Awesome.
Norway is building thorium reactor
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Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#72Interestingly 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
Yup. And we had a running MSR at shippingport PA for awhile.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#73Earlier 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…
Great Scott! That's almost enough to power a flux capacitor.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#74Earlier 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…
> 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 dense than that. Fusion requires you to put in so much power in the first place to just get to hydrogen burning that it seems ridiculous to not take advantage of the dense energy gifts of destroyed stars.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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.
There is less uranium in the waste, but there will be fission products and trans-uranium elements just like in the fuel of regular reactors. Radioactivity of uranium is hardly a problem, when dealing with spent fuel. In short term (less than 100 years) fission products produce most of the radioactivity. In long term trans-uranium elements are the problem.
>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.
Halting a normal fission chain reaction is hardly a source of accidents in any current nuclear reactor design. Decay heat is produced in the spent nuclear fuel of CANDUs just like in Fukushima or Three Mile Island.
CANDU is an interesting reactor design, but there is none as great alternative as you propose. However, various active and passive safety measures may get you very close. I don't know CANDU design so well, that I could judge those.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#76Earlier 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…
The idea that nuclear waste needs to be isolated for (pick your arbitrarily large number) of years is a misconception based on the assumption that everything else remains static.
It won't. In particular, we are in the middle (actually, maybe still near the beginning) of a biotechnology revolution every bit as profound as the electronic one that started with the transistor.
What we fear most from radiation is cancer. If it weren't for cancer, nuclear power would be a no-brainer. Its environmental impact is negligible compared to fossil fuels because the volume of fuel mined and transported is so much less. This was shown in a book titled "The Health Risks of Not Going Nuclear", now sadly out of print.
And in fact, radiation is a very weak carcinogen. Frank Von Hippel, a Princeton professor who is no friend of nuclear power, has estimated the total cancer deaths resulting from Fukushima at somewhere near a thousand -- pretty bad for an industrial accident, but hardly the Black Death all over again.
Consider cancer treatment today compared to, say, Ben Franklin's time. Now imagine how much more detailed our understanding of cancer treatment, possibly even prevention, will become in another century or two.
If cancer becomes the kind of non-issue that smallpox is today, a disease which used to kill one child in three before the age of 5 in many parts of the world, our descendants will regard us with the same pitying disbelief that we apply to the self-flagellators of 1348 trying to propitiate an angry G*d.
Consider this slideshow:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/54904454
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#77Earlier 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.
Most of them are going to be using the latest iteration of some tried-and-true series of reactors from another country. Russia is exporting the VVER-1200, Korea is exporting their APR-1400, and China is looking to export their ACPR-1000 and large components of American, Japanese, and European reactors.
The common thread here is that all of these are very conventional, directly descended from designs that have seen extensive service and have an excellent record of reliability. You're not going to see newbie countries screwing up the designs. (You might see them mess up the operations.)
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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. There is less uranium in the waste, but there will be fission products and trans-uranium elements just like in the fuel of regular reactors. Radioactivity of uranium is hardly a problem, when deali…
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.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Generally when talking about how safe a given sort of nuclear power is the most important thing to consider is whether it has a positive void coefficient or not. That is, if the reactor starts to overheat will that make it generate more power or less. In light water reactors, such as pretty much all existing commercial reactors, you need complicated feedback systems to keep the reactor under control. And if those are…
>Generally when talking about how safe a given sort of nuclear power is the most important thing to consider is whether it has a positive void coefficient or not.
The void coefficient is only appropriate, when you are dealing with a criticality accident like in Chernobyl. Criticality accident (fission chain reaction getting out of hand) has never happened in commercially used Western reactors. In fact, in Western countries you can not get a license for a reactor design, which has positive temperature coefficient for power i.e. the fission power must decrease, if temperature increases.
Re: Norway is building thorium reactor
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Power consumption only drops to about 50% of the daytime peak at night[1]. Unless you have somewhere to store that solar, you have to plan on "other sources" producing at least 50%, and more likely significantly more. I consider Utah to be a pretty sunny place, but it is still cloudy nearly a third of the year[2]. Sure, you can couple wind and solar, but that still doesn't help when we get a valley fog inversion for…
> Unless you have somewhere to store that solar
You could hollow out a mountain and pump water up and down -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
Better still, adjust demand to it changes with supply by having electric cars with removable batteries, the batteries being recharged when there is excess power.
> Sure, you can couple wind and solar, but that still doesn't help when we get a valley fog inversion for most of January that reduces sunlight to 30% of already short days and no wind is blowing anywhere nearby.
Utah is connected to the rest of the USA. Is it ever not sunny and not windy everywhere?