the article about an "artificial leaf", so does that mean that you use sunlight as the energy input instead of electricity, and the sunlight drives the reaction with the catalyst?
Slight slip up while typing. What I typed was, "Water is a Hydrogen atom plus an oxygen atom.". What I *meant* to type is, "Water is two Hydrogen atoms plus an oxygen atom."
Chemical reactions do not destroy or change the elements in the compounds. Water is a Hydrogen atom plus an oxygen atom. Nature has been splitting water, then re-forming it for those same billions of years you're talking about. We're not really doing anything new here. We're just doing it in a new way.
When the hydrogen gets used, mostly it'll be "used" by recombining it with oxygen, either in a combustion reaction, in which case the water is re-formed and vented into the atmosphere where it will eventually become part of the rain, or it's recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell to generate electricity, at which point the water is re-formed, vents to the atmosphere, and becomes part of the rain.
Oh, also - we've 'liberated' a lot of 'new' water in the past 150 years - when we pull coal, oil, natural gas, and peat out of the earth to burn it, there's hydrogen in all those fuel sources (as well as carbon). Hydrogen which had been locked away for millions or billions of years, and reacts with oxygen in the atmosphere to form water (technically, it's not 'new water', really, since it started as water aeons ago, and was absorbed into the living plants, mosses, bacteria etc which eventually turned into coal, oil, natural gas, and peat).
I'd keep getting up in the morning, going to work, and paying my electric and heat bill. Perhaps when I'm an old man, my energy bills will be lower or about the same as they are now (instead of rising with inflation).
If you take short positions on oil and gas, you, uhhh, lose your shorts.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, this is actually legit. It'll take a decade or two, at least, before enough of these are built to even make a small dent in the international energy market. Shorting stock is a game of predicting that the stock will lose value within the next *week*. Plus, if this is real, I expect the current energy giants to get a stranglehold on the technology, so that they control the technology (or they own most of the nickel mines, or whatever else goes into the e-cat to make it work, so they continue to control the resources).
The e-cat is essentially a "black box", with no moving parts, which produces electricity. What will the video be showing? The readout of an electric meter showing volts/watts/amperes? I suppose mostly it'll show reaction from whoever they got to attend the event?
Why would you hit an asteroid with a nuke? So you can crack it in half and it makes 2 craters instead of one?
You don't have to use the MAC address if you don't want. You can setup a DHCP server to assign addresses randomly if you really want to. However, I think the reason auto-config uses it by default is that:
A) It's already guaranteed to be unique (unless you've changed it), without having to resort to any additional logic to check for conflicts on the network.
B) For network administration, it's often nice to know which machine traffic is coming from (although, of course, for the local network admin there's other ways to track this which don't involve exposing the MAC address to the rest of the world).
One thing I don't really understand is why people get so hung up on the MAC address being embedded in the IP address. You can already be tracked by IP address, and with IPv6, even if you don't use MAC addresses, that can likely still be resolved to a specific computer.
But, as I said before, and others have said a thousand times before on other IPv6 threads - you don't *have* to use the MAC address, so please quit whining.
Ok, I just found what you were talking about Tritium with regards to LFTR - the Lithium in the Flibe salt will, over time, capture neutrons, and release some tritium. However, I found a post on the energyfromthorium.com forums which discusses the problem, and mentions some ways they can mediate the tritium problem:
http://energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3175&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=Tritiated
In short, it looks like a relatively minor problem, with solutions.
Sodium? There's no Sodium in a LFTR. I think you're confusing the LFTR with Liquid Metal Fast Reactor (like the Integral Fast Reactor which is sometimes discussed).
When I first heard about IFR, I was somewhat interested, but then as I learned about it's dependence on Sodium, I backed away from my interest in it because of the reasons you mentioned.
LFTR uses molten *salt* not molten *metal*. The salts are toxic, from what I understand, but they don't release any gas, operate at low pressure while a liquid, and won't boil until something like 1300 or 1500 centigrade. They are non-flamamable.
There are some gaseous fission products, but those, from what I've been told, will be continuously removed, so they don't build up to large concentrations in a LFTR like they do in solid fuel (where fuel stays in the reactor for 2-3 years, building up waste products the whole time). They can then be safely stored and moved off-site where an incident with the reactor can't release them.
You really should look more at the LFTR - I think you don't understand the technology I'm referring to, from some of your statements, like the statement about Tritiated Fluorhydric acid. I think there's different salts that might be used, but the people I've heard talking about LFTR seem to favor Flibe - Fluoride, Lithium, and Beryllium. No hydrogen present to become tritiated?
As for running the turbine, I suppose you could use water for steam, but the people I've seen discussing it all say it makes more sense to use a high-temperature inert gas like helium, CO2, or Nitrogen, because then you have no water present, and you can run at higher efficiencies, while having less waste heat to dispose of (which, they say, means you could put one of these in a desert and air-cool it).
"and even if they had piping for the venting it would still be difficult and costly to build a watertight seal around them."
Buh, wha? Haven't you ever seen the chimneys on an old ship? They shape them like candy-canes, so that water would have to go UP the chimney.
So, you build the generators in a rugged, water-tight building, run some chimneys (both fresh air intake, and exhaust) up nice and high, far higher than any tsunami will ever possibly get (or so high it would be an extinction event in the area anyhow), then bend the tops down a few feet so rainwater can't fall down in. You now have a properly vented diesel generator inside a rugged building.
I bet that building with high chimneys is a cheaper alternative to a long high thick seawall.
Maybe the real solution is, perhaps, that all plants should be designed to, in the worst case scenario, *meltdown gracefully*.
One such design is a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor - technically it always operates melted down, and in an emergency, the molten fuel salt just drains into a cooling tank that allows the molten salt to cool off passively into the surrounding environment. There's no water in the LFTR design, so you don't have to worry about high pressure radioactive steam being vented, nor about hydrogen explosions.
But, even with more traditional designs, I've heard of something called a "Core Catcher". That wikipedia article mentions several designs with core catchers. Makes total sense to me - make the plant so that you don't have to avoid a meltdown at all costs - make it so that meltdown is a viable outcome that results in no significant damage or release of radioactive material outside of the reactor containment building.
It's ridiculous to assume you can prevent meltdown in all cases. Design for meltdown in addition to designing to avoid meltdown, if possible (it's obviously preferable not to meltdown in the first place, because maybe the plant can be saved and continue to operate if you avoid the meltdown, but there's no reason a meltdown should be a "disaster").
Yeah, those loans are also in a special class all by themselves. You cannot "escape" from them through bankruptcy. I should think those DOE Student Loans are some of the safest loans on the market as a result.
Unless the rates of people who either A) die before they can pay them back, or B) Are never able to achieve high enough salaries to pay back those loans in their lifetime, so only pay back a fraction of what they borrowed, are somewhat high, then the loan guarantees should cost the government fairly little money.
These loan guarantees are different than the sort that was given to Solyndra, because student loans are tied to people for their life until they pay them back.
If the government gets paid back (or in the case of DOE loans, they don't even lend the money, private lenders do. . . or, well, did when I was taking out student loans; I think that might've changed a couple years ago, not sure), then how is it a subsidy?
If I borrow money from the government, to get a degree or build a house, then over the next 20 years I pay back the principle plus interest, how is that a subsidy? I'm paying $250/mo on my "subsidy" right now and have been for several years now. Sure doesn't feel like a subsidy to me. I also sure the hell don't view student loans as free money and never have. Signing my master promissory note was one of the most terrifying and "weighty" days for me as a young adult.