BTTT
Interesting. I’ve never heard of these. I need to do some fact-checking, but if they are as much the perfect energy source as you say, then I’m going to start asking “why not” too.
That's the very last thing that they want.
They want to turn the country into a pristine wilderness, with them in their lakefront dachas and all the smelly peasants herded into urban prisons where they can be controlled and culled more conveniently.
The answer to this guy’s question is buried in his analysis:
Why isn’t the world using Thorium (article doesn’t say this, but there’s at least 4 times more Thorium in the world than Uranium)?
“Furthermore, they do not produce plutonium . . .”
Adm. Rickover made this call back in the 50’s.
If you use a cup of Uranium in a reactor, you get about 3/4 cup of Plutonium out.
This is the same as saying, “If I use a cup of silver to produce power, I get 3/4 of a cup of gold, plus the power.”
This was a no brainer call for Rickover. We put in Uranium and we get Hydrogen Bomb flour out the other side? Thorium may be cheaper and safer, and the waste is nearly zero, but I can turn silver into gold with a Uranium reactor and get power for free.
The equation is changing now, of course. Any shit hole country declaring they want nuclear power is declaring they want to build bombs, and it is an open secret in diplomacy that this is the case.
Iran, Venezuela, and others have made the same calculation. If they wanted nuclear power, they’d have pursued Thorium as both India and China are doing today in all due haste.
The average wage slave is too ignorant or preoccupied to get this, and no politician dare raise this in public discourse.
It’ll take AQ wasting Denver or Seattle or San Diego before anybody does anything about it.
Ever wonder why Japan uses Uranium instead of Thorium? Not a stupid person in Japan, but they use Uranium too knowing all the risks. They have declared never to produce or use a nuke, but here they are making Plutonium by the bushel.
This thorium reactor thing sounds AWESOME! I’m going to remove the “Tornado” from the air intake of my car and replace it with a thorium reactor. I’m sure I’ll get 100 mpg then!!!
If Thorium can be produced in the U.S. and requires digging in the ground, 0bama and the other Demonrats will oppose its use. End of story.
Even Obama recently touted nuclear... although, like most of his words, they were apparently empty rhetoric.
One would think that the greenies would like to go from millions of tons of pollutants (including 48 tons of mercury) per year, to zero... their own propaganda says, "Out of the entire US electric industry, coal-fired power plants contribute 96% of sulfur dioxide emissions (SO2), 93% of nitrogen oxide emissions (NOx), 88% of carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) and 99% of mercury emissions. (Clean the Air, “Power Plant Air Pollution Problem,” Fact sheet)."... but then, they'd have to be honest and consistent, or else reveal the truth that they simply want America to be less prosperous.
Nobody talks about nuclear power because if you so much as whisper it, you’ll be clubbed to death by Birkenstock wearing former hippies. Even if you could get the various permits from the Obama machine (never happen) you’d still be picketed and sued into oblivion. No politician in the current circumstances would risk so much as proposing a committee to research the possibility of building more nuclear reactors. It would take a sea change in Washington and a power company with deep pockets to pull off one tiny new reactor.
I’d like to see legislation preventing lawsuits once a project is permitted. (Snail darters, anyone?)
The best “shovel ready” reactor designs we have today are called Generation III. Japan already has four such reactors in the field. Thorium designs are classed as Generation IV, designs which still need some development before first deployment.
India and China are the leaders in thorium reactor research. Watch them carefully.
they can be made small enough to power an aeroplane
As it happens, I was involved with the nuclear powered aircraft project in the late 1950s (guidance, not propulsion), so I'm familiar with the problems of putting a reactor in an airplane. To begin with, reactors must be shielded, and shielding is heavy. Most of the designs for nuclear powered aircraft had a heavily shielded crew compartment, and just enough shielding on the reactor that, when it was on the ground, you could approach it in a shielded tractor. However, that meant that the airframe was bombarded by lots of neutrons, which created dislocations on the crystal structure. That would rapidly lead to crack growth, meaning the airframe would have a short useful life, and would be radioactive. Big disposal problem. Another problem was that the temperature possible in a nuclear reactor is limited by the properties of the reactor structure. No matter what you do, this is going to be lower than the gas temperature in a fossil-fueled jet engine. Lot of power in the reactor, but transferring that to a jet exhaust is tough. The laws of thermodynamics work against you (nuclear powered rockets have the same problem).
In short, a nuclear powered airplane was a loser back then, and I don't think going to a thorium reactor is going to change that.
For stationary power plants, though, and possibly for ship-board power plants, we ought to be investigating the thorium reactor. If necessary, we need to get away from the not-invented-here types in the Department of Energy.