Norway is building thorium reactor • Hacker News Board

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#31

Post by billysilly » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 12:13 PM UTC

velodrome wrote: post #25

ianbooker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear fellow free market enthusiast, I fear it is not possible to determine a price for the storage of nuclear waste, because it needs to be taken care of so long. If one could estimate a price, I would doubt that any of todays companies companies is yet big enough to pay for it. If you look at germany for instance: We are using nuclear power since decades, in almost 20 plants. Yet there is no solution for waste stora…

The US had a ban on reprocessing nuclear material and the industry is currently not commercially viable. However, other countries (France and Germany) do recycle their nuclear material. This can help reduce the amount of nuclear waste. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

That's nice and all, but "help reduce" doesn't really equal a "solution for waste storage", and does not change the fact that society, not the companies that built, run and extracted profits from these plants, will have to pay the costs (which we cannot even calculate as long as we don't even have a storage solution, which makes shrugging them off even more criminal -- yeah, maybe it won't be so bad, but we shrug it off because we'll be dead by then, not because we know, and that's rather weak at best, disgusting at worst).

In that wikipedia article you linked, Germany only occurs only once on that page, with a facility that has been out of operation since 1990 - WTF?

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#32

Post by rimantas » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 12:14 PM UTC

ianbooker wrote: post #17

scarmig wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many nuke advocates go much too far in the "nuclear power will solve all our problems!" That said, the strongest arguments for nuclear power has always been as part of a balanced energy diet, not as the off the shelf answer to everything. So, how do we figure out where it's appropriate and where not? Properly price carbon, and remove all distorting subsidies to all forms of energy, from fossil fuels to solar…

Dear fellow free market enthusiast, I fear it is not possible to determine a price for the storage of nuclear waste, because it needs to be taken care of so long. If one could estimate a price, I would doubt that any of todays companies companies is yet big enough to pay for it. If you look at germany for instance: We are using nuclear power since decades, in almost 20 plants. Yet there is no solution for waste stora…

Coal plants also produce nuclear waste. It either goes with the smoke or is filtered. What do they do with the filters though?

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#33

Post by gregsq » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 12:37 PM UTC

There's no insinuation in my posting this link, and it's not directly pertinent to Thorium reactors, but the free PDF downloadable from here is a good reference for these kinds of discussions, I think. Helped me with perspective anyway.

http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#34

Post by konstruktor » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 12:37 PM UTC

marvin wrote: post #26

If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy. Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physic…

Thanks for, without giving actual examples, telling us that the people opposing nuclear are uninformed and unable to form complete sentences. Without this enlightened information one might have listened to them and judged them based on their arguments. Edit: spelling

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#35

Post by henrikgs » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 12:44 PM UTC

According to an article in a norwegian newspaper[1], there are much bigger challenges in extracting the thorium from the ore in Norway. The thorium in India is supposedly easier utilize.

The technology today requires use of a lot of nasty chemicals to extract thorium. I think this is a big issue for the government in addition to running nuclear reactors.

[1]In norwegian: http://www.aftenposten.no/okonomi/Gigantisk-energikilde-i-Te...

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#36

Post by snom380 » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 12:54 PM UTC

emiliobumachar wrote: post #27

marvin wrote: post #26

If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy. Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physic…

Being cynical, perhaps the fact they're swimming in oil makes them disintersted as a nation in developing alternative energy.

Actually, that's not being cynical. A lot of engineering brainpower goes to the oil industry since it is so big. Almost any engineering company has oil and gas companies as their biggest customers. In comparison, hydroelectric is mainly maintenance and upgrades since most of the waterfalls have been built out.

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#37

Post by chromaticorb » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 1:25 PM UTC

emiliobumachar wrote: post #27

marvin wrote: post #26

If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy. Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physic…

Being cynical, perhaps the fact they're swimming in oil makes them disintersted as a nation in developing alternative energy.

No, no, theyre fully aware of that. The people behind this are the Halden Reactor Project, they already operate this small nuclear reactor that was (don't know if it still is) used to power a paper mill. The whole thing is just for some clout in world research. Leave it to the Norwegians!

They're a wonderful bunch of people, I had the chance to study some safety in software engineering principles with them, about 6 months ago. I had no idea they were planning to implement Thorium.

They do a huge bunch of research in Human Factors, and half of the team basically hack about with Kinects as their job designing AR solutions rehearsing dangerous nuclear sites/oil rigs

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#38

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 1:42 PM UTC

marvin wrote: post #26

If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy. Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physic…

For all our supposed good policies, we are still subject to mob rule and completely uninformed detractors.

To democracy! All hail the will of the people!

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#39

Post by da3da » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 2:20 PM UTC

tehabe wrote: post #13

dthunt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great talk. Gates's foundation has made a handful of bad investments (generally small) but I'm generally really impressed with the thought they put into where to invest and why. While it's a little bit scary that Japan and Germany are both trending (more than trending) away from nuclear, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world. Neither country will go for coal. Both countries will need to invest in other techno…

I'm more scared about countries who start using nuclear power.

I'm curious why that is? I remember a table that showed the deaths per terawatt-hour of each energy source [1]. Coal was the highest, and nuclear was the lowest (below all the renewables even). I don't know if this data is accurate, but assuming it is, I can't understand why nuclear doesn't have more support.

[1] http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#40

Post by jpdoctor » Sat, Dec 01, 2012, 2:52 PM UTC

marvin wrote: post #26

If I am correctly informed (would love to hear from people who are involved in the project), this project is being done in spite of the Norwegian government's stance on nuclear energy. Thor Energy and its associated researchers have tried to stir up support for thorium reserach for years now, but there has been very little support and large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad"). A number of physic…

> Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean

Only for some definitions of clean. Forget the radiation, Thorium's toxicity profile is not pretty. Hell, the damn thing is pyrophoric.

Hats off to the engineers if they can make a more sensible reactor out of it.