Topic: The end is near - page 10. (Read 17362 times)

Succesfull, like the following up problems off the saved salts which wasnt stored correctly and could reach critical mass? And in general this was not the concept lots of engineers would like to run nowadays. Infact till today not one dual-fluid reactor has been builded.(The Oak Ridge one didnt had a second fissile fluid.)  Lots of projects are just stuff that uses the salt as coolant, but still relie on solid fuels.

Hmm lets start with materials then, i guess you readen the "not-yet-released-paper" of Phd. Steven Boyd regarding the problems of using Silicon Carbide for the fuel pipes in Molten-Salt Reactors? You might seen his presentation on TEAC5, too.
Like i said i would be quite happy if iam wrong, but i dont see this technology civil-ready in the next 15years.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory ran a successful prototype in the 1970s. All the research has been done, prototype bugs found and solved, all the theoretical work complete.

Building large scale models would of course involve some more design work, in the same way that every highway bridge needs some site-specific design work, but as far as the basic theory of operation, metallurgy, nuclear design factors, all that theoretical work is complete and tested.

Only bureaucracy and entrenched interests stand in the way.

Your reply is a textbook example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Ohh i hear this (Dual/Two)Fluid Reactor Stuff often, but actually none of the countrys considering it nowadays are even behind the "paper-reactor" status yet, so we are talking about 5+ years before the first prototype bugs are all run out, it probably could be a competition for fusion reactors. I would be quite happy if iam wrong tough.


I still think they gonna kick of this Desertec Project i linked before, they allready racked up marocco and egypt plants are builded, too. In general iam no fan of this stuff, i think to many dangers are just comin from running your energy-production offsite. ( Its like outsourcin support to india ... ) And yeah issues with saving energy, they probably just build up tons of pumped storage plants to solve that, i can allready see them lurking in the place like all the stupid windmills.

The whole build solar panels on your roof stuff is just ok for heat-production and saving. ( Get a 40.000l Water in the middle of the house which gets warmed up over the summer and produces heat in the winter ... not in every region of the world tough )
Beside it makes the old-style house look stupid, architecture should ban them on standard roofs :p

It is not the stupidity of voters that gets bad politicians elected, we all vote for the illusion, that one thing they say that gives us hope that the world will transform into a place where we can simply be happy.

I believe that the real mistake is thinking that voting people into office is the way to create change.

We the people have to get involved in our countries, not just by voting, but by being proactive, take the initiative to solve the problems we need to fix. We have to take what we want and not expect it to be handed to us.

I DO NOT mean, starting riots, getting violent etc., I mean we have to get our hands dirty digging into the bureaucracy ourselves. We have to be our own lobbiests, write our own bills, and push them through. It is not easy because the powers that be make it very difficult, but there are bureaucratic ways of interacting with every governmental office, program etc. it just takes an extreme amount of work.

I propose we address this issue the same way we would a large open-source project. Something like Github could be used to organize the research, write bills, prepare and file paperwork etc. A module similar to Kickstarter could be used to raise funding for things that would require marketing (campaigning) or other resources. We already have the proof of concept within the two systems I mentioned, crowed sourcing works, so lets crowd source government.

I cannot imagine any other way that people will get their voices back, or that the world can be saved from the greedy.

Oh, don't get me wrong.  They can be made elsewhere, just not in any volume, nor at any price, that works economicly.  There are also other techniques, but they are more expensive, too bulky or otherwise have some other downside to their employment.  Which is why we use photovoltics as the most common method of solar power, it's the best choice among known techniques.  Solar power will come when it's economicly competitive, but for many reasons (including resource availability) it's not possible to do more than about 4% of the US total grid in solar.  In most counties, the 'net metering' laws that exist to favor the small, home solar installation are void if more than 1% of productive capacity is solar; because beyond that point the negative effects of distributed and unreliable power sources upon the grid become too large for the power company to ignore.  They would either have to have control of those power sources, able to disconnect them; or at least be able to highly predict their total output capacity at least an hour in advance.  Look up the term 'spinning reserve' with regard to grid power systems, and you might understand the problem with unpredictable renewable power to the power company.

Existing nuclear power plants are based on designs that were created back when computers were still made out of vacuum tubes and took up entire buildings.

The difference between what is possible fission, but blocked for political reasons, and what is currently allowed to be built out is nearly as great as the difference between your smart phone and ENIAC. Civilian nuclear power plants are basically bomb material factories that just happen to produce electricity as a side effect. They produce large amounts of waste because they are supposed to.

State-of-the-art 1970s molten salt reactors would be a huge improvement. That would give us reactors which create 1 ton of automatically processed waste per GW-year of electricity produced, that would only need to be stored for 300 years (instead of 10000), and using a fuel supply that would provide 350 million BTU per person per year of energy for a 10 billion person populations for 1.1 million years before we'd have to mine thorium on the moon, Mars, and other bodies in the solar system. Also the design has no possibility of a catastrophic meltdown because it is based on stable chemical salts instead of water, high pressure, and flammable metals. (Did you know that zirconium, the metal used in the cladding of all solid fuel designs, is flammable? And that it produces hydrogen gas when exposed to water at high temperatures? That's why all existing power plant designs are dangerous.)

Remember that when you're talking about nuclear power as it is currently deployed that no significant advancements have been allowed ever since the 1960s. There are no technological or physics reasons we couldn't do a lot better now, just political and bureaucratic ones.

You mean like building solar panels in africa for renewable energy in europe?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Fullconnection.jpg

Ohh and they made solar panels in germany, too. Afaik the only resource not available here where cheap workers.

I wasn't talking about the uranium fuel cycle, I was talking about the thorium fuel cycle.  Even with U235, up at least until the latest screwup in Japan, and likely even afterwards, all of the radioactive materials released into the environment by all of the nuclear power facilities, all over the world and since the dawn of the nuclear age is less than the radioactive materials that are released into the environment every single year bye the burning of coal worldwide.  Yes, burning coal is known to be worse for ratioactive waste materials than the entire nuclear power industry, and that doesn't even consider all of the other bad effects of burning bitumous coal for power.  The accumlation of nuclear waste is a well known problem; and is handled (or not handled, as one may look at it) in the US the way that it is for a particular, strategic reason.  Europe and most of the rest of the world will generally "process" spent fuel rods to remove the 'hot' fission byproducts from the fuel, and then recycle the remainder of the useable fuel back into their domestic fuel cycle; as a typical reactor fuel rod will still be about 1.5 to 2% fissile U235 when the critical reaction can no longer be maintained for useful power production, no matter what the concentration was at the beginning of the fuel rod's service life.  So Europeans generally encase the fission products into leaded glass balls about the size of a softball, and store those products forever.  The amount of long term storage space, using this method, is incrediblely small; however the term period is incrediblely long, considering the high concentration of risk.  In the US, we (deliberately) don't process spent fuel rods, instead we just pretend to store them forever.  The reason for this is strategic, not economic.  You see, the US does not have any viable uranium mines from which to extract weapons fuel in the (considered rather remote at the time, and it still is) event that we are cut off from our primary source allies, Canada and Australia.  The massive 'long term storage facility' that has never been opened in Nevada isn't really intended for storage of materials for 10K years, nor would that be neccesary.  The storage facility is basicly an artificical mine, that the US military could draw upon under such very unlikely conditions.  If those conditions are never met, it's highly likely that the US nuclear power industry would demand access to the stored materials in the future, in the event of some 'uranium energy crisis' if the cost of refining and importing refined fuel from other nations ever exceeds the cost of simply processing and re-refining the stored 'spent' fuel.

However, since thorium is three times as abundant than uranium in the Earth's crust, and 100% of thorium is fissile (compared to roughly 1.2% of uranium) switching to a thorium fuel cycle, again a tech that we have known about for 40 years, would easily power our modern industrial economies for 10's of thousands of years at the current burn rate, even if every human being on earth today consumed energy at twice the rate of the average American today.


Actually, that's generally true; there are no technological (and likely no economic) barriers torunning the entire world on renewable resources.  But while there are no barriers, that doesn't mean that there are no limits.  The greatest issues are political & social.  While it is scientificly possible to power all of the world using only a km wide band around the whole of the equator of solar cells, it's not actually possible to build that many solar cells using the science that we have and the resources that we are aware of.  The problem here is that almost all electronics require trace elements commonly called "rare earth minerals" in order to manufacture the semiconductors required.  Solar cells, and some kinds of modern batteries, require an awful lot of these rare minerals.  This is one reason that China is the only place affordable solar cells are produced, because of all of the "rare earth" mines in the world, over 90% of the known resources happen to exist within the borders of the Middle Kingdom.  If you thought our dependency on oil was a geopolitical conundrum, this is way bigger.  NASA literally cannot build a spacecraft without underpaid miners in China, and no one else can either, because the "rare earth" mines in the US, Europe and Russia are tapped out or nearly so.  The problem is similar for windpower, due to the need to use fancy inverters to produce mains power from unpredictable wind resources.  Waterpower isn't so affected, but then the 'low hanging fruit' of productive capacity in this arena has long been utilized; and further projects face a case of diminishing returns, particularly with regard to the popularity of harming natural ecosystems with flooding for reserviors for power storage.  Some site can, and many already do, use 'run of river' waterpower methods, but these suffer from the similar issues with weather unpredictablity as windpower.

And none of that even considers the NIMBY social issues that any grand scale geoengineering projects would have to overcome first.  One of the most promising wave energy sites has been tied up legally for over a decade because construction would disrupt the view from the beachhouse of a US senator.  Renewable energy projects of the scale required would, quite literally, be everywhere.  Good luck with that.

I have a small understanding of nuclear power. I know about the onkalo storage facility in Finland. I was just trying to make a point by citing someone with a better understanding then me.(i guess not you?, and is that not allowed here?) As i said before i don't know where either of you came up with the conclusion that solar, water, and wind(geothermal?) aren't enough to sustain humanities energy consumption. I'd like you to inform me though. In my opinion the cons of nuclear power far outweigh the benefits for very long term. The risk of disaster may be very small but it still is there, so why not make use of safer resources? I suppose I’m wrong though.



Let me recite someone else just because. As if what you're telling me was all information you automatically were born with...I generally read to inform myself. Believe it or not i look at both sides to try and avoid a biased opinion.

When i said inform me I was serious, i wasn't trying to be sarcastic. Maybe you should try informing people instead of seeing if they qualify to talk to you. I guess it's the low post count that shows I’m unworthy?

Do you actually know anything about nuclear power, or do you just recite talking points?

Nuclear power creates waste though, it's an unrealistic solution for the very long term. It's certainly better than the fossil fuels used now but the waste has to go somewhere. I don't think storing trillions of tons of nuclear waste underground is in humanities best interest. More efficient methods of solar, water and wind energy can be created. Baby steps man, these problems aren't going to be fixed overnight. It's going to need to take some effort from everyone of us.

Oh and this guy disagrees with you. Not saying you don't know what your talking about but i don't know where you came up with that conclusion. I also think this man has a little more experience in the area. Not to say people haven't been wrong before.

We've had the technology to do this for forty years.  It's just not being developed, and it won't in the current geopolitical environment.  It's wishful thinking to believe that wind, water and solar are ever going to be able to run our modern industrial economies.  Nuclear power is simply required if we really desire to move away from using coal.

Yes. There are actually tremendous reasons to be optimistic.

If we can please get through the current period without major turmoil, it appears we can reach a new phase of unprecedented economic activity fueled by cheap & clean energy.

At that point, governments would be able to rescue themselves by taxing some of that vast newly created wealth -- even as they become much less relevant because everyone's needs will become so much easier to meet.

We will also be able to significantly reverse environmental degradation (including, as a minor aside, powering bitcoin on equipment that is no longer coal-fired).

Pessimism right now can be needlessly destabilizing.  It can be cured with knowledge of such likely solutions as lattice-assisted nuclear reactions aka low-energy nuclear reactions.

We need to get past systemic risks such as our inflationary financial systems and melting ice/permafrost so they don't halt our progress just short of the goal, then we can celebrate in due course.

It's unfortunate that governmental missteps have caused decades of delay, wasted so many resources, and favored the appearance of prosperity over sustainable economics, edging us towards catastrophe just as we seem about to triumph.

Wider awareness of the spectacular future we're building will help get us there.

I don't know where you got this idea, but that's not true.  I know of no argument to imply that a free market would produce more than the current market. It might, or it might not; depending on the desires and needs of the people.  The difference would be that productivity would not be siphoned off by an ever more needy state, and those who are dependent upon the state would have to learn how to produce something of value as well.

I don't believe the end is near.

There will soon be new cheap energy sources which will help a lot.

Computers will be smarter and we will come much more efficient.

Internet is empowering individuals more than even in the history of mankind.

I believe the future is going to be great. Of course there will also be problems to solve. Bitcoin might help with that.

Yes, without the state, inefficiency will be eliminated. That means, that nearly nothing will be produced, as it was the case within stateless communities in the whole history of mankind. But that wasn't Capitalism. The austrian anarchocapitalists believe, that we will produce even more without the state. That's the greatest economic joke I ever heard.

if this is true then most of the leaders of the world today couldn't give a crap...  nobody will blame them ( at least not while they are still alive...)

Couple things.

First, the present system will keep going on for much longer than you think. The US dollar will be propped up worldwide because it's in everyone's interest to keep it there, since it's the reserve currency. Good for the US, bad for the world. Eventually countries holding dollars will cut their losses, let the dollar float, and the dollar will be screwed. Some speculate China is even planning to engineer this situation so as to offer the yuan as a replacement reserve currency.

But it's perhaps more likely that this would backfire and bitcoin could become the global reserve currency, since government control of currency would be what got the dollar into that position in the first place.

And you won't want to be in the US when the dollar tanks. It will be an entire generation of wealth lost or more than that. All fiat currencies eventually hyperinflate and fail and the US dollar will be no different.

However, there are always pockets that escape the turmoil of the day. I don't mean within the US, I mean places that thrive nonetheless. Like Venetia during the chaos of Constantinople being sacked; the Roman empire went down, Venetia lived on.

What we need is a new Venetia to the US's failing empire.

I suggest that the way forward, and what should give everyone optimism, is to build seasteads (/r/seasteading), free communities on the water, places where bitcoin will be a native currency and where political experimentation can flower into new desperately needed forms, forms that move beyond democracy, perhaps even abandoning it as the political crutch it was, now outdated, outmoded, discarded. The future belongs to political individualism, and abandoning democracy will mean abandoning the last element in society that clings to collectivism: politics. It will in fact mean the end of politics and the end of politicians, for political individualism constitutes a rejection of the idea that anyone should have the power to force laws on anyone else. Choose laws for yourself, each human a sovereign over their own life and own property.

That is a way forward that is truly new. And it's in such a society that people can prosper while Rome is burning.

I suspect we have at least a decade before any coming crash truly hits, and possibly more like 30 years before the crisis is unavoidable entirely.

This :

http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/quickstart