251–260 of 554 posts
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You need a sufficiently large reserve to allow the reactor to cool, not an infinite supply. Reactors can be shut down and in this case the pool is sized to absorb all decay heat from the shutdown, plus a significant safety margin.
And if the pool gets a leak?
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This is IMO a positive for nuclear, not a negative. You're forced to confront the cleanup as opposed to fossil fuels, where you just blow your waste out into the atmosphere and make it the commons' problem.
If only a method for permanent disposal of nuclear waste actually existed.
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If only a method for permanent disposal of nuclear waste actually existed.
Many such methods exist. There are no methods that have 100% answers for every "what if 5 things go wrong at once?" question. That's true for everything, but those questions only get asked for nuclear energy.
This is huge. Not only are micro reactors far more economical, it dramatically reduces the need to maintain a massive nationwide grid and provides flexibility to people in remote areas including greater autonomy. Efficiency should be greater without massive transmission line losses. Might start fewer fires in California too.
> This is huge. Not only are micro reactors far more economical No, they aren't. They are more expensive per unit of power produced, by far bigger than any other powerplant in practical use. The only way I see nuclear getting economical is it getting bigger . Nuclear's biggest advantage after the cost of fuel is its huuuuuuge power density, and power scalability. With currently technology level, it's possible to gene…
Mass production is a no-brainer.
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If you could solve climate change for less than that, I think it would be splendid. To put that number in context, which is just an order of magnitude, it's $5,000 for every person on Earth, about 1.5x the current US national debt, and just under the combined market cap of NYSE+NASDAQ. As an existential problem for humanity that doesn't currently have a solution, I think that's a decent cost estimate.
This is in no way to disagree with your overall point, but marine cloud brightening looks like it might be a fairly cost-effective solution to climate change. It's unproven, but not an insane gamble either, and it has little risk of second-order consequences if it doesn't work. All that at a cost of single-digit billions per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening#Costs
Going after a single unproven solution (yes this includes non-existing types of nuclear energy too) is just magic at this point and it doesn’t work.
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You need a sufficiently large reserve to allow the reactor to cool, not an infinite supply. Reactors can be shut down and in this case the pool is sized to absorb all decay heat from the shutdown, plus a significant safety margin.
Great, and ideally gravity can be used to move it. Remember, at Fukushima power to the pumps was lost.
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There's no research being done on materials to safely contain molten radioactive salt, that research could be dangerous, pretty much only superpowers would have the resources to do the research.
This was being done three years ago: https://www.powermag.com/thorium-molten-salt-reactor-experim... Also, I believe Copenhagen Atomics is doing this at the moment, but couldn't (quickly) find a reference.