Topic: Nuclear Energy. Do you want more or less? (Read 3612 times)

More efficient and hotter.

New stuff. Out with the old in with the new.

Also recycling

safety records, in order to be meaningful, need to be measured in deaths per terawatthour generated. By that standard, nuclear is much safer than coal. You need to compare indirect deaths which means including uranium miners and coal miners in the mortality calculations. 

Only in a statist society could you have a government build a nuclear reactor directly on the coast of a highly-population region with a history of earthquakes and tsunamis.  No, the inhabitants were not included in the decision.  An anarcho-capitatlist insurance company would never agree to sign off on the construction of that nuclear reactor since there would be 10's of millions of potential claimants.  Governments like to pretend that they are some benevolent insurance force protecting everyone.  But since there is no legal liability for the government, and since all their money is stolen from the people via taxes in the first place, they continue to engage in such risky behavior.  I don't have to point out all those floods in the mississippi river and new orleans, and all those helpless flood victims being "protected" by the army corps of engineers...

That's not quite true.  Thorium does have some hazardous waste products, but none that are nearly as long lived or as hazardous as plutonium itself.

Waste storage is a red herring.  These issues have been solved, but the US doesn't do these kinds of things, and instead chooses the path of long term storage, because this waste is still reactor fuel in it's own right and the US has no economicly viable uranium mines of it's own, and presently depends upon favorable political relations with Canada and Austrailia to supply both the military and civil needs of the United States.  The long term storage facility concept thus becomes a reserve that could be drawn upon should either of those supply source become cut off indefinately.

no, we don't.  We just need to not be idiots about it.  long lived waste components are fuel for different types of reactors, which then give much shorter term waste, which would only need to be stored 200 years, which is much easier to get right.

Thorium is wasteless. It uses Uranium as a catalyst.

The problem with nuclear energy (besides the scale issues, of which I agree with Jaime Frontero on) is that we have to figure out a secure way to store the waste that is beyond any time scale we can reasonably envision. Because of this, we essentially are creating incredibly toxic management problems for societies that we have no idea of. I believe it is an unfair burden for future generations to have to deal with, when we do not know what their capacity to deal with it will be, just so we can have more energy now.

World health orginzation puts total deaths from chernobyl accident at 4000, with 31 deaths happening directly because of the meltdown.  Deaths in mine collapses as well as black lung and related conditions are orders of magnitude higher in the fossil fuel industry.  Plus the chernobyl reactor was of a TERRIBLE design as you learn in any introduction to engineering course.

People already keep those things packed with acid waiting to explode resting by their crotches; if they were at least as safe and didn't cost nor weight much more than regular batteries i wouldn't expect there to be much issue with public aceptance, specially if pushed by big companies with intense followers like Apple and Nokia

It's not the radiation. It's the proximity. Frankly, in exchange for increased connectivity and communication havoc opportunities going the way Marie Curie isn't too shabby.

A long time.  People still freak out about the electromagnetic radiation that cell phones emit under normal operation.  Neutronic radiation actually merits such panic.

I wonder how long until mobiles will carry their own little plants

Possible I don't know.  Smallest practical is about 14 Kw thermal, which is tiny.  There is no theoretical minimum for an energy amp thorium reactor.  But the reactor size itself is rarely the issue.  It's usually the containment and shield mass that is the largest expense, which is why civil reactors favor such huge economies of scale. 

What's the smallest Thorium reactor possible?

And don't forget modern nuclear reactor and plant designs are way safer than the stuff that went bad in the past

That's right. Coal contains radioactive stuff too. That's the reason I would prefer natural gas.

yeah right, tell that to the people living near thousands of coal power plants.

No one who lived near Chernobyl died or contracted cancer as a direct result of their proximity.  Chernobyl was a bad accident, but contrary to popular belief, an American coal plant releases more radioactive material into the air each year than Chernobyl did.  The problem was that Chernobyl was doing it in concentration as well as would have continued doing so so long as the fire continued.  Coal contains large amounts of thorium and uranium naturally, and there is no way to get them out before burning it.  So some portion of those elements do end up in the exhaust.  I've been employed in both types of power plants in the United States, including the oldest coal fired power plant still licensed in the United States, Beckjord Power Plant, and I can honestly say that I would much rather live near a nuke plant than a coal plant.  Yes, there is a small chance that said nuke plant could be mismanaged and have an incident that harms my children; but that's a certainty if you live downwind from a coal plant.  Go tour a coal plant, nothing green grows within a quarter mile of the stack.  Nothing.

EDIT:  BTW, Chernobyl continued to produce power for another 15 years or so before being mothballed.  Only the affected reactor was closed immediately.  There is no evidence that employees that worked at Chernobyl after the incident were exposed to any more radiation than their peers at any other nuke plants.

That was a soviet design :-)