I would prefer to end the use of nuclear materials for energy and spend the money putting solar of roofs and intensifying research into all forms of alternatives. There are a large number of breakthroughs happening every day. We don't need nuclear.
What would your prefer? We could always dump or waste on the enemy du jour.
And of course, there was the scare of "irradiating" food.no no no no no no no no
It was always about retards not wanting nuclear reactors by their houses. The word "nuclear" was even removed from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (now called MRI). People are stupid as fuck.
I would prefer to end the use of nuclear materials for energy and spend the money putting solar of roofs and intensifying research into all forms of alternatives. There are a large number of breakthroughs happening every day. We don't need nuclear.
What about those that use more than they produce? Where will they get their electricity? I'd like to see a system that incentivised energy use reduction. If you use the median amount of electricity, you pay the normal price per kw/hr, you use more you pay more, you use less, you pay less.
Right now solar on the roof sells power to the utilities and buys it back at night or when consumption exceeds production. Peek electricity use coincides with peek production from solar because of the use of air conditioning. Technologies are on the way that will use solar to create hydrogen which can be burned to drive fuel cells in the home or in cars, etc. Large commercial solar farms like those in California coupled with hydrogen production for fuel cells will be able to supplement what isn't produced locally. Local production, however, reduces the costs and problems associated with transmission of power over long distances.
no no no no no no no no
It was always about retards not wanting nuclear reactors by their houses. The word "nuclear" was even removed from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (now called MRI). People are stupid as fuck.
Yup, if uranium was a vitamin or Mothers didn't care about their kids, or people weren't pigs that never clean up their messes, or if nuclear reactors couldn't melt down and poison the water supply, or didn't make bomb materials, of if they were cheap to make, or about a hundred million other ifs you always hear when the subject turns to nuclear, then it would really be great. So take all your ifs and fuck yourself with them. If, fucking if. If Grandma had whiskers she'd be Grandpa. If only shit didn't smell you could crap in the kitchen sink.
Right now solar on the roof sells power to the utilities and buys it back at night or when consumption exceeds production. Peek electricity use coincides with peek production from solar because of the use of air conditioning. Technologies are on the way that will use solar to create hydrogen which can be burned to drive fuel cells in the home or in cars, etc. Large commercial solar farms like those in California coupled with hydrogen production for fuel cells will be able to supplement what isn't produced locally. Local production, however, reduces the costs and problems associated with transmission of power over long distances.
Lets compare that with the reactors we currently use. For the same gigawatt a year, they require 250 tons of uranium with 35 tons of enriched uranium. At the end you are left with 215 tons of spent uranium and 35 tons of spent fuel. The latter must be stored for 10,000 years.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\One thing to keep in mind when talking about weight of material is that uranium is extremely dense. It's hard to imagine just how heavy it is.
To put it into context, imagine yourself carrying a 1 gallon jug of milk. With a density of ~1, a gallon of milk is about 8.3 pounds. Uranium is 19x heavier than this. A 1 gallon jug filled with uranium would be approximately 72 pounds.
Have you ever lifted a car battery? They're very heavy and difficult to carry because they're filled with lead. Uranium is 68% heavier than lead.
My Toyota Corolla has a 50L fuel tank. A 50L tank filled with uranium would weigh 2105 pounds.
09/07/2010
Thorium Reactors The New Free Lunch
A week ago, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the UK newspaper the Telegraph demonstrated that he is a staunch advocate of Free Lunches in his Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium
If Barack Obama were to marshal Americas vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.
Human beings love the Free Lunch, so there were comments & chatter galore on the internets about Evan-Pritchard's article. He quoted nuclear physicist Carlo Rubbia to make his point, with one easily forgettable caveat
There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.
Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thors day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.
Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "Its the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.
"Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilization on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and its essentially free. You dont have to deal with uranium cartels," he said.
Not only does small amounts of thorium produce prodigious amounts of energy, but it seems you can't leave your house in the morning without tripping over itthis would be the only sense in which it is hazardous, apparently.
Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.
If something sounds too good to be true, it's a good bet it is. There is a joke among economists pertaining to the Efficient Market Hypothesis that goes like this
Two economists spot a $10 bill on the ground. One stoops to pick it up, and the other advises, Dont. If it were really $10, it wouldnt be there anymore.
If thorium reactors are that $10 bill, it would be fair to say that no, they're not just lying on the ground waiting for somebody to pick them up. However, there really is an opportunity in these reactors which various groups are pursuing. Carlo Rubbio, being a nuclear scientist, no doubt just waves his hands in the air when confronted with the engineering problems of creating a commercial thorium reactor.
Needless to say, no such reactor exists, and that's not entirely due to the fact that uranium was chosen over thorium decades ago because you can make atomic bombs with itthis story is popular among the usual conspiracy theorists, who probably also believe that the political power of the oil & coal companies is the sole reason we don't the run the whole economy on renewable energy today. Nevertheless, a promising path for nuclear energy was largely abandoned in the past, and is now being picked up again.
Without much effort, I found several credible sources of information about the state of thorium reactor development. I will quote from IEEE Spectrum's Is Thorium the Nuclear Fuel of the Future?
...several countries are investigating the possibility of thorium-based energy generation: India's working on an Advanced Heavy Water Reactor, Japan has the miniFuji, Russia is working on the VVER-1000 and even the United States has long term plans to experiment with commercial energy generation by thorium. Most of these plans are nebulous, but for some its a serious option. The country with the most specific plan is India, which has drawn up a three-stage process to rely almost entirely on thorium by 2030.
[My note: Did you spot an important keyword in that paragraph? "and even the United States has long term plans..."]
India has been very aggressive about meeting its energy needs with thorium. They are embarked on a multi-stage development which may pay off a few decades from now
The fast breeder reactor is only the second stage of a long-term project. There are no defined time lines as lot of technology development, research and demonstration activities need to be completed before commercial deployment of thorium reactors for power, Thakur told me in an email. I think it is decades away. First, he explains, we need to have a significant capacity of the fast breeder reactors where thorium could be used as a blanket. (For a good overview on what this means, read this article on thorium reactor physics at the World Nuclear Association.)
The IEEE Spectrum article talks about other designs (e.g. LFTR, liquid fluoride) and provides links to additional information. Here's the bottom line
... I must note here that there are counter-arguments to these arguments and counter-counter-arguments to boot. If I listed them all it would just be turtles all the way down.
Ultimately, we can argue all we want, but the proof will come in the most basic possible formsomeone submitting a credible design to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission or some analogous body. So far, that hasnt happened. NRC spokesperson Scott Burnell told Spectrum that there isn't anything on our radar for a thorium-based reactor at this point.
As the old saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. Religious disputes about energy from thorium go on and on, just as they always do when one is arguing about somethinga commercial thorium reactor providing real power to real peoplethat does not exist.
The Free Lunch is not free, and is dangerous besides, because of the cost of opportunities foregone as we engage in single-minded pursuit of it
The true cost of something is what you give up to get it. This includes not only the money spent in buying (or doing) the something, but also the economic benefits that you did without because you bought (or did) that particular something and thus can no longer buy (or do) something else...
If we did as Evans-Pritchard suggestsmarshal Americas vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project to develop thorium reactorswe would forego the opportunity to develop other sources of energy, to learn how to live with less energy, etc. Since he writes about economic issues for the Telegraph, one would think he knows this already. And if he knows about Free Lunches & opportunity costs, then only shamelessness, combined with willful ignorance, can explain why he wrote such a misleading sales pitch for thorium reactors.
Wake me up when there's a commercial thorium reactor up & running somewhere on Earth. Then, and only then, will we know the true costs & benefits of energy from thorium.
What is sideline basically scary about Thorium is that its more abundant that Uranium and its most abundant isotope is fissionable.
Here everyone is peeing their pants about North Korea and Iran finally purifying enough U238 to get to 94% weapons grade U235, so they can build a nuclear weapon, and with thorium its possible to skip that timely process.
But for generating electricity in a reactor, thorium seems way way better than Uranium.
Right, the big bad E.P.A. won't let the poor energy companies pump more gas, so the price can drop and they make less money.
We have already built and ran a LFTR thorium reactor and ran it for years in the 60's, it worked as designed. We need to seriously restart research to be able to build a new commercial reactor and that requires funding which hasn't been there.
The problem is that a lot of people, like yourself, hear "nuclear" and start screaming without really knowing what the possible potential could be. Like I said, we have 3 basic options for baseline power generation and I would much prefer (assuming it scales up and works as advertised) we use something like thorium versus coal, nat gas, or conventional nuclear. If thorium doesn't work for whatever reason I still think nuclear is our best option given the choices but wouldn't it be great if we could get rid of the really bad parts of nuclear power?
The power of renewable energy is really coming to light, but what about the people that live in northern climes.
Yep, the price of natural gas is falling like a rock because they've discovered there are incredible amounts of relatively cheap to recover deposits. Not enough money to be made.
Hehehehehehe, here we go with the if. Nuclear would just be great if. Trust me I know all about the potential for nuclear and have for years and years, if........... Hehe Nuclear fusion is even better if and when and if.....
Crazy folk like me aren't going away...
I would prefer to end the use of nuclear materials for energy and spend the money putting solar of roofs and intensifying research into all forms of alternatives. There are a large number of breakthroughs happening every day. We don't need nuclear.
Unless you think current solar tech is good enough to produce all energy, you're relying on a pretty big IF yourself. IF we can develop solar enough that it's not cost prohibitive as our main power source. IF we can figure out a completely new form of power I don't even know about.
We have a current source of energy which is less harmful that one already in use. Explain to me why we should continue using the more harmful one while we develop better techniques? Using nuclear now <> never using solar/alternatives in the future.
I don't know what you don't know about so I don't know where to begin.
Technologies are on the way that will use solar to create hydrogen which can be burned to drive fuel cells in the home or in cars, etc.
Never create even a little poison that will kill for thousands of years. Even the dumbest person knows that is evil and that you will only do that if you are an asshole who cares more about making money then they do about children. Fuck all of you who want nuclear power because it's your message to us dumb people.
Unless you think current solar tech is good enough to produce all energy, you're relying on a pretty big IF yourself. IF we can develop solar enough that it's not cost prohibitive as our main power source. IF we can figure out a completely new form of power I don't even know about.
We have a current source of energy which is less harmful that one already in use. Explain to me why we should continue using the more harmful one while we develop better techniques? Using nuclear now <> never using solar/alternatives in the future.
The harm of fossil fuel will dissipate once we stop using it. Nuclear waste won't. It will last and last and last and last for many thousands of years.