Topic: Thorium power, how is it going in the US? - page 2. (Read 11262 times)

That's the best part. It is, relative to other nuclear fuels.

Thanks for the article.

I thought Thorium was a common material.

Related: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=no&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aftenposten.no%2Fokonomi%2FGigantisk-energikilde-i-Telemark-7055485.html

'ts okay, what's a little melamine on the milk among friends, rite?  :-)

I lold. 

Yeah, but the paint on them will contain lead.

The Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project is an open source replication effort whose leads are currently attempting to replicate the Francesco Celani excess heat experiment while making their research and apparatus public and building kits to farm out to scientists who want to try it out.

http://www.quantumheat.org/

Um, wtf are you talking about.  I made no such comment as far as I can see.

The inability distinguish between magic and science displayed in your comment is why we haven't seen as much technological advancement as we otherwise could have.

If everyone had that kind of attitude (I won't believe it's possible until it is fully commercialized) we would still be riding horses to work.

It's not just that, but the whole academic establishment is locked into some belief about physics which ultimately stops any real innovation.
On the other the fringe is full of people who engage in the same kind of thought process.

Both rely on long abandoned mathematical concepts. Quaternions have been around for over a century but still they use tensors and even build a sum in a way it is not permitted outside "special" relativity.
Of course you cannot come to those false conclusions with Quaternions but since the establishment religiously believes in them it is not permitted to use them at all.

If you insist:
Stright from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer

"theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel and nuclear physicist Peter Thieberger argue that the claims for the E-Cat are incompatible with the fundamentals of nuclear physics.[31] In particular, the Coulomb barrier for the claimed fusion reaction is so high that it is unsurpassable anywhere in the known universe, including the interior of stars. The reaction also would create gamma radiation that would penetrate the few inches of shielding apparently provided by the E-Cat, leading to acute radiation syndrome in persons involved in the demonstrations.[31] Given numerous other scientific inconsistencies – such as the ratio of isotopes in the supposed copper "fusion product" being identical to that in natural copper[32] – the authors argue that it is now time "for the e-Cat's proponents to provide the provable, testable, reproducible science that can answer these straightforward physics objections."


A little lesson of physics:
When comes to shooting proton into nuclei problem is that protons repell eachother. When you reduce distance by half, repelling force gets 4 times stronger. It obviously doesent scale to infinity, but at some point the forces between protons inside nuclei and one that you are trying to infuse are getting EXTREME.

Additionally there is another problem - the atoms nuclei is so small, that hitting it even without repelling force is extremally unlikely. When comes to neutrons there is no repelling, and low hit probability is solved by breeding huge amounts of them - thanks to this nuclear powerplants can work.

As I said: Show me working commercial E-cat, or it didnt happen.

The question is how far do you go to call something a 'fact'. A blackbox demonstration done in a obscure lab by some company taking money from investors?
For me definitely not.

I think without some serious scientific breakthrough remains in the realm of sci-fi.

Hydrogen-nickel fusion without big accelerator? Bullshit. I won't belive it until I'll se a working power plant with my own eyes.

Except for the once-a decade cold fusion hoaxes. Can't go without mentioning them  

But look on the bright side, if the trend holds you can buy thorium reactors from China by 2022.

Settle down, the current state of fusion research is nowhere near as advanced as you hope.

Yes, fusion reactors exist, and you can even build one for only a few thousand dollars if you know what you're doing. But there are a couple of problems. First of all, most fusion reactions (including all of the most practical ones) produce a huge amount of neutron radiation, which (unlike most other forms of radiation) causes anything exposed to it to become radioactive. When the reactor components wear out and need replacing, they will be highly radioactive and need to be disposed of as such. Anyone claiming that fusion reactors produce no radioactive waste is lying.

The second problem is even more serious. To get nuclear fusion, you need to produce and confine an extremely high temperature plasma, and no current designs* have been able to achieve this without consuming more energy than the fusion reaction produces. (Note that a loss of plasma confinement is not particularly dangerous, as although the plasma is at a very high temperature and pressure, the density is so low that it's virtually a vacuum, with a correspondingly low heat content. Instead of the reactor heating up and melting, the plasma cools. Cool plasma is no good for fusion though, so confinement is still extremely important, but losing confinement isn't the catastrophe that one might imagine it to be.) No currently operating fusion reactors are capable of producing net power, and all are used either for research purposes or as a controllable source of neutron radiation.

*Nitpickers will be quick to point out that fission bombs are capable of producing high temperature plasma and confining it just long enough to get a good fusion reaction out of it without consuming much energy, but this has an obvious drawback.

The timely invention of the atomic bomb saved over 4 million lives:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1708051/posts

Again, solar is going to get all the money now because it has had such a radical breakthrough in the last 3 years.

It's hard to accumulate enough of it in a small place to produce usable amounts of energy.

Just due to thermodynamics thermal energy is difficult to convert into a usable, concentrated form like electricity unless the temperature of your heat source exceeds 250C, and even that isn't particularly efficient.

I think, you are speaking of Toshiba 4S reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S


Little offtopic guys, but there is something bugging me - since nuclear power plants are producing strontium-90 as one of fission products, wouldnt it be a good idea to use it to produce electricty? According to wikipedia strontium-90 produces around 0.46 kilowatts of heat per kilogram, due to radioactive decay with half life of about 30 years. Wouldnt it be a good idea to turn it into power source? I mean something like Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG) or just hot steam production for traditional turbines?

Waiwaiwait... WE HAVE FUSION REACTORS ALREADY?

HOLY FUCKING SHIT.  I want a Mr. Fusion for my black Trans Am, NOW!!!  I won't be able to go to the future with it, but I would most definitely achieve Super Pursuit forrealz.