Topic: Thorium power, how is it going in the US? - page 4. (Read 11262 times)

Probably because for most anyone with any training in the field capable of doing it without killing themselves, the construction of a reactor without the consent of the NRC is a federal felony.

Excluding the "Nuclear Boy Scout" of course, but all he did was build a breader reactor in his mom's tool shed, and probably shorten his lifespan by about 20 years.


It's not accurate.


Negligible, a few grams per ton of fuel consumed, less after it's had more exposure to the neutrons and some has transmutated to other elements with shorter half lives.  The majority of them has half lives in the 4 and 12 year ranges, and can reasonablely be sequestered into leaded glass in a safe manner for 100 years or more.


I don't understand this question. I haven't seen the video, are the talking about medical radioisotopes?  They are valuable, but they are not created in any useful quantity unless the reactor is designed to do it deliberately.  Most such radioisotopes are created by one of a few tiny research reactors that produce negible amounts of electrical power, usually less than the facilty they are housed in consumes.  It's hard to have it both ways, wither the reactor is designed for research or it's designed for power production.


On a side note, there is more radioactive materals put into the atmostphere each year by coal plants, mostly due to the thorium in the coal in trace amounts, than that what was released by Three Mile Island.  Thorium is, literally, found everywhere on earth.

That's not quite true.  The transuratics are less involved in a thorium cycle, but there are more in a liquid reactor design, and since transuratics are a neutron 'poison' they would have to be delt with on an ongoing basis.  While the processing of a liquid core is technically easier than a spent solid core, it's still very real.

Thanks that is a fascinating video. It however does rise the question what those guys think they are doing, like beating a dead horse.

From the looks of it a proof of concept reactor could be built on a shoestring budget in a garage. Why hasn't it been done yet?
It does clarify some things but there still is the point of nuclear waste, how accurate is the claim of no transuranic waste? Is it really none? A few atoms would be negligible but even a few milligram is not.
The next thing is the actual fission byproducts, I doubt they are all as valuable as it is claimed to be, but like to be proven wrong

If there really is no catch, I'd say:
brb overtaking civilization.

That video there starts with a 5 minute summary, and then goes into more depth. Watch at least that first five minutes, and if you can, hang around for the whole two hours. Great info in there.

I'm going to say it again: not a nuclear engineer. Quizzing me on the specifics will get, at best, educated guesses.
Here is where I got my info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

In a LFTR, there's no reprocessing. It all just stays in there until it comes out as ²³⁷Np. Or whatever the actual end product is. I'm not a nuclear engineer.

Reprocessing is for solid fuels.

Well doesn't that refer to the reprocessing part of spent fuel?

Well, you ask a silly question, you're gonna get a silly answer.

I stopped at...
What did I miss?
...
Everything after that

Oh lol

Everything after that. Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#Fission_product_wastes

I stopped at "uranium is breeded out of thorium". If there is uranium involved at any point there will be uranium fission byproducts.
What did I miss?

I don't have the numbers to share. That's the point of the parenthetical statement, and the "probably". But if you had done any research on the thorium cycle, you would know that spent fuel from it is actually spent. It's hardly more radioactive than thorium itself. "Spent" fuel rods from traditional nuclear reactors still have most of their fuel still active, and are chock-full of transuranics.

Well that sounds hard to believe... mind to share those numbers? What exactly are we talking about? What kind of dumps is the nuclear energy doing?
How do you think fission byproducts are so fundamentally different?

anyone who's actually interested in thorium energy, check out gordon mcdowell on youtube - http://www.youtube.com/user/gordonmcdowell  

he is doing a great job of documenting various speakers/experts on the subject.

my personal favorite one to start with is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

2 hours long, and it's a couple years old, but it does cover most of the basics.

enjoy

Theoretical is not actual, and unlikely ever to be. The maximum theoretical efficiency of an internal combustion engine is about 39%. In actuality the most efficient have trouble breaking 20%. Further the efficiency of the panels isn't the end of the story. Now you have to do something with it because the sun does not shine 24/7/365. It can be sold back to the power company and credited for later, but there are line losses and other losses involved. You can store it locally through any number of means, but every time its form is changed there are additional losses.

However that is all beside the point, the real point is that solar could be 100% efficient end to end and it still would be 9-10 orders of magnitude less dense than either fission or fusion. Which, as I said back in post 58, isn't to say that solar is of no use, only that without subsidies its applications will be very limited and that no level of subsidies can overcome a 9 order of magnitude disadvantage in the long run.

Everyone could dump their old reactor - hell, their spent fuel - in the woods out back, and it would still probably have less long-term impact than the kinds of dumps the current nuclear industry is creating.

(And I only say probably because I'm not certain of the hard numbers.)

Well, here's wikipedia right back at you!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multijunction_solar_cell
This type of cells have a theoretical maximum efficiency around 90%..
So the only real limit now is economics.
Thing is, even with your calculated lower yield you still have enough roofspace on a house to cover a family.
But with time these high yield PVs will be widely available for a low enough price.
And like with bitcoin people will be 'mining' electricity.

I think I haven't made that clear enough: With nuclear power in hands of the general public there will be some people who do not obey the necessary steps to implement clean waste disposal.

The scenario we are talking about are reactors small enough you can carry around, like the size of a coffee machine with the corresponding additional machinery in the range of a refrigerator to a shipping container. While that would be very cool in terms of decentralized power it will also mean that there are new kinds of environmental threats associated with it.
The critique is not about the principal versatility of such a system but of how the current society would deal with it.

Even with very rigorous fines some people would still dispose their spent reactor in the woods, some lake, etc... And that can have dire consequences.
I realize that such a reactor would have less impact that lets say a spent fuel rod, you don't see those in the hands of people with complete disregard of consequences.

Like this?: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/photogalleries/100708-radioactive-nuclear-waste-science-salt-mine-dump-pictures-asse-ii-germany/

Yeah, no. Look up what the thorium fuel cycle's end states are.

The thorium cycle could use the stuff in that mine (well, most of it) as fuel.

Well my point is i don't think it's wise to have lots of tiny reactors everywhere. There is just so much that can go wrong and no matter what eventually some accident will happen when they are cracked open.
Yes eventually thorium reactors could be as safe as batteries but it will be a long time till that happens, and somehow I doubt it.

And lets say that does happen what after a decade? What to do with em? They gonna be everywhere some of them will end up in a landfill and don't tell me that won't rise the average dosage of ionizing radiation and inhaled active particles.