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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting concept. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is how to protect these units from the bad guys.
I'd hope the first thing to come to mind is how to build the technology. Once it's built, we can start worrying about how to protect it .. why protect something that doesn't exist?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting concept. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is how to protect these units from the bad guys.
If you mean "protect these units from bad guys so they don't threaten our electrical system," that's kind of the point of having a decentralized system of smaller reactors: if one or two get sabotaged, others in the system can easily pick up the slack. If you mean "protect these units from bad guys so they don't steal the thorium and weaponize it," that's one of the great things about thorium reactors: thorium and it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you mean "protect these units from bad guys so they don't threaten our electrical system," that's kind of the point of having a decentralized system of smaller reactors: if one or two get sabotaged, others in the system can easily pick up the slack. If you mean "protect these units from bad guys so they don't steal the thorium and weaponize it," that's one of the great things about thorium reactors: thorium and it…
What about the health impact following a release of materials?
Solid thorium reactors mix Th with the existing waste piles of Plutonium sitting in cooling pools and burn that up for us[1].
There's no waste materials to release from either of these reactors.
[1] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/160131-thorium-nuclear-re...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting concept. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is how to protect these units from the bad guys.
There are two issues here, one of which strongly cuts against distributing nuclear power that broadly: If you have a lot of units, the loss of one or a few has limited effects, vs. taking out a few big baseline power plants and/or major transmission nodes. What's the local/regional cost if someone takes out a node with a sufficiently big shaped charge?
Damn. The powers that be better do something about this fast. SF is about one of the last places in the US to develop new things. Heck just a temporary prolonged outage of Google alone would have huge negative consequences for the US (not to mention the world). Amazon AWS US west is in Northeren California. I wonder how big the negative effect will be on just how many companies?
The "City" of San Francisco (though it does contain a big chunk of the tech industry and houses many of it's employees) is not the whole "Silicon Valley". Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Y-Combinator, Stanford, Yahoo, etc are all located in the South Bay and (may or may not be, the article doesn't specify) affected by the fires.
Damn. The powers that be better do something about this fast. SF is about one of the last places in the US to develop new things. Heck just a temporary prolonged outage of Google alone would have huge negative consequences for the US (not to mention the world). Amazon AWS US west is in Northeren California. I wonder how big the negative effect will be on just how many companies?
The "City" of San Francisco (though it does contain a big chunk of the tech industry and houses many of it's employees) is not the whole "Silicon Valley". Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Y-Combinator, Stanford, Yahoo, etc are all located in the South Bay and (may or may not be, the article doesn't specify) affected by the fires.
This report is an economic scenario analysis, and estimates the probable effects on the Bay Area economy of a major failure of the San Francisco Public Utility Commission’s Hetch Hetchy water system,
http://www.bayeconfor.org/pdf/hetchhetchyfinal2.pdf (map on pg 4)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the health impact following a release of materials?
Molten salt thorium reactors are "continuous reprocessing" ones, which means they burn all the (active) waste they create for more energy. Solid thorium reactors mix Th with the existing waste piles of Plutonium sitting in cooling pools and burn that up for us[1]. There's no waste materials to release from either of these reactors. [1] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/160131-thorium-nuclear-re...
These reactors by definition have a fair amount of very "hot" materials; it hardly matters if none of them are declared "waste" if they'll still kill you in a few minutes of direct exposure.
For example, 74% of Mountain View's water comes from Hetch Hetchy. (They get 87% of their water from the SF Public Utilities Commission, and 85% of that comes from Hetch Hetchy.) [1]
Daly City, San Bruno, and South San Francisco currently get 67% of their water from SFPUC and the rest from local aquifers, with a project in the works to increase the SFPUC portion to 100%. [2]
Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and other towns also rely on it, although I don't know the percentages.
Many have seen the pipeline that crosses the Bay between the Dumbarton Bridge and the old railroad bridge.
There are also a number places in the Peninsula and South Bay where you can see parts of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct, either the pipes themselves or the above-ground access hatches where the pipe is underground. These are white structures, often circular.
For example if you walk or run the Dish Trail at Stanford, you can see a number of these next to the northernmost part of the trail. This is part of the southern branch of the Aqueduct, which doesn't cross the Bay but cuts south through Milpitas, Sunnyvale, and Mountain View.
Several places where you see a residential street that is divided with a very wide grassy or dirt median, that's the Aqueduct: Sharon Heights Drive and Ivy Drive in Menlo Park are examples.
Along Edgewood Road near 280 there are a number of pipeline sections where it alternates between above-ground bridges and underground sections through those hills. The pipeline then parallels the Cordilleras Trail in the Pulgas Ridge Open Space Preserve where you can see some of the access structures.
On the other side of 280 on Cañada Road there is the famous Pulgas Water Temple [4], where you can really get a sense of how much water flows through the Aqueduct.
For the obsessively curious like me, several years ago I traced the path of the southern branch of the Aqueduct and made a KML file marking some of the visible structures. [3] Someone else had made a similar file for the northern branch but I don't know where to find that now.
[1]: http://www.mountainview.gov/city_hall/public_works/water_con...
[2]: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/three-peninsula-citie...
For anyone wondering what the relationship between wildfires in Yosemite and San Francisco proper, its worth a small comment. California's Sierra Nevada range is a couple hours east of SF. These mountains include the highest points in the continental US. Trapping most of the water from the east-west jet stream. The sierras hold massive amounts of high-quality water, which runs out of the non-porous terrain of the hig…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you mean "protect these units from bad guys so they don't threaten our electrical system," that's kind of the point of having a decentralized system of smaller reactors: if one or two get sabotaged, others in the system can easily pick up the slack. If you mean "protect these units from bad guys so they don't steal the thorium and weaponize it," that's one of the great things about thorium reactors: thorium and it…
To which I say BS, at least for the reason cited. Sure, the U-232 contaminated U-233 is nasty, but as long as it doesn't make it impractical to make a nuclear warhead it's quantitatively different from the uranium cycle, where after a few months at most plutonium is impossibly contaminated with two even more undesirable isotopes (one is very hot, I've seen estimates of 100kW for a bomb sized quantity (it's used for R…