Topic: Thorium power, how is it going in the US? - page 3. (Read 11245 times)

I second this.  A quick Googling of what JustusRanvier said confirms what he said about temperatures and fission rates.  ElectricMucus is becoming more destructive and assholeish -- unnecessarily so -- as the thread develops, which leads me to agree with others in this thread who have pointed out that ElectricMucus has some sort of anxiety problem related to being exposed to facts he dislikes.

Excellent response.

So, we don't have Thorium reactors today, because sociopathic closeted mass murderers saw no ability to use them to terrorize hundreds of millions of people with the threat of genocide.

Typical statist-religious bullshit.

Facts are irrelevant (to bureaucrats who will punish you violently if you attempt to do stuff without their permission).  Thorium reactors could be safer than a kitten, but the bureaucrat (with his natural petty tyrant tendency) won't give a shit about that -- and the average moron will support the bureaucrat because he doesn't understand that thorium reactors are safe.

I went into studying engineering physics in 1998, mostly because I was hopeful that the US would get its act together and invest in building real, safe nuclear energy, soon.  Unfortunately, I learned very quickly that Americans are far, far too stupid to do that.  Furthermore, we are far too stupid to let someone competent, like the French or Japanese, do it for us.

I've kept a pretty close eye on the energy situation since then.  It seems obvious that the decision was made, decades ago, to choose recession, austerity and warfare in a gambit to jump directly to renewables, and to skip nuclear entirely.

Photovoltaics are getting cheaper.  But the total power produced is insignificant.  They are still too efficient, and too expensive.  To really capture solar energy effectively, you need something more like wind turbines, with a large capture area, and a small capital cost.

We have lots of land.  But covering that land with anything that doesn't self-replicate is hugely expensive.  Consider roads.  They are just oil, and rocks;  the cheapest materials possible.  And they only cover a tiny fraction of the country.  Yet they cost billions of dollars a year, just to maintain.

All of the photovoltaics produced in all of human history cover something like a few hundred square miles, total.

And there is no viable storage mechanism.  So they only compete for peak power, in sunny areas, during the hot months.

Photovoltaics are getting cheaper.  But the cheaper technologies use more precious metals.  They will be limited.  And they will come from places like Afghanistan.

So, yes, I agree that the US will never produce a nuclear renaissance.  It has nothing to do with the feasibility of nuclear energy.  It has to do with the idiots in charge of the US.

Finally used google to look this up, and it does seem that the argument is nonsense.  You are right that the day time peak is about 1kw per sq meter, but the US has 9 billion sq meters of land!  Half an hour of sun energy hitting the US is enough to power the whole country for a year.

It's economics, mixed with politics, as always on that scale.

And energy is the most important resource so anything related to energy has the highest economical impact.

we would have had thorium many years ago i we hadnt needed fissionable materials or weapons

but.. how is this economics?

It is for many, particularly in India.  That's beside the point. n_TOF has a research license under CERN.  None of these guys could do any such thing without the explicit support of CERN.  It is a highly regulated field of research, with good reasons.  India has been deep into research regarding the thorium fuel cycle for many years, but mixed fuel reactors are probably the best way to breed uranium from thorium in the near future, and any such breeder design can also transmutate nuke waste from LWR or BWR designs.  However, as I mentioned before, such designs are not safely efficient for power production as well, and work best as municipal heat.

Alright, what about n_TOF at CERN? I mean that is at least inside the academic world, and from some poking around at the nuclear physics institute website in my city about everybody in the field knows about thorium reactors. They write about it as means of nuclear waste disposal but I think the potential for energy production is well known.

I have no affiliation with the field but if it is possible to leverage existing infrastructure that could even be a Bachelor or Master Thesis project for somebody...

A nuclear bus would be a scary concept. Not just because they'd be driven by public employees, either. A cracked reactor vessel, in the presence of even city street-level speeds could splatter molten radioactive salt all over the place. While it would be a heck of a lot easier to clean up than a cloud of radioactive steam, that's still a mess I would rather not deal with. I think it would be safer, radiologically, than a BWR, but short term, that salt would still be crazy radioactive. A hydrogen explosion could do some serious damage, but at least once the boom is over, it's over.

No, a permit is required regardless of what you are doing.  In the case of small research reactors, the licensing process is often as expensive as the construction of the entire reactor.  One reason that no one makes small, neighborhood sized reactors even though they certainly could.  A town in Alaska has been asked by some manufactuer from Japan to field test a prototype reactor that supposedly needs no attention nor refuling for 30 years at a time.  I forget what that type was called but it resembled a pencil stuck eraser first into a concrete hole in the ground.  The eraser being the actual reactor and the shaft of the pencil being a set of molten salt lines to function as a heat transport loop to the surface where the generators would be housed.  Last I heard the town was all about it, considering that they were so remote that everything ran on deisal gensets, but the NRC wan't giving the idea the time of day.  That would have been ten years ago, I think.

There have been both nuclear powered commercial ship prototypes and aircraft.  Ocean ship are fine, but anything that can crash into a residential zone (as opposed to sink into a ocean of radioation shielding) is a bad idea.  That goes double for actual street vehicles.  I'd much rather see a hydrogen powered bus in a city with a nuke powered hydrogen plant than actual nuke busses no matter what kind of fuel cycle it uses.


Yes, easily.

Now that, you're gonna have to ask Kirk Sorensen about. I am pretty sure we could get it down small enough to power large-scale vehicles, like submarines and the like. A thorium powered car is probably out of the realm of feasibility. A neighborhood power plant is certainly within feasibility.

The important thing is can it be safely and economically scaled down and how far...

It's different enough that I almost wouldn't call it the same thing. It's more of a chemical filtration process, if anything.

Many people strongly object to molten salt reactors when they hear about online reprocessing because they hear the word "reprocessing" and immediately think "dirty, dangerous and expensive" without realizing how little liquid fuel reprocessing resembles solid fuel reprocessing.

This is what I meant. There's no taking out the intermediate wastes, reprocessing them into fuel, and putting them back in. they're just left in there until they burn up, and then are removed as the final product.

Wouldn't any PHD in nuclear physics be able to get a permit or do they require one to be part of the cartel?

A molten salt reactor requires ongoing reprocessing to remove fission product poisions. This form of reprocessing is very different from solid fuel reprocessing because it's just a matter of adding a fractional distillation column to the existing piping. There is no requirement to transport or manually handle the waste and the isotopes which can be burned get inserted directly back into the fuel salt instead of manufactured into new solid fuel elements.

Actinides can remain in the fuel salt indefinately until they are consumed. Any negative reactivity they add can be easily compensated for by increasing fuel concentration. This is something trivial to accomplish when the fuel is liquid but impossible when the fuel is solid.

LFTR does not produce transuranic waste because all the transuranics are consumed internally. That's why the waste that is removed from a LFTR will only require 300 years of storage instead of 10000.