Obama will quash this fast.
Lets Do It.
The only electrical generation the progressives want is generated by unicorn milk.
The environmentalist whackos have stymied the development of new reactor technology for decades and have kept obsolete and potentially hazardous designs like those a Fukushima operating long after they should have been replaced with better technology. Nuclear power is safe and produces no of those supposed green house gasses, but the environmentalists keep pushing for windmills and solar power that could never produce enough reliable power to meet even a fraction of our needs.
good thing we don’t need plentiful safe cheap energy, or anything
There is no excuse for any new design to not be “walkaway safe”, so in the event of total loss of cooling power like at Fukushima, the reactor stays within the safe and stable portion of its operating envelope.
The company I work for actually built a salt-cooled reactor as an experiment back in the ‘60s. It’s still there, near Winslow, Arkansas. It only ran once, just to see what would happen; then they shut it down, foisted it off on the University of Arkansas, and washed their hands of the whole matter!
Before she was tossed out on her fat a** by the voters of my fair state, our (thankfully) former U.S. Senator Blanche (Blank) Lincoln managed to secure some federal dollars for the site to be cleaned up.
Very interesting development. This deserves some more reading. The developing company certainly has patents, and
China, the world’s largest manufacturing country, largest manufacturer and consumer of automobiles, and facing well known air pollution problems, would be the most likely market. They have the market and the money, and don’t have a million or so making a good living disrupting energy production as we do here in the U.S.
This issue, in this writer’s opinion, has always been the key to understanding the current administration. Many of the key players in the Obama administration have made careers of obstruction, and always been honest about it, depending upon the ignorance of the public to insure that the obstruction business remains profitable - environmentalism, global warming, global change, enhancing dependence upon foreign energy sources (Keystone, drilling restrictions, emphasis upon nonsense like solar electric and wind generation.
John Holdren, thirty five years a Marxist, committed to reducing population by any means necessary, as Presidential Science Advisor, and now on the new NSA oversight panel, is but one key example, supported by Theresa Kerry’s father’s money for several decades. These people never did anything but obstruct development, which is the key to their motivation - right out of Atlas Shrugged!
They haven’t the character or talent to be developers, but as community organizers, have focused their lives on becoming the administrators of other people’s lives. Making more dependent upon a growing government is job security and, while misguided, many of them have become very skilled. China will have no use for those skills, and when China’s air is cleaned up, many of our skilled developers will move to China where their industry and talents will be appreciated and rewarded, unless, of course, some of our formerly sovereign states become independent, rather than be robbed of their productivity to support the government dependents who are now a majority of our nation’s economic base, and to support military actions in support of the Muslim Brotherhood, costing the lives of many patriots as well as the livelihood of what remains of those in the private sector.
This technology is real, it works and it is quite safe....amazingly safe when compared to conventional
reactors. It’s not new tech, we’ve known about this
type of reactor for decades. However nobody wanted
to be bothered to perfect and scale up the technology
as Uncle Sam had already done and paid for that to
happen with the conventional reactors currently in use.
The current designs were created because they produce
fuel that can be turned into bombs. The molten salt
reactors do not. That is a major factor in why one
design was chosen over the other.
Transatomic has been talking about doing lftr thorium reactor for two years or more. But as far as I can tell they have not done anything yet. I think for lack of funding. Another lftr thorium company Flibe has been talking about doing a lftr thrium reactor for 3-4 years. They also have done nothing—as well, I think for lack of funding. Bill Gates’ company Terrapower has a different design that they have so far done nothing but model in computers. Their design may be too cumbersome. Last year they also began looking into lftr thorium reactors. As far as I know, so far no actual construction has begun in any of these projects. For lack of funding.
If it sounds too good to be true, it is.
Investment cost = $ 2000 M/520 MWe = $4000/kWe or the same as for the traditional nuclear power plants. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/schultz2/
they have to reduce that to less than $3000/kW (perhaps to 2 500) to be competitive.
A very informative link that raises some questions about the design http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4303