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Norway is building thorium reactor

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Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#61

Post by specialist »

pjscott wrote: post #3

This isn't one of the fancy liquid fluoride thorium reactors that people immediately think of. It's a scheme for incorporating thorium into the fuel mix in existing reactors. Still very cool.

Agreed.

Also, this is the first I've read that thorium reactors can also use up (dispose) waste. (Not an expert, or even an informed layperson, just a news junkie.)

We need to reduce, reuse, eliminate waste and weapons grade stockpiles. Something less evil than using depleted uranium bullets to convert foreign countries into uninhabitable radioactive hotspots.

From my casual reading, that's meant traveling wave reactors. Having another energy source is just a happy side benefit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#62

Post by ThomPete »

polshaw wrote: post #42
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…

>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…

Wind and hydro does not begin to address the need for exponentially more energy and neither of them are the future in any important factor.

Furthermore. It is estimated that 100.000 people die from the use of coal to generate energy every year. More than nuclear power have ever done ( 4,000 people ever).

The only thing that is problematic with nuclear is storing it, a problem which can be solved.

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#63

Post by arrrg »

lutze wrote: post #52
arrrg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, the "in for a penny" school of thought. A very sensible and reasonable approach to something that could affect the future of our entire species!

Don’t be so overdramatic. If we were to use modern technology we would likely no greatly increase the amount of waste, if not decrease it.

The costs are already there. The costs are mostly fixed. The marginal costs are minimal. It’s in for 99 pennies, in for a pound.

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#64

Post by ThomPete »

konstruktor wrote: post #34
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

Perhaps you could introduce some arguments for this opposition instead of just do what you complain about.

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#65

Post by DennisP »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #58
DennisP wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curre…

People in southern Utah used to go climb the buttes to get a better view of the fireballs from the Nevada nuclear bomb tests. Not sure I'd use what people used to do as a standard to measure against.

I'm just saying, if people can survive thorium lamps, we can probably manage to use modest amounts of thorium in much more controlled circumstances without undue difficulty.

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#66

Post by TeMPOraL »

da3da wrote: post #39
tehabe wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'd guess mostly because of "large amount of uninformed opposition ("nu-cu-lar is baaaaaad")", to quote from another comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4857371).

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#68

Post by fleitz »

mtgx wrote: post #48
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…

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 w…

Canada has already solved most of the typical nuclear problems with the CANDU design and ecosystem.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/CANDU_fue...

CANDU runs on natural uranium so the waste products are actually less radioactive than what we take out of the earth, as well CANDU can burn nuclear waste from light water reactors alleviating the need for Yucca mountain.

Lets look at it's meltdown profile, CANDU reactors need heavy water to function, if you replace the heavy water with light water fission stops, no meltdown. Also before the reactor would ever get to that point the fuel bundles deform, halting meltdown.

CANDU reactors are designed to put less radioactive material back into the earth than came out of it, and when problems occur in a CANDU design it fails safe.

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#69

Post by ScotterC »

Interestingly this has already been done in the U.S. kinda. Back when I was working on Indian Point Units 2 & 3 I found a paper about Unit 1 where - about 30 years ago - they mixed in some of the fuel bundles with Thorium to see how well the neutron flux would turn it into Uranium and possibly breed more fuel. It was really fascinating but, although they had some success, there was really no need for it in the U.S. because Uranium is not in short supply and as this article points out, solid fuel reactors kind of dismiss all the advantages of thorium.

Re: Norway is building thorium reactor

#70

Post by s_henry_paulson »

ScotterC wrote: post #69

Interestingly this has already been done in the U.S. kinda. Back when I was working on Indian Point Units 2 & 3 I found a paper about Unit 1 where - about 30 years ago - they mixed in some of the fuel bundles with Thorium to see how well the neutron flux would turn it into Uranium and possibly breed more fuel. It was really fascinating but, although they had some success, there was really no need for it in the U.S. b…

Even prior to that in the 1960s the US invented Molten Salt Thorium nuclear reactors at Oak Ridge.

They were shelved not because of the abundant supply of Uranium, but rather because they could not be used to make weapons.

http://energyfromthorium.com/history.html

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