Peter Thiel's class had an interesting part on Thorium: http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/23787022006/peter-thiels...
Norway is building thorium reactor
41–50 of 102 posts
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#42If 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…
>nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad
Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the top of my head i think a wind farm is also more energy dense than a nuclear power plant, given all the space required around it.
That is not to say it is 'baaad' because it does have some uses; eg it can provide a baseline power. Basically, we need many different sources, but there are (more?) informed people who oppose nuclear for very good reasons.
OTOH thorium could be great, but it has not been proven commercially yet. We'll see what happens but i remain sceptical until proven otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_g...
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#43If 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…
>nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the t…
The cost of power from nuclear is quite competitive. Capital costs are high but, like renewables, amortized over a long lifetime with low operational costs. Your wiki link puts nuclear cheaper than solar or offshore wind, and barely more expensive than onshore wind.
Moving to small modular reactors, as many outfits are trying to do, will lower the required investment and time to production. Liquid thorium or fast uranium would largely eliminate long-term storage problem...in fact, we'd eliminate the long-lived wastes we have right now. (In the meantime we should keep wastes in a form we can use for fuel later.)
Renewables are great as far as they go, but there are only so many places you can build a good dam, and wind needs either a large oversupply, an economical energy storage system (which, other than the limited hydro, doesn't exist), a drastically souped-up and expensive power grid, or possibly all three. You don't have to worry about that if you're just adding power on the margins, but you do if you want to run civilization carbon-free. Taking all that into account, it's questionable whether wind would really be cheaper, especially as we're forced to expand into less suitable locations.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#44If 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.
But you need only small amounts of it. In a LFTR, one ton of thorium, about the size of a beach ball, is sufficient fuel for a one-gigawatt reactor to run for a year.
Compare that to the enormous quantities of coal ash we produce every day. It's hard to imagine chemical toxicity being a major problem. People used to make lamps out of the stuff.
In fact, given that thorium is a byproduct of rare earth mines, and currently considered a hazardous waste, it'd be nice to have something to do with it.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#45If 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…
>nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the t…
That would be a rational, well-informed counterargument against traditional nuclear power plants. It is not a counterargument against seed-level funding for R&D towards a completely new reactor technology, which has different economic and safety characteristics. Accelerator-based reactors, which are what have been proposed for publically-sponsored research in Norway, are a completely different beast. Yet they are treated as if it was a proposal to build 1050s Soviet-style reactors.
I am not trying to be hostile here, but you are making the exact same assumptions and fallacies as most of the Norwegian detractors to thorium reactor research. Although the criticism I was referring to in my post was rather the type you most commonly see: Uninformed dismissals of the type "We're still feeling the effects of Chernobyl", "Nuclear reactors are inherently unsafe" and "Nuclear waste cannot be handled in a safe way".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf35.html
Traditional counterarguments to nuclear energy should not be enough to dismiss using a couple of million a year to look into promising, alternate solutions.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Good point. The Norwegian oil companies are, in fact, swimming in money (mainly due to high oil prices), but getting oil up from the North Sea in 2012 is vastly more complex than drilling a hole in the ground and attaching a hose to it. There are lots of incredibly smart and dedicated people working in these companies.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That’s kinda beside the point, you know. We already have all that waste. We already have to deal with it somehow. There is no avoiding it. So we might as well add to it.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#48If 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…
Wasn't uranium-based nuclear energy supposed to be very cheap, too, and then it turned out it wasn't that cheap? I worry the same will happen with thorium.
Also how much safer is it? Can it be set-up just a few KM outside a city? Is there any dangerous waste to deposit at all?
I do think that if we are to continue research in nuclear energy it should be based on Thorium, rather than uranium, but in the same time, I would much rather have the focus of the energy industry be solar energy right now.
I hope countries in the future are powered 70-80% by solar, and 20-30% by other sources like nuclear energy (at least until we figure out how to store solar energy cheaply for night use), than the other way around. And we can only get there fast if we have the industry's almost complete focus on solar energy, and have them invest billions into researching it and lowering the cost of solar panels.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#49If 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…
>nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the t…
Don't forget to consider the cost of externalities (environmental damage, health costs), which probably roughly double the true cost of nonrenewable fuels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_g...
Also, as for the comments that oil is still king in terms of absolute price, keep in mind that we probably peaked around 2004:
https://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2008_fot...
In my mind, we crossed the peak when diesel became more expensive than gasoline, because that meant that availability/exploration became the primary cost instead of refinement (because diesel has more energy and is easier to refine).
In fairness, we won't reach peak coal for at least several more decades, but my guess is that the externalities associated with coal will become unpalatable once a category 5 hurricane takes out New York City or Florida is under water. Or, when disaster relief crosses say 50% of the government's budget.
I forgot to mention that I'm against all new nuclear unless it can burn waste and plutonium. Partially because I saw the reactors underwater outside Omaha and realized that we are only a human error away from a Fukushima event here in the US.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
>nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad Nuclear is not the panacea almost every 'informed' internet citizen thinks it is. It is EXPENSIVE. Wind and hydro power are already cheaper, for example. On top of that, whilst any new nuclear power plant will take many years to produce, costs for renewables continue to fall, and, it obviously has a huge number of risks (not just 'meltdown' but costs, security, long-term storage etc). Off the t…
Don't forget to consider the cost of externalities (environmental damage, health costs), which probably roughly double the true cost of nonrenewable fuels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_g... Also, as for the comments that oil is still king in terms of absolute price, keep in mind that we probably peaked around 2004: https://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2008_fot... In my min…
Again, I am not an expert on Thorium but it's my understanding that the health and safety risks involved are much lower than traditional nuclear plants.