"I think from a long-range standpoint--I'm talking about humanity--the most important thing we could do is start by having an international meeting where we first outlaw nuclear weapons and then we outlaw nuclear reactors, too." - Hyman Rickover, January 28, 1982
Norway is building thorium reactor
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Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#92A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Ractor is as safe a unit as is possible. Look it up online. Much safer, cheaper, and more versatile than a bulky CANDU. It can be throttled and scaled which is a huge advantage. There is plenty of easily accessable thorium worldwide. It also can generate radioisotopes that are extremely useful and much more readily extracted from the reactor than those currently used.
Time to begin building these.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#93If 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…
Norway might not support, but Finland is majority owner of Fortum (51%), which the news article states as a partner. So governments aren't completely out of the picture.
Fortum actually has slightly more nuclear power production in Sweden than in Finland. But your sentiment rings true, indeed only Finland is pro-nuclear in this common energy market (NASDAQ OMX Commodities Europe, previously Nord Pool).
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 curre…
I was surprised about "about the size of a beach ball". Wikipedia says thorium is 11.7 g per cubic centimeter, so the one ton beach ball works out to a diameter of roughly 55 cm if my math is right, which is a reasonable beach ball. It turns out my intuitions aren't much use with metal beach balls.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I checked some facts; 2W / m^2 for wind[0], 1000W / m^2 for nuclear[1]. Even if they didn't account for some infrastructure, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't decrease that number 500 times. Nuclear fission is one of the most powerful energy sources (in energy per unit of mass of fuel)…
I always wonder why people disregard nuclear like its low efficiency. It is taking elements that are inherently (in the case of uranium / plutonium, any passive nuclear power source) or situationally (thorium) emitting radiation (photon emissions, a kind of light, which is a form of energy) and using that heat energy to boil water. And these unstable atoms were made by exploding stars . It is hard to get more energy…
> It is hard to get more energy dense than that. Fusion requires you to put in so much power in the first place to just get to hydrogen burning
Yeah, that's why a hydrogen bomb uses an atomic bomb as a trigger. But getting a stable, self-sustaining fusion reaction would quickly recoup for initial energy investment.
Unfortunately, as for the third reaction, I don't see much future for us using annihilation large-scale, at least in the coming centuries. It's simple: we don't have any antimatter around in significant quantities [0] and making it is a terribly inefficient process.
[0] - maybe it's fortunate; pure antimatter is probably the most dangerous source of energy out there; one mistake and we'd kill ourselves with it.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, I thought the large heat sink inherent in the CANDU design essentially ensured that with no human interaction that CANDU reactors would failsafe. My understanding was such that the 'reactor' might be destroyed but the design was such that the failure cascade would not release radioactive materials outside of the containment units.
As I said, I don't know the safety systems of CANDU :) Large heat sink buys you time to get the cooling working again. Ultimately the heat must be transferred out somehow. In modern reactor designs these systems are usually designed to passively for very long times. With CANDU's it is very likely to be the case too. In nuclear engineering one must always consider also the chance, that not everything is working as des…
would be a 100 km meteorite smashing the plant to atoms
Or an airplane...
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I said, I don't know the safety systems of CANDU :) Large heat sink buys you time to get the cooling working again. Ultimately the heat must be transferred out somehow. In modern reactor designs these systems are usually designed to passively for very long times. With CANDU's it is very likely to be the case too. In nuclear engineering one must always consider also the chance, that not everything is working as des…
would be a 100 km meteorite smashing the plant to atoms Or an airplane...
At least in European Union new nuclear power plants are designed to withstand a collision of any currently used commercial airplane.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
would be a 100 km meteorite smashing the plant to atoms Or an airplane...
At least in European Union new nuclear power plants are designed to withstand a collision of any currently used commercial airplane.
That's nice. Except these facilities tend to last 50+ years, and planes keep getting bigger...
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/vulnerable-to-pl...
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least in European Union new nuclear power plants are designed to withstand a collision of any currently used commercial airplane.
That's nice. Except these facilities tend to last 50+ years, and planes keep getting bigger... http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/vulnerable-to-pl...
None of Germany's nuclear power plants is built after 2001. Before that hardly anyone cared about planes, when designing nuclear power plant.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's nice. Except these facilities tend to last 50+ years, and planes keep getting bigger... http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/vulnerable-to-pl...
None of Germany's nuclear power plants is built after 2001. Before that hardly anyone cared about planes, when designing nuclear power plant.
None of Germany's nuclear power plants is built after 2001.
Yes. I guess we'll be fine if we just kindly ask those terrorists to not crash their planes into an older plant.