Posted on 12/09/2016 12:12:49 AM PST by Berlin_Freeper
Last year, Germany completed and turned on the Wendelstein 7-X nuclear fusion reactor. This amazing piece of technology uses a complicated design called a stellerator, and scientists have finally managed to verify that the design works like it's supposed to.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
Stella!!!
Germans find way to halt oxygen formation - plan worldwide implimentation. Finally we will have a world without the hated CO2!!
A problem I never had when I was using HDOS in my Heathkit H-89. Stable as a rock. A rock that sat there with its blinking cursor, except for the day that the video circuit died and I had to finish my work using only my memory of DOS commands. Then it was just a rock that beeped.
Good Morning: You are right, totally useless for making bombs. It does make U233 in the fuel cycle which is hit with a Neutron it fissions, generates two Thorium 323 atoms which are again hit by a neutron and becomes Uranium 233. will no make weapon grade Uranium.
Google Thorium videos and please share.
Good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ9Ll5EX1jc
Follow Kirk Sorensen for some of the best information on Thorium.
Info on Thorium reactors:
Intro:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYxlpeJEKmw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
Complete list of Thorium videos:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjGPRCesrlHHcviBQiKJVzlO4xqyKXrQp
.The problem is that it's always contaminated with a small amount of Uranium 232. U-232 decays fairly rapidly and produces some strong gamma ray emitters. The result of that is that the fuel generated by a thorium reactor becomes very dangerous to handle after a few months. You can build a Uranium 233 bomb, and after it sits on the shelf for a year or so, you'll get a dangerous dose of radiation just by sitting next to it.
Practical fusion is 5-10 years off.
Just like it’s been since 1970 or so. . . (grin)
http://underlore.com/thorium-reactors-and-nuclear-bombs/
“...For the sake of argument I’ll stipulate it’s remotely possible to make a nuke with thorium reactors.
Why does that sound like a hypothetical?
Well let’s start with a comment made by Morio Murase of Thorium Now.
The proliferation concern comes through the idea that you can irradiate thorium to get protactinium-233, extract the protactinium, wait 29 days, and presto, almost-pure U-233. The thing is, one needs to keep Pa-232 out of there because that turns into U-232, whose gamma emissions can really mess with someone making nuclear weapons. So you’d need to build the breeder reactor to deliberately irradiate thorium, and deliberately separate out the protactinium and possibly isotopically separate it if you’re going to make a U-233 bomb. No UN inspector’s going to be fooled by that, and if you’re going to go through all that trouble, you might as well burn both U-233 and U-232 and get some dirt-cheap power out of a proper reactor.
Another thing working against U-233 proliferation is the fact that the only bomb ever to have used it didn’t have the power the US military expected. If you’re going to go through all that trouble to make U-233 for a WMD, you might as well make plutonium instead. And that’s exactly what just about every nation that developed nuke weapons has done.
I conclude that yes, there is a proliferation risk in the thorium fuel cycle, but it is minuscule compared to uranium-238, and more difficult than what anti-nukes seem to believe.
It sounds like a hypothetical because one wonders if it were viable to weaponize, why then are there thorium stockpiles all over the world gathering dust and why thorium itself remains little more than a mining waste byproduct. I mean seriously, if it’s so dangerous it should be valuable and scooped up on that basis alone. Plutonium is absurdly valuable when you get right to it, dangerous and toxic as it is. And depleted uranium despite being nuclear waste also makes great material for bullets. Let that sink in. We found a kind of nuclear waste that’s good to throw at each other and we do it.
That no nation’s weapon scientists, including ours, have found a viable weapon use for thorium such that it literally sits in abandoned piles all over the planet, should make one question the notion of it being dangerous to any realistic degree.
It should be noted the one and only u233 bomb ever tested by the United States was actually just a plutonium bomb with u233 added, and as mentioned above its yield sucked so only India ever bothered with a pure u233 bomb.Which also sucked. Which in turn is probably why the US still has a giant stock pile of pure u233 which they are paying 500 million to destroy instead of it being in bombs.
Think about that for a moment as well. If it were a weapon material could they not sell it to a contractor to be converted into said weapon and bought back or could they not make them into weapons and then sell them to ally states?
So yeah, even if we pretend for a moment that thorium is useful as a weapon. Still the objection is a Nirvana Fallacy. Because when you get down to it all forms of power are lethal or can be weaponized under the right conditions. Indeed I can’t think of a single technology that couldn’t be used to kill under the right conditions.
Demanding absolute harmlessness is an impossible standard.
Electricity itself is lethal remember.
This line of objection completely ignores the massive positive offset of successful deployment of thorium reactors and incidentally the resultant counter motivation for war.
Any rational appraisal of a security decision has to consider the trade-off.
http://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_schneier.html
And one of the many effects of mass thorium reactor development and deployment would be a near total undermining of petroleum wars/tensions.
Thorium/LFTR deployment would undermine any weaponization risk of the technology by the impact of the technology. A competent appraisal must include asking why would a country want to make nuclear bombs if peace is suddenly and vastly more profitable?”
They been trying to get this to work for 30 years. And it still hasn’t reached break even. And even if it did, how much power is it really going to generate? Slightly more than break even? I don’t know why they haven’t built Thorium reactors. In recent years, they’ve regained interest, and India, China and Canada are seriously looking at building them, but the US seems to drag its feet.
Safe, clean and no waste materiel. What is not to like? They also run at higher optimal temperatures than breeder reactors, but slow down at dangerous temps, so there is no danger of runaway reactions
We also throw away more energy in coal fly ash than we extract from burning the coal.
imagine if part of the $16t debt from the last 16 years had been spent building a network of thorium reactors across the nation to provide energy independence for the next ~50+years. Future generations would inherit a legacy cheap energy and of freedom instead of debt and serfdom.
Well said!
That was it entirely. We wanted the materiel for Pantex.
So true!
Interesting points made by many. Radiation is always an issue one way or another.
And to the risk of sounding conspiratorial, what concerns me is the Pantex plant, and the managers over time. Was not Babcock & Wilcox involved with 3 mile island? Also a search on missing nuclear war equipment (bombs, warheads, or materials and tools used to make such) although most likely inaccurate is still out there, and ‘broken arrow’ events are not as infrequent as once thought. Another point and old news, when the USSR broke up you ended up with several little countries (dictatorships, whatever) many of which had nuclear materials in their possession. Much of this material is not accounted for
I believe that as well as a general decline in the quality of human civilization overall. (do not confuse a larger database of knowledge and ‘new & improved’ stuff as an indication of an improved humanity; really overall Americans are individually less capable now, at securing their own survival, then they were 100 yrs ago). There is a deterioration in the belief that a ‘nuclear event’ of any kind is a bad thing. The belief and acceptance of a ‘small nuclear conflict’ is too easily being passed around in movies and games.
Do not get me wrong, I believe in developing the most economical source of energy we can; if nuclear is it, or even one of the ‘its’, and we can do it correctly, then I am on board.
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