Posted on 03/20/2011 8:25:08 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium.
This passed unnoticed –except by a small of band of thorium enthusiasts – but it may mark the passage of strategic leadership in energy policy from an inert and status-quo West to a rising technological power willing to break the mould.
If China’s dash for thorium power succeeds, it will vastly alter the global energy landscape and may avert a calamitous conflict over resources as Asia’s industrial revolutions clash head-on with the West’s entrenched consumption.
China’s Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball. Further evidence of Barack `Obama’s “Sputnik moment”, you could say.
Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.
“The reactor has an amazing safety feature,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert.
“If it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami. The reactor saves itself,” he said.
“They operate at atmospheric pressure so you don’t have the sort of hydrogen explosions we’ve seen in Japan. One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release.”
Thorium is a silvery metal named after the Norse god
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Don't snicker too loudly just yet. One of the interesting things happening now is an apparent successful "cold fusion" reactor (actually and more correctly called LENR..."low energy nuclear reaction"). This discovery (an accidental one) by an Italian (Rossi) seems to have revealed a new and different fusion (or some sort of high energy nuclear) process.
There have been several semi-public demonstrations of the working reactor, which puts out about 20KW (with an 80-watt electrical input), and generates steam with an upper temperature limit of around 550 C. He says that he plans to start up a 1MW demonstration plant in partnership with a Greek company this coming October.
A quick search on {Rossi "cold fusion"}(without the brackets, of course) yields plenty of links. One of the more complete descriptions of the demos is found at LENR-CANR.org.
That latter URL:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
If this is successful, who knows....we might even have steam-powered cars running on "Mr. Fusion" type reactors.
cheap, safe energy makes people uppity...
I didn’t mean to imply that the Indians are working on MSBR’s. You are correct in that they are researching liquid sodium fast breeder reactors. Here’s a reference: (http://www.dae.gov.in/publ/3rdstage.pdf). They are also working on the development of advanced heavy-water Thorium-fueled PWR’s and should have a prototype operational next year or thereafter.
“The United States is threatened far more by the hazards of too much energy, too soon, than by the hazards of too little energy, too late.”
-Envirowhacko, John Holdren
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy . . . would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Paul Ehrlich
These are some serious anti-humanity ideas here.
It’s what Pelosi runs out of the day before she makes a speech
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