81–90 of 91 posts
Thorium msrs could be a panacea for humanity - but they won't get adopted, because nuclear weapons aren't a byproduct, and that's a drawback in the eyes of our bellicose political classes. Edit: you're welcome to downvote the truth, but it won't change it.
Is it just me, or does the flashy website somehow make them seem less credible?
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>I think Greenpeace also has a lot to answer for with their campaign against nuclear power. Thanks to them my children can look forward to a world where a coal plant is build every week and fossil fuel fueled climate change is a certainty at least your children can look using 2 eyes. If not for Greenpeace the expected value would be uniformly distributed anywhere between 0 and 4 or 5...
Coal contributes vastly more to radioactive environmental contamination than nuclear does, by hurling radioactive particles into the atmosphere. So on the contrary, the fear over nuclear has done far more to increase our exposure to radiation that what we would have if coal plants had been replaced by nuclear.
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The zirconium hydride moderator is a genuine innovation, allowing much higher core power density than LFTR, and higher conversion ratios without HEU (assuming their modeling is correct). But like LFTR, you've got loose FPs all over the place and it's hard to see that being acceptable in anything like the current culture. Meanwhile, it's hard to see any benefit from MSR. Edit: There will likely be all sorts of materia…
Why would the fission products be "all over the place?" They're contained in the reactor core, just like any other reactor.
Other FPs in the salt are circulated out of the core and through a heat exchanger. Some ongoing actinide fission there too. Tiny defects in heat exchangers handling plain water currently cause reactors worth billions to be abandoned (e.g. SONGS).
Some FPs will plate out and you'll need to replace plumbing periodically. That has to be done by robots because the pipes will be ultra-hot and deadly within minutes to anyone nearby.
For what benefit? You improve the fuel cycle by a factor of 50. But the fuel cycle is < 10% of the costs and material flows of nuclear plant. So yes, online FP separation is something a mature fission-based civilization would have. But it is not clear how it helps us, other than to provide a focal point for a new culture to form (which may be a substantial if illegitimate benefit, admittedly).
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Because nuclear weapons aren't a byproduct of this kind of reactor, and that renders it useless in the eyes of politician-warmongers.
That was more true in the 60's, and so we never spent the time to try bringing this to production. We don't need to make all of our nuclear reactors capable of producing weapons-grade material anymore, and I don't think there's much objection to new reactor types on those grounds.
There has never been an economic case for the breeder simply because the fuel cycle is such a small part of the cost of nuclear energy. When you have a factor of 5,000,000 you can afford to throw away a factor of 100.
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Coal contributes vastly more to radioactive environmental contamination than nuclear does, by hurling radioactive particles into the atmosphere. So on the contrary, the fear over nuclear has done far more to increase our exposure to radiation that what we would have if coal plants had been replaced by nuclear.
i don't know a coal plant that would have a 30 km dead zone around it like Chernobyl does.
The deaths caused by Chernobyl is a tiny blip compared to coal no matter whose estimates you pick.
In 2010 alone, estimated deaths from US coal power plants alone was 13,000, with a huge number of other bad health effect (20,000 heart attacks for example) [1]
In the 3 decades from Chernobyl we can extrapolate to maybe ~350k-400k deaths from US coal plants alone.
The number of deaths due to Chernobyl on the other hand, is rarely estimated higher than the low tens of thousands. The number of cancer incidents attributable to Chernobyl is likely far higher. E.g. estimates of an excess 7k thyroid cancer incidents in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia by 2005. But only a small number of those have died of cancer so far (the number will likely increase, but the reduction in overall life expectancy is still modest).
In 2005, the UN predicted 4,000 deaths due to Chernobyl [2]. Greenpeace countered with a claim of up to ~300k deaths total[3] (based on a combination of an estimated 93k deaths in Belarus and 60k deaths in Russia due to cancers, and an additional estimate of potentially another 140k premature deaths in the following/coming years).
Even if we accepts the Greenpeace claims, as the upper boundary, more people have likely died due to US coal plants alone than due to Chernobyl in the years since Chernobyl.
And the US is not the biggest consumer of coal. Already well before 2000, China had surpassed US coal consumption. Tack on India and Russia, and the US coal consumption is only 1/3 of that used by the top 4 countries. Go to the top 10, and the US coal consumption made up ~25% by 2000, and as far as I know dropping as a percentage of overall consumption due to dramatic continued growth in places like China. So even just looking at the top 10, it would not be unreasonable to quadruple the estimates of excess deaths from coal from the above to 1.4-1.6 million in the 3 decades from Chernobyl.
But of course these plants were going for decades before that, and will continue for decades to come, and many of these countries have far more lax rules than the US when it comes to emissions. The reality is that worldwide deaths from coal likely are equivalent to Greenpeace's idea of Chernobyl every 2-5 years. On the other hand, if the UN predictions are right, US plants alone are as lethal as 3 Chernobyl's every year, and coal worldwide is equivalent to somewhere well above 12 Chernobyl's every year.
Now, it is reasonable to bring up that Chernobyl is only one plant, but the point is the difference is damage scenarios: Nuclear plants kill when something goes wrong, and something goes wrong exceedingly rarely, leaving us able to name the ones attributable to 90%+ of nuclear power related deaths.
Coal plants, on the other hand, silently kills every day, around the clock, during normal operation. Chernobyl, even accepting the worst case estimates, does not lift nuclear even into the same league. Even if we replaced coal with Chernobyl type reactors, with the same lax safety procedures as at Chernobyl, rather than opt for the much safer designs and processes that were the norm even back in 1986, we'd still kill far fewer people.
[1] http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plan... [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2... [3] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/che...
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People who believe that nuclear reactors are so great and safe can probably save a lot of money by renting property next to a nuclear reactor. Have you done so? Would you like a reactor to be built next to your house?
Would you rather live right next to a coal plant? They release a lot more radioactivity into the air that a nuclear power plant. Plus, you know, all the other pollutants that they blow into the atmosphere.
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Why would the fission products be "all over the place?" They're contained in the reactor core, just like any other reactor.
Nope. Gaseous FPs are continuously removed and stored somewhere. Of course they require cooling while being stored. Any mishap releasing even a tiny fraction of them would of course be harmless, but in the present culture would result in a global panic. Other FPs in the salt are circulated out of the core and through a heat exchanger. Some ongoing actinide fission there too. Tiny defects in heat exchangers handling p…
ThorCon has an interesting approach for dealing with plating and so on: their design has reactor cores that can be easily swapped out. When one's ready for maintenance they just cart it away, let it cool for several years, then deal with it.
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Agreed. BTW my old boss said the same after Chernobyl: he used to be worried about nuclear safety, but after Chernobyl, where everything went as much wrong as it can go - you have an unsafe type of reactor, incompetent staff blows it up, the accident is covered and evacuations are delayed, etc - and still the death toll is much smaller than the impact of coal mining, which is the practical alternative picked by e.g.…
it's overwhelmingly not coal, a majority share is imported gas. Local energy is coal and renewables are under 5% last time I checked, that's true.
BTW I find it somewhat scandalous that Russian gas companies can hire senior politicians (such as former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Finnish prime minister Paavo Lipponen) to assist the political approvals. Although these men are no longer in such official positions, it is obvious that they were given money to advance the interests of Северный поток through their connections in their respective social democratic parties.