81–90 of 97 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a reason we call MRI machines MRIs, and not NMRIs. Rebranding around public perception matters, whether we like it or not.
I don't buy it. For example in Germany MRI is usually called "Kernspintomographie" ("nuclear spin tomography") and nobody has any issue with that.
> similar radioactivity at 100 years to uranium-plutonium fuel cycles, and actually has higher waste radioactivity at 100,000 years At 100 years your radioactivity is still dominated by fission products, which are the same in either reactor. At 100,000 years the radioactivity is minuscule with any reactor. But what you don't have with thorium or fast uranium reactors is a lot of transuranic waste, like plutonium. Tha…
A few points: * Uranium-Plutonium fuel in a closed cycle can burn all the transuranics and have very low radiotoxicity waste as well. * Molten salt fuels are 10x less dense than typical solid fuels, implying an increase in waste volume. They're also water soluble and frequently liquid. This complicates waste disposal and transport. Not terribly, but still. A good summary reference on radiotoxicity vs. reprocessing is…
That doesn't necessarily imply anything about the waste volume. With high burnup, the waste is just fission products, which are entirely different elements than the fuel.
One reason high burnup is easier in MSRs is that xenon, a neutron poison, is a gas that just bubbles out of the liquid fuel, instead of being trapped in a solid. With fast uranium or thermal thorium, you also don't have a large amount fuel that can't be fissioned. (Some early MSRs will be thermal uranium, and produce more waste.)
For disposal of fission products, the general idea is to mix them into glass and bury them as solid blocks.
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Shipyard-constructed several-hundred-megawatt pressurized water reactors. The Navy has basically achieved economies of mass production with their reactors. The submarine and aircraft carrier weapons systems are expensive, but if you just did something similar for civilian power, I believe you could capture both economies of scale and economies of mass production. For decarbonizing the world very rapidly, this would b…
Both Chernobyl's RBMK and Fukushima's GE BWR reactors are widely used standard designs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a reason we call MRI machines MRIs, and not NMRIs. Rebranding around public perception matters, whether we like it or not.
I don't buy it. For example in Germany MRI is usually called "Kernspintomographie" ("nuclear spin tomography") and nobody has any issue with that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is an economical reactor model available to be built today? Practically every commercial reactor built seems to be a multi-billion dollar project that takes years to complete, with cost overruns common.
Shipyard-constructed several-hundred-megawatt pressurized water reactors. The Navy has basically achieved economies of mass production with their reactors. The submarine and aircraft carrier weapons systems are expensive, but if you just did something similar for civilian power, I believe you could capture both economies of scale and economies of mass production. For decarbonizing the world very rapidly, this would b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shipyard-constructed several-hundred-megawatt pressurized water reactors. The Navy has basically achieved economies of mass production with their reactors. The submarine and aircraft carrier weapons systems are expensive, but if you just did something similar for civilian power, I believe you could capture both economies of scale and economies of mass production. For decarbonizing the world very rapidly, this would b…
Both Chernobyl's RBMK and Fukushima's GE BWR reactors are widely used standard designs.
If one such failure amongst hundreds of reactors active for over fifty years is the price of saving millions every year, then so be it. We should use solar/wind/water to the full extent possible but not exclude nuclear energy, especially with the latest factor designs. And you can bet that Japan learned from Fukushima and that it's very unlikely that'll reoccur as well. Plus, most reactors aren't built near major fault lines, so this failure isn't even possible in most places. Let's not kill millions because of a TV drama. It's news exactly because it's rare, that's why you don't hear of people dying while installing roof solar or from air pollution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a reason we call MRI machines MRIs, and not NMRIs. Rebranding around public perception matters, whether we like it or not.
I don't buy it. For example in Germany MRI is usually called "Kernspintomographie" ("nuclear spin tomography") and nobody has any issue with that.
Yeah, let's bring down one of the few candidates who is actually treating climate change seriously with a bunch of nitpicks. Nevermind Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wanting to shut down the entire nuclear power fleet.
Also the cost estimates of nuclear don't include decomissioning because nobody has actually decomissioned a nuclear power station yet so who knows how much it costs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a reason we call MRI machines MRIs, and not NMRIs. Rebranding around public perception matters, whether we like it or not.
Yeah, but I think just calling nuclear energy thorium or quantum energy or whatever is too shallow. The nuclear element of nMRI is kind of peripheral, but I don't think anyone will let you do that with mass-to-energy conversion power plants. With airplanes, everyone knows they're really safe. Everyone says they're safer than cars. People are still afraid of airplanes but they're reassured. It'd be nice if nuclear fis…
Though true by many metrics, the fact that this has entered into the public zeitgeist is a victory in marketing.
While commercial air travel is much safer per hour and per KM, it is less safe by the metric used by the industry and its insurers: Deaths per journey.[1]
However, there's a strong argument to be made that time and distance are more relevant to the consumer anyways. Still, the per-journey metric could have been weaponized by an opponent of commercial air travel to assert the opposite.
[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16321985-200-flight-i...
Right now, when we make nuclear weapons from plutonium 239 and uranium 235, it looks like a regular machinist doing regular machinist things on a lathe, except they're doing the work in a glove box. These elements, their contaminants, and their decay products all decay by alpha decay, which is blocked a thin layer of basically anything. As long as it doesn't physically get inside your body, (hence the glove box) it's safe.
Uranium 233 from the thorium cycle inevitably is contaminated by uranium 232. Uranium 232 decays quickly into thallium 208, which is a hard gamma emitter. It takes a lot of work to get uranium 233 pure enough to make nuclear weapons out of it. Bodies with the resources to deal with this are already sophisticated enough to enrich uranium 235: the uranium 233 angle is irreverent.