101–106 of 106 posts
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India seems to only go for technologies that foreign companies have developed. Guess why? Kick backs are a nice way of living the good life. This, even as recent hikes in fuel prices across the country are putting paid to the dreams of a growing economy.
You guys must be kidding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl5DiTPw3dk
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Google is in the renewable energy business. They have devoted well over $400Million US to solar, hydro, and wind power startups. They see energy as their biggest cost point in the next decade (powering data centers is not trivial).
If Google has actually spent that much on renewables, then why didn't they give Bussard the measly $5M (or maybe it was $20M) for which he practically begged them, back on 11/09/06? He needed $200M, over 5 years, to build his fusion reactor, but only a small fraction of that to confirm some important experimental results which he had achieved just before the Navy cut his funding. He believed that he could get that co…
$280Million just in june.
I don't know anything about Bussard, but seems like he unfortunately passed away before completing his research (which admittedly was underfunded). However I wonder if part of the reason for it being underfunded is that it promised power that was TOO cheap. Too cheap to profit at the same scale as coal etc.
the UK National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) undertook a recent independent assessment, in which it assessed a number of claims made by proponents of thorium fuel. The report can be found at: http://www.nnl.co.uk/positionpapers
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As a nuclear engineer, I doubt it.
Sorry to say this but you have probably been deceived by the nuclear industry. First of all thorium is much cheaper (about 160 times I think), secondly it's far more abundant and third LFTR has a much better design. The industry dismissed liquid reactors because of the problem extracting weapon grade material. Uranium based reactors where not as safe nor as cheap. During the cold war this made sense but not today. It…
Or perhaps you've been swept up by the breathless prose of popular science articles?
As far from peak uranium as we appear to be, there is simply no need to explore alternative fuel sources. Fuel is not scarce. The capital (political and financial) to build infrastructure - both power plants and reprocessing plants - is.
In that climate, the (never-been-built-or-licensed) LFTR is only a game-changer if its construction (and licensing and R&D) costs are an order of magnitude lower than those of current-gen reactors. This I highly doubt.
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Like I said, the cost of fuel doesn't matter. Fuel could be free, and a new reactor would still take forever to pay for itself.
But if you look at the design you will see that it's much more simple than a PWR. All calculations I've seen puts the cost of construction well below the cost of modern PWRs. And the cost of fuel is still important, uranium isn't getting cheaper.
And what calculations are those?
I hear a lot about the LFTR, and I wonder what the problem is. Is there a major technical hurdle that prevents this from seeing widespread use? Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't. Sometimes a really good idea never gets used because... well... because nobody really picks it up and runs with it. It's that simple sometimes. But sometimes there's some hidden gotcha.
The ratio of plutonium needed to seed and convert thorium into fissionable uranium-233 is very high (0.8:1)
Clearly, the problem is the political will to do something different. If the nuclear lobby and the anti-nuclear lobby are both against it, it's hard to get traction. Kirk is likely correct. The only way to get this through is via the DoD. I wish FLIBE Energy the best.