Posted on 11/01/2013 1:47:34 PM PDT by Innovative
Nuclear scientists are being urged by the former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix to develop thorium as a new fuel.
Mr Blix says that the radioactive element may prove much safer in reactors than uranium.
His enthusiasm is shared by some in the British nuclear establishment. Scientists at the UK’s National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) have been encouraged by the government to help research on an Indian thorium-based reactor, and on a test programme in Norway.
China is going for a revolutionary approach, devising a next-generation reactor which its supporters say will enable thorium to be used much more safely than uranium.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Heh, no, I didn’t intend to hammer you, though I am fairly accused of belaboring the point!
All intended as friendly banter, you made your points well.
That is what I like about FR...:)
Glad you asked.
Remember when MRI was correctly called NMRI? They dropped the Nuclear because people feared it. Liberals learned long ago if you really want something you just have to lie better than the other guy.
Of course it could be done. I just gave the reasons why it is not being done.
LENR has been validated.
“LENR has been validated.”
No observable energy generated.
http://jjap.jsap.jp/link?JJAP/52/107301
The metadata is in the measurement/number of the Pr atoms created at this point. Obviously this scope is still at an early stage but it is a real validation and the next stages of operational and performance validation will spell out the values for you in greater detail when they are released. Given the economic and political storm this news will create, I hope we can have access to to follow up articles. I would imagine there are some people up at MIT who are having migraines about this. Maybe because the House of Saud has donated much to that school?
Wrong, of course. Many experiments have shown positive energy levels, some quite high. Yours is the typical knee-jerk response of those who have not bothered to read the actual published work on the experiments. Sufficient validated data is available for the Pd/D2 system to show that the major pathway yields He4, and that the calorimetry shows ~24 MEV/nucleon formed. Minor side reactions yield tritium, and a hodge-podge of adducts formed from other elements present.
The Ni/H2 system has less data on what the final product(s)are.
And I think we'll see working LENR reactors well before any thorium fission reactors can be brought to commercial reality (not because of a lack of technology, but politics and the green movement simply won't allow it. There are at least half a dozen companies pursuing commercialization of LENR(how many companies working on thorium reactors??)
Note....I'm not by any means anti-fission. When I got my PhD in chem, I actually minored in nuclear science, so I have a reasonable background in "things nuclear".
I look at energy like food.
When people don’t have food, they will do things and eat things they would not have been able or willing to do when they did have food.
I see energy the same way. It runs economies. It provides heat. It lets us travel in our cars. When the cost of energy goes down, so does pretty much the cost of everything else. Costs go down, business is more lucrative, and jobs are created. And when energy becomes more expensive so does everything else, and the economy contracts, jobs disappear, and business is bad.
I can see people not clamoring for thorium reactors. All things nuclear have been so effectively demonized since the late Sixties, that anything having fission and nuclear waste is not viable in the public arena. The public would not see thorium reactors as different in any way, they would see them as...nuclear power. Period. So people would shrug their shoulders and say “Eh. Nuclear is bad. Fukishima is bad. Chernobyl is bad. Three Mile Island is bad. No...we don’t need nuclear.”
But if energy becomes so expensive that it accelerates the inevitable implosion of many of the world’s economies...if people can’t get heat or electricity for air conditioning, and they can’t buy fuel to drive or fly and jobs are invisible, then I could see it happening. Or even if we get someone in the White House who understands the energy sector, that could make it viable.
I just wish it wouldn’t take those things to make it happen.
I have always thought the concept of scalable pebble bed reactors to be a fascinating one, making them small and safe enough to provide town-sized municipalities with them, up to major cities. Design them and become a world leader in selling them and the radioactive product they need to function.
Eh. Probably never happen, but you never can tell.
Yeah, "pebble bed reactors" are the other "fission panacea" that folks talk about. Unfortunately, it has been shown in the pilot-scale reactors that the "pebbles" don't do as good a job of containing fission products as was planned, and get contaminated by a HIGHLY radioactive "dust".
"Eh. Probably never happen, but you never can tell."
Unfortunately, you're probably correct.
After the Chinese visited Oak Ridge, the NRC passed regulations that made it yet more difficult to handle Thorium. And look at how the administration got behind small modular reactors, promising jobs in Pennsylvania - a state that could not go Republican under any circumstances.
Our government does not care about the 21st century. It will arrive no matter what. What matters is what contributing interest will help you stay in office.
If you have a Thorium ping list add me please!
The Thoriun fuel cycle produces fewer actinides, which have long half lives.
More importantly, with a lftr, the fuel is liquid, so it “burns” more than 90% of the fissionable material. With a light water reactor, the fuel is solid, contained in ceramic pellets. Only about 4% of the fissionable “rock” is burned.
The regulatory regime, for all intents and purposes, precludes the building of a commercial lftr. The regulations are not so stringent for military use, so if they want a mobile power plant that produces 1,300 deg. f liguid for desalinization of water and production of electricity, that might be the ticket to develop the technology.
The Earth, believe it or not, maintains a high temperature at its core because of an ongoing Thorium reaction. The warmth and life sustaining goodness if Gaia is a nuclear reactor that burns Thorium - new tagline!
They already have stolen our nuclear patrimony, and are developing new patents on the technology. When lftrs become commercially viable, we will be paying the Chinese for their ip. So it's worse than what you think.
They are bomb factories that produce power as an afterthought to ensure that public will not disapprove of them.
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