But that last fish..
Should fetch like a million dollars... you are creating wealth by making demand.. isn't this the point of capitalism?
I find myself in an uncomfortable position over this climate change thing. I've no problem with the existence of man-made climate change, no problem with the idea that we ought to do something about it. But what we are actually trying to do about it seems bonkers, counter-productive even. So how did we get into this mess? To …
I disagree with your conclusions, but some of your premises are correct, and you don't piss me off like Lewis Page does, and you obviously know a bit more then him about possible solutions so:
You are right, we are pushing for a localised energy production with a greater agenda then just global warming.
I don't think that was ever a secret. I do think that having communities control their energy production will free those communities from dependency on someone else, and will give them more control over their resources.
Now I’m guessing that just about any community which had a natural resource project going on have resisted it, I can name Rossport and Alberta Oil as examples, but pretty much any community had some form of resistance to big projects like these, after all who would want to have their local enviornemnt ruined.
Now i live in London, and having some smoky refinery somewhere wouldn't bother me much, but if i was living in say... Lake District, I would definitely resist any attempt to build a big polluting monster in my back yard.
And who can blame those who do, it's not their concern that the world needs energy, and it's their stock of natural resources which are being exploited.
Now, I know that everything require mining these days, and that wind power is no different, but it could be a lot easier for a community to agree to accept these mining/refineries if they benefited from them directly, and this will never happen when those in control of the energy production are sitting in some faraway board room, and have no real interest of sharing the wealth they make with the people/communities they pillage, and that's why we advocate localised energy production, as a mean for communities to have a decision about their environment and reap the benefits of living on a resource rich land.
Now I don't advocate like you concluded a return to peasant society, or that we all live in some hippy arty commune, what I advocate is the next logical step, meaning after we industrialised everything, and concentrated the wealth in the hands of a select few with no productive skills, that we bring communities control over their means of production (I tried not to use that phrase really hard). This isn't a call to demolish modern society and return to curving tools, it's more of a renaissance for science and technology, in which (at least that's how the theory goes) we free up more time to pursue our skills and hobbies to a new level which we cannot afford to at the moment, and with access to the right facilities, science hobbyists who are currently charted accountants and advertisers could use their time to explore and discover things that might be unimaginable to us, and not only things someone somewhere thinks will make a profit.
What an excellent, informed insight to the issues at hand. The carbon 'problem' is being addressed to reate a new market commodity, not to rectify climate. The climate is changing, that is what it does and the human community cannot stop it. We need to be ready.
The interesting issue not raised is that changes in land usage changes climate. Laying out a field with solar panels has surely got to do something different to local weather. I suspect a bit like paving a park in granite slabs!
The Thorium issue is one that real environmentalists will support but the raging, fundamentalist Greens will accept nothing short of the collapse of modern societies and lifestyles. About time they were being shown for their perverse intentions.
Words fail me. The only solution is a reduction in energy usage, and it's luddites who call this 'going back to living like peasants' who are holding back science. While energy is cheap there is no incentive to enhance energy efficiency - energy needs to become considerably more expensive.
Power generation and the means of it are a red herring. There are lots of perfectly rational moves we could make as a nation to help avert an energy crisis, such as changing our appalling building regulations so that insulation is much more efficient. It's perfectly possible to heat a family home with a tiny fraction of the energy currently used on average, but what do we do? Moan at each other about how alternative energy won't work (on one side) or how nuclear is evil (on the other) and nothing gets done.
It sounds like you want a true steady state, so I'll suggest you google "heat death of the universe".
Meanwhile, for the rest of us, there's no actual need for a steady state. As Douglas Adams once pointed out, the universe is Really Big. Sustainable growth is perfectly possible.
And my luddite objection to living like a peasant is basically that there are too many of us to do so. Whilst you're googling, look up world population levels at various points in history. We're all quite familiar with exponential growth, but the dominant pattern throughout history has been a plateau, policed by Malthusian checks, as the prevailing technology limited the available energy budget per capita.
For a "peasant" (pre-industrial?) lifestyle, we're current over-staffed by quite a few billion. On what timescale would you like to dispose of this surplus? If you forcibly sterilise the entire population of the world, you can probably complete the "adjustment" within a century without resorting to genocide. (Of course, you'll have to keep a few people fertile so that you still have youngsters to breed in 2111, but I don't suppose there will be any political problems in deciding who gets spared the snip. Oh no.)
"For a "peasant" (pre-industrial?) lifestyle, we're current over-staffed by quite a few billion. On what timescale would you like to dispose of this surplus?"
Hello? The commenter wasn't advocating living like a peasant, let alone everyone living a pre-industrial lifestyle. They were saying that people need not consume as much power as they have been accustomed to doing. What you get is someone claiming that "my washing machine uses a lot, so why shouldn't I have two plasma televisions that I leave on all the time because I'm not always in the same room?" and it's a slippery slope from there, all while they heat up the air above their house because "gas is cheaper than electricity and I've got a gas boiler".
Without the high-energy agriculture and the high-energy transport network and the high-energy "rest of the economy", you most certainly *are* talking about a return to peasant living.
You may be able to point at a handful of "two plasmas" domestic users, but energy consumption in all these other areas represents the majority of *your* lifestyle's energy cost and they are nothing like as wasteful, since they are commercial operations and already complain about the cost of energy. Making energy much more expensive, as the OP suggested, would be very bad for "the economy" in the short term and consequently bad for the people it supports (i.e., you) in the long term.
The device for this is largish nuclear weapon with a Cobalt casing detonated in the jetstream.
I read about it at my HS in a book written in the late 50s.
IIRC it was estimated it would take 4.5 days to circle the Earth and Co60 has a half life of 5.4 years.
Co60 is a gamma ray emitter used to sterilize potatoes. It's effect on higher life forms was expected to be equally shriveling.
They called it a doomsday device.
I think you can see why.
The atmospehric bomb tests of the 1950s and 1960s, on conservative assuptions seeded several tonnes of plutonium, and similar amounts of materials like strontium and caesium. Life survived.
"Doomsday bombs" never really stood up to examination - you'd need hundreds of megatonnes to loft enough cobalt or whatever to have any real effect.
.. include "No" to the billions the petrochemical - and coal and gas and every other energy-related - industry gets in direct grants and tax breaks ..?
To say nothing of the trillions in defense budgets required to secure access to the oil, gas, uranium etc.
The idea that it's only tree hugging green projects that get inexplicable amounts of government money is standard right-wing BS: decide what you want prove, deny reality and invent "facts" to back up your assertions. The bigger the lie etc.
Coal, oil, gas, nuclear all have government skewing the market in their favour: why not a little skewing in favour of things that aren't going to totally trash the planet?
Going back to the middle ages is definitely not the answer, but then it's not what anyone is actually proposing, except in the right wing imagination.
Quit b*tching about emerging technologies getting a tiny fraction of the assistance established technologies have been getting for decades: sure, it may affect your share price in the years to come, but you can always just buy into green technologies.
China has recently initiated a priority effort to develop thorium molten salt reactors.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/china-thorium-power/
"China has officially announced it will launch a program to develop a thorium-fueled molten-salt nuclear reactor, taking a crucial step towards shifting to nuclear power as a primary energy source.
The project was unveiled at the annual Chinese Academy of Sciences conference in Shanghai last week, and reported in the Wen Hui Bao newspaper (Google English translation here).
If the reactor works as planned, China may fulfill a long-delayed dream of clean nuclear energy. The United States could conceivably become dependent on China for next-generation nuclear technology. At the least, the United States could fall dramatically behind in developing green energy."
An interesting piece, but it does seem to me that the author is being deliberately obtuse.
In George Monbiot's exchange with Caroline Lucas, surely he (and the author) can see the difference between an 'immature' technology such as solar PV that we know works, but has yet to really reach widespread production and the associated economies of manufacturing scale that come with that, and an 'unproven' technology such as thorium reactor nuclear power that is still in the research stages?
Not to mention the one major argument that always gets conveniently swept under the carpet with pro-nuclear arguments (notably in The Register I might add): where exactly is the hazardous long term (100,000's of years long term) nuclear waste going to be stored from now until our great grandchildren's great grandchildren are all long gone, forever stashed in monitored caskets deep underground, just in case of an earthquake or some seismic event? Which country has held it's hand up to provide the 'bin' for this steadily growing pile of spent nuclear fuel that will be around long after this column has faded into obscurity and the internet is a footnote in some future history book? That'll be no-one to my knowledge, but then perhaps El Reg knows better?
Agreed, thorium reactor technologies allegedly reduce this waste production significantly, but a small pile of practically permanently lethal material is still practically permanently lethal, no matter what the size. And the pile won't be getting smaller.
It is widely accepted that neither solar PV nor wind power alone are likely to be capable of providing all of our growing power needs. What they can do is supplement the existing base load to the extent that we can cut the amount of hydrocarbon emissions by a significant amount using the power of the sun and the wind that is provided at a fraction of the environmental cost compared with oil and gas. Distribution of these systems will help to ensure that some fraction of them will be producing at any point in time.
Until someone can make a Mr Fusion waste/energy converter a la the Back To The Future film, there are precious few alternatives and we should be investing in those that push non-polluting technologies forward and not those that line the pockets of corporations waiting to take on lifetime waste management contracts.
The world is not short of vulture capitalists looking for a guaranteed return on their money. However, where I live, PV only "works" because of a whacking great feed-in tarriff, enjoyed by people who can afford the installation costs and paid for in higher electricity prices by those who can't.
Thorium power means a lot less waste and the really nasty bits are gone in about 20 years with longer term storage for the remainder of about 300 years and not the 100s of thousands of years suggested. See: http://energyfromthorium.com/
Solar and wind are great but they are useless for base load. See www.withouthotair.com
Also what do you do in large parts of the world which have neither regular sunshine or wind resources? In Ireland we should have lots of wind but look at the generation on a calm day like today: http://www.eirgrid.com/operations/systemperformancedata/windgeneration/
And pumped storage is not the solution for the reasons outlined in various posts here.
Yep solar is great for the southwest USA but even there I'd suggest there should be better ways of getting it than PV.
A thorium-u233 makes roughly the same quantities of waste as a "classic" u 238-Pu239/240 cycle - thorium protagonists have a nasty habit of failing to compare like with like - they compare a "once through" cycle for uranium fuelled plant with a recycling-based approach for the thorium plant.
I'll declare my hand - I think the Thorium-U233 cycle has potential - however, it's being chronically oversold by the enthusiasts, mostly relying on a pretty poor understanding of the issues by those they're selling to. It's one of several potential routes to a closed cycle for nuclear fuel, but by no means the most promising.
Let's be clear - making a thorium cycle work is hard, even if you use a throrium cycle in "conventional" (and that's stretching the normal use of the word) fast reactors. More usually, the enthusiasts go further - they argue for a cycle based on thermal breeding in a molten-salt system.
The neutron economy of such a system is utterly marginal - a 1% variation in the ability to extract fission products from the salt makes the difference between it producing surplus fuel, and needing continual top-ups.
Worse, making a molten salt system works requires, a large scale and complex chemical processing plant to be added on to a reactor. A Molten Salt Breeder Reactor (MSBR) won't work if you let just a few percent of the siffion products (like Xenon) stay in the fuel - you need 95% plus efficient extraction on every circuit of the fuel. Worse, you HAVE to get out 90% or more of the intermediate between thorium and uranium on every cycle - protactinium. And to get that out will involve delights like passing 800C flouride-uranium salts through a column of molten bismuth, then extracting the protactinium frojm the bismuth somehow.
I wish the people who latch onto this, like ducklings following a rolling ball, would bother to think through the engineering needed for such a system. Here's one for the enthusiasts - once the uranium is "bred" in the fuel/salt mixture (and leaving aside the delights of managing two such circuits, one for the fuel, and one for the breeder blanket), you have to get it out. And to do that, you have to bubble flourine - that well known non-reactive and benign gas - through that same 800C molten uranium salt, then capture the resulting uranium hexaflouride. "Hex" is not only "hot" both thermally, and radiologically, but it's venomously corrosive - the separation membranes in enrichment plants have to be made of pure (99.9% plus) nickel to withstand it, and even then last only a few years.
And yes, it has virtues - thorium abundance, and potentially, it can be "drained down" in an accident. Bit that still means you have to remove decay heat from a couple of thousand tonnes of fuel mixture (more than in a conventional reactor), and have secure cooling and storage for the chemical plant and fission product inventory.
As I said, it might have potential - but compared to something like a lead-cooled fast reactor, which have already been built in considerable numbers - the Soviets used them to power the "Alfa" class subs - doesn it look like an obvious route? Hardly...
Because you are fissioning U-233 and you need no U-238 in the reactor you end up with far less transuranic isotopes such as plutonium which are the really nasty ones as they are so poisonous and need to be kept out of harms way for thousands of years. The waste problem becomes easier with a LFTR as most of it is low level after 10 to 20 years and safe after about 500 years.
Because Xenon is a gas it is much easier to remove from liquid fuel as you are bubbling it out as you go along. The neutron economy margin is more like 5% apparently. This makes it easier to get the conversion rate of just over 1 needed to fuel itself but we have plenty of U-233 to start reactors in any case (it would help if the US doesn't destroy its stockpile of course). Great strides were made in many of the issues you raise for the extraction circuit at the test reactor in the 60s (known as the MSRE at Oak Ridge in the US). More work still needs to be done of course. It's possible to use pure Nickel but a more likely technology is a frozen wall fluorinator which is much more advanced than it was back in the 60s. It deals with a lot of the corrosion issues.
Yeah it needs to be tested further but what those of us who support it are saying is that it seems to have plenty of advantages many of which were confirmed at the MSRE and we should be at least building a test reactor to confirm those advantages. Note that for a 1GW plant the fuel load is about 100 tonnes and not the thousands you refer to and it convects passively which makes it easier to cool.
The advantages of LFTR include the reprocessing being built into the reactor operation but that is better for many operations than lead-bismuth where you have to cart the entire reactor core away every 9 years or so. The lead-bismuth technology is being applied by a commercial company in 25MWe lumps so that is already maturing - LFTR needs the impetus of a new research reactor in the western world.
First, transuranics - plutonium apart - aren't a major proportion of the overall radioactives inventory. Amerecium contributes about 1-2% of the waste burden at most, even on convetntional reactors.
And getting rid of gaseuous fission products isn't as simple as you imply - xenon is soluble in halide salts, se getting shut involves entertaining processes like forcing it through a pressurised spray (at 800C) into an intert atmostphere like helium, then processing the xenon from the helium - hard to do as both are noble.
Which is pretty poor (and closer to 1-3% in an credible operational system - 5% is a theoretical maximum). A "conventional" fast breeder will run a 20% or better neutron surplus.
"This makes it easier to get the conversion rate of just over 1 needed to fuel itself but we have plenty of U-233 "
we most cetainly don't - U233 exists in gramme amounts in the convetional fuel cycle. The LSTR/MSBR arguments are basedon U235/Pu239 "feedstock".
"circuit at the test reactor in the 60s (known as the MSRE at Oak Ridge in the US)"
far from it. The MSRE wasn't a breeder at all - it was purely a test of the "core" LFTR process, and completely lacked the crucial separate breeder circuit. Which reduced it's use as a demonstrator re the crucial aspect of neutron economy to essentially zero.
"More work still needs to be done of course. It's possible to use pure Nickel but a more likely technology is a frozen wall fluorinator "
And, what might that be? I know most of the key technologies around erichment and fueln processing, and I promise you no such thing is in use at even ilot scale amongst any of the major fuel cycleplayers like Urenco, Areva, BNG and so on.
" Note that for a 1GW plant the fuel load is about 100 tonnes "
If you exclude the breder blanket, of course. Even ignoring that, that's another implicit failure to compare like with like. The reason that the fuel load is so low is extremely high enrichment (after all, the energy per fission is fixed - all you're doing is haivng more fissions in a smaller volume, itself problemativ for control purposes). So, a better analogue is to a fast readtor, rather thana thermal plant per se - and guess what, you end up with a similar fuel load.
" Note that for a 1GW plant the fuel load is about 100 tonnes "
Which is, if anything the major problem - yas I commented before, you're reprocessing out of extremely hot working fluid, in "real time" - compare that with the vastly lesser chalenges of working on "cold" fuel that's had a decade or two to allow the decay of the truly unpleasant fission products.
If I'm handling LWR fuel, post 20 years of cooling, I've a negligible inventory of problematic stuff like Xenon, Iodine 131, to remove. It's gone, mostly into the form of non-problematic "noble metals" like ruthernium, rhodium, palladium etc (which may even have a market value in their own right). If I'm going to keep an MSBR running, I have to remove those poisons within a circuit or two of the point of their creation.
It's also not asthough I can work a single process to extract the uranium/plutonium as in "Purex" or the electrophoretic processes used in "conventional" reprocessing - that'd leave leave the fission products and other poisons in my working fluid - rather, I have to work multiple processes to remove each procut individually, at extremely high efficiency - a spray into a helium atmospheren to remove xenon (the somehow separate two noble gasses from each other...) , a hydrogen stripping process to remove iodine, another process (reacting with lithium and chlorine) for the alkali metals like caesium, a flourine sparge to manage uranium concentration (followed by hydrogen treatment to get the uranium back in metal form for re-injection), and in the breeder stream, treatment with molten bismuth to remove protactiunium as it's produced (otherwise neutron economy goes to pot). And all working at 700-800C with a radioactive working fluid.
The net effect is that you end up with a relatively simple reactor - with a large, expensive and complex reprocessing plant stuck on the side - worse, that reprocessing plant has to be in close proximity to the reactor(s) served, so can't have the economies of scale of a centralised plant like a Cap de la Hague.
With the best will in the worl, the capital costs are going to end up dominated by the processing side of the plant - and it adds huge complexity and difficulty in securing such plant against (for example) aseismic problems, etc.
" but that is better for many operations than lead-bismuth where you have to cart the entire reactor core away every 9 years or so."
No need to move entire cores - LMFBRs work unpressurised, so you refuel, and manage the breeder blanket oline - like with MGNOX and CANDU, but without the need to manage a pressure seal.
"A thorium-u233 makes roughly the same quantities of waste as a "classic" u 238-Pu239/240 cycle - thorium protagonists have a nasty habit of failing to compare like with like - they compare a "once through" cycle for uranium fuelled plant with a recycling-based approach for the thorium plant."
What *kind* of molten salt reactor are you talking about?
Molten salt fueled/cooled or molten salt moderated? AFAIK the Gen IV "Molten Salt" proposal just uses a molten salt as a coolant with all the usual paraphernalia of a conventional reactor.
I'll declare my hand - I think the Thorium-U233 cycle has potential
I'm glad you made that clear. It's pretty well hidden otherwise.
Let's be clear - making a thorium cycle work is hard, even if you use a throrium cycle in "conventional" (and that's stretching the normal use of the word) fast reactors.
True. The MSRE did *not* incorporate breeding of Thorium.
"More usually, the enthusiasts go further - they argue for a cycle based on thermal breeding in a molten-salt system."
Not to do so eliminates some of the *key* advantages of a molten salt reactor (IE one where the salt is both coolant and *fuel*).
"The neutron economy of such a system is utterly marginal - a 1% variation in the ability to extract fission products from the salt makes the difference between it producing surplus fuel, and needing continual top-ups."
The key one of which seems to be Xe135. The ability to purge the reactor of this was *the* key reason for designing a molten salt reactor (as part of the nuclear powered bomber programme) in the first place. And AFAIK the MSRE did *not* require top ups of Uranium. However as it did not including the breeding function this merely says a non breeder can be designed well enough *not* to need a top up.
"Worse, making a molten salt system works requires, a large scale and complex chemical processing plant to be added on to a reactor. A Molten Salt Breeder Reactor (MSBR) won't work if you let just a few percent of the siffion products (like Xenon) stay in the fuel - you need 95% plus efficient extraction on every circuit of the fuel."
I looked for "siffion" products but found nothing so I'll assume you mean fission products.
MSRE indicated both Xe and Kr poisons could be efficiently stripped by spraying the salt in a small chamber with an atmosphere of Helium. Both came *readily* out of the salt mix for later absorption onto carbon bed filters to be retained till their decay products could be released into the atmosphere.
" Worse, you HAVE to get out 90% or more of the intermediate between thorium and uranium on every cycle - protactinium. And to get that out will involve delights like passing 800C flouride-uranium salts through a column of molten bismuth, then extracting the protactinium frojm the bismuth somehow."
AFAIK already worked out. The description I'm aware of was a 1GW station would need A 4m (14 feet) high column. my experience of the chemical industry is that a 14 foot high column at probably a few atm (I'd expect it to operate near the same pressure as the core) is not *that* big a deal *despite* the temperature, which I would expect to be *lower* than the core in any case. This hardly compare to reactors for Ammonia or Nitric acid, typically running at 300-400atm, c300c and maybe 8-12 feet wide and 50-100feet high.
"Here's one for the enthusiasts - once the uranium is "bred" in the fuel/salt mixture (and leaving aside the delights of managing two such circuits, one for the fuel, and one for the breeder blanket), you have to get it out."
This *is* a reasonable concern and something which has not been demonstrated.Its complexity is the reason the MSRE did not include the breeding process. *However* the separation process is *well* understood using a combination of adding fluorine and distillation, *provided* you do have 2 separate circuits. The unavailability of a material with sufficient hot strength and chemical and radiation resistance at the preferred temperature was what stopped the MSRE testing this. Metallurgy has improved a bit in 40 years.
" And to do that, you have to bubble fluorine - that well known non-reactive and benign gas - through that same 800C molten uranium salt, then capture the resulting uranium hexaflouride. "Hex" is not only "hot" both thermally, and radiologically, but it's venomously corrosive - the separation membranes in enrichment plants have to be made of pure (99.9% plus) nickel to withstand it, and even then last only a few years."
As you point out this is *known* technology from the Uranium enrichment industry. Agressive certainly but *well* within the state of the art. Note also the "freeze valves" developed for MSRE would allow parallel processing columns (if needed) to be isolated for maintenance and replacement
And yes, it has virtues - thorium abundance, and potentially, it can be "drained down" in an accident. Bit that still means you have to remove decay heat from a couple of thousand tonnes of fuel mixture (more than in a conventional reactor), and have secure cooling and storage for the chemical plant and fission product inventory.
I'd doubt that. The MSRE salt mix density was 2300 Kg/m^3. Given that's lower than Aluminum and the *entire* volume of the MSRE (with no space taken up by the actual graphite moderator) would come to about 5500 Kg, with a maximum thermal output of 8MW I'd say 100x bigger would give c550 tonnes, so a 1GW (common size of power plant) reactor would have to be *very* badly designed to need more than a 1000 tonnes of salt .
As I said, it might have potential - but compared to something like a lead-cooled fast reactor, which have already been built in considerable numbers - the Soviets used them to power the "Alfa" class subs - doesn it look like an obvious route? Hardly...
You are aware that the design you're describing actually uses a lead/*bismuth* alloy?
It's major features being an ability to operate with natural convection in a "stealth" mode which is handy on a naval submarine. and will fail "badly" if the coolant freezes in the tubes.It's got *all* the issues conventional reactors have with fuel element design/certifcation and Xe135 and Kr reactor poisons, *without* the ability to irradiate decay products to *much* shorter lived elements, possibly *the* key benefit of this design if you want to have a nuclear fuel *cycle* instead of the burn/store arrangements most countries seem to have at present.
On the subject of the Alpha reactors for re-processing didn't the USSR just *dump* the cores at the end of life?
I'm not arguing, merely commenting that the phrase "Molten salt reactor" if used loosely has more than 1 meaning.
In case you haven't seen it this is the description of the work written by one of the team shortly after the MSRE. worth reading for the good, the bad and the could have been better.
www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/NAT_MSREexperience.pdf
is so praised here? It's a technology that, for the time being, simply does not exist in any useful size. It was tried in experimental life size reactors back in the 20th century and abandoned because it could not be made working.
If we want to believe in unproven technologies, why not go to fusion right away. Billions have been invested in that technology for ages now, and it promises energy with no limits, never running out of fuel.
I'm not entirely sure - there are a few real enthusiasts out there ( a chap called Kirk Sorenson has been on the US lecture ciruit puching it for years).
It's a mixture of things - first, it's a technology that was at that attractive stage where it'd beeen shown to work at a simple trials stage (a 5MW reactor running for five years), but not where any of the real unpleasant grind of moving from that stage to commercialisation. For a comparison, the 40MW "Windscale Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor" (WAGR) worked beautifully. It was the propotype for commercial scale AGRs which were utter pigs to build and run.
Second. there are genuinely good arguments for a Thorium cycle - primarily, the sheer abundance of Thorium itslef.
But a lot of what people have bought into seems to be based on overselling - and something the nuclear industry doesn't need is a repeat of the "too cheap to meter" overselling of the '50s.
For example, the proliferation argument - it's true that a thorium-origfinated U233 is laced with highly active U232, which makes it hard to handle, comparaed with bomb-grade plutonium. But civil non-thorium breeders and LWRs don't make bomb-grade Pu239 - they make plutonium laced with Pu240 and 238 - the latter of which is about as active as U232. In theory, you could run a breeder or LWR to make near-bomb grade PU - but it'd be crap for power production if you did - far easier to make Pu in a optimised design, like that used by the North Koreans or Israelis.
Similarly, the argument that the reactor doesn't contain such a large inventory of fission products. True, in part - if it's used as a breeder the fission products MUST be removed, as neutron economiy is marginal at best. But, they're still there on site, needing highly secure storage and cooling, just like spent fuel ponds. And there's a whole additional set of vulnerabilities introduced by having the processing facilitites to remove them - having a large inventory of extremely reactive flourine, for example, or needing to process extremely hot (in both sense) fuel through other extremely hot materials like bismuth.
The worst habit, though, and one that many have fallen for, is the trick of comparing dissimilar fuel-cycles. They compare the waste generation and fuel utilisation of a molten salt design requiring immediate, on site reprocessing to remove poisons and nascent fuel, with LWRs running a "once trough" fuel cyccle. The appropriate comparison would be LWRs/breeders running a classic reprocessing cycle. And if you allow for the fact that "classic" reprocessing lets you allow 10 or 20 years of decay between taking the fuel from the reactor, versus having to do it straight away in an MSBR, which makes handling much easier.
MSBR and the thorium cycle are concepts with a lot of potential - but kidding yourself that thatey're some sort of deus ex machina is naive.
I wish people would be more honest about things. This has got sod all to do with saving the planet. It's all about saving the Human Race and "the way things are, with the pretty birdies and the whales and...".
As has been pointed out earlier, the planet's been through more climate change than you can shake a stick at and it's still here.
'Save the planet as it is now.' In a few million years the earth will still be spinning merrily along, and humans will be forgotten.
Since you are the 'Beer Monster' here's a totally unrelated fact. Beer is brewed from yeast which turns the malt sugars to alcohol. Alcohol is toxic to yeast, so the yeast multiplies rapidly at the start but is eventually killed by its own waste products ...
Make your own metaphor
Don't know about many planet-wide civilisations that rely on fragile infrastructures and "at the limit" food production systems that have survived massive climate changes though!
The "planet has been through climate changes before" is a statement that provides little justification for our civilisation forcing a massive change in an incredibly short time (tens of years instead of thousands, way faster than most ecosystems can move/adapt... even if they had somewhere to move to that we had not mined or turned into farmlands or cities).
Still, what a great experiment!
As the gambler said "let it ride" (just before losing his stake, as he always will if he lets it ride long enough).
The very reason why carbon trading is seen as a "good thing" is because it's the only sufficiently large thing our various political systems can get off the ground to "*do* *something*".
This usually cynical commentard was in fact shocked to learn that some of our westerner greenies had the sheer gall to tell whichever international politico or ngo or whatever wanted to hear, that we shouldn't develop Africa because that would keep emissions low.
The sheer audacious stupidity of that I found daunting, and taunting.
We can't afford not to. But it is that it's apartheid all over again, on a global scale and in greenie sauce this time, that makes it morally objectionable as well as, long term, highly impractical. Our food situation isn't getting better and the world population keeps on growing. Also entirely hypocritical, of course, as this sort of thing is touted in five star restaurants in world capitals, not in Darkest Africa. You'd get eaten right quick if you dared utter it there.
But it's part of a pattern that tends to be common to activists of all plumage. For example, PETA still conveniently labels wearing of fur as proof of being personally responsible for killing small furry animals. Disregarding for the moment that there are mighty cold places where furs are the only thing keeping the hairless apes wearing them alive. Apparently greenies never go there. That there is in fact a continent full of small furry animals where they are pests and that this indiscriminate labeling killed the market in their fur, allowing these pests to flourish and further endanger already endangered species down under appears to be no skin off their nose. Apparently they've never been there either. It's the thought that counts, not what happens in the real world. Ideology based policy making in its purest form. It distorts reality so hard that even science seems to agree, until you realise it's a fundie in a white coat. Who let them out of the asylum?
But it's worse, Tim. Our politicians are clearly utterly and completely incapable of making their own well-informed, nevermind balanced decisions. We've long known that the real vulnerability is in listening to lobby groups. This is just one of those things where lobby groups got sway. But it isn't in the best interest of humanity or even any single people. Only some industry groups.
I am probably a liberal-leaner mostly because, even if they're selfish bastards, they usually go for things that at least look like they might work. I've yet to see a starry-eyed youth utter anything remotely practical, no matter how full of the urge to go out and "help the poor" or "help the workers" or whatnot. It always ends up in handouts, and they never really work. But they do keep an entire industry going, even if entirely on subsidies. It's good monies for the now grey-haired starry-eyed youths from yesteryear filling the senior positions. Greenies and other ideologically-driven I don't suppose are much different--haven't seen any evidence to the contrary.
Which is a shame, really. If only the thought is what counts, we won't be changing our ways. Instead we're just pouring money down a black hole. And at some point people will start to notice and put the greenies out to pasture. So snap out of it already, you greenie bunch of selfish oafs with your selfish "starving to be green" agenda. Reality check, people.
The article's fundamental point that we should be investing in thorium is correct, but the problem is that it's still in research and therefore is not yet actually a solution either. It does ignore the fact that we are investing oodles in fusion which, of course, is the cuddly research project. I presume it's a green politics issue, but maybe it's a resource issue too. On the other hand wind, solar, tidal and hydro are solved problems, even though they are currently fucking expensive. The problem is that saying wind isn't a magic solution doesn't actually do anything to resolve the fact that there are finite supplies of fossil fuels and fissionable material.
"But I'm actually seeing people arguing that we can't shouldn't use gas because it will stop us from investing in windmills"
Similarly, I see people arguing that windmills are pointless because they aren't a reliable source of electricity. It seems we both encounter idiots.
What matters is net energy savings. That's all. If windmills provide net energy savings then they help towards to the current energy supply problem. While gas generators might not be super fast to be adjusted they're a damn sight faster than nuclear and coal. Pair wind with gas generation and you can reduce the consumption of a finite fossil fuel resource. And the natural gas can be generated renewably from waste, even though the total amount generated won't meet current demand and it's probably another fucking expensive thing to do.
And please, everybody, just stop with the "it's too expensive" crap. Everybody, including advocates, know it's expensive, but it doesn't change the fact that the cheap stuff is running out. Just breath a sigh of relief every time new technology increases available fossil fuel supply or makes renewables cheaper or more efficient and cross your fingers for your descendents and hope that research gives us a magic solution.
Again, people saying lots of energy is a bad thing are nuts and should be ignored. Limitless energy would help resolve the resource problem since limitless energy would mean limitless recycling.
And the part of the article about cheap solar always being just around the corner fails to show the numbers that indicate that the actual price of solar has been falling consistently. Even if it's not as cheap and magical as the boosters would have you believe, it's still net-positive for energy and better than having millions of empty roofs.
...is contained in this single paragraph from a BBC Radio 4 program "ARE ENVIRONMENTALISTS BAD FOR THE PLANET?" Broadcast Date: 25.01.10
Solitaire Townsend Co-founder and Chief Executive of Futerra Sustainability Communications: "I was making a speech to nearly 200 really hard core, deep environmentalists and I played a little thought game on them. I said imagine I am the carbon fairy and I wave a magic wand. We can get rid of all the carbon in the atmosphere, take it down to two hundred fifty parts per million and I will ensure with my little magic wand that we do not go above two degrees of global warming. However, by waving my magic wand I will be interfering with the laws of physics not with people – they will be as selfish, they will be as desiring of status. The cars will get bigger, the houses willget bigger, the planes will fly all over the place but there will be no climate change. And I asked them, would you ask the fairy to wave its magic wand? And about 2 people of the 200 raised their hands."
"I will ensure with my little magic wand that we do not go above two degrees of global warming. [...] there will be no climate change."
All that tells you is that two people failed to detect various obvious inconsistencies in a presumably self-serving bullshit sales pitch ("Sustainability Communications" indeed). Maybe the "thought game" played itself out on the speaker, not the audience.
but
1) The repeated use of windmill (they are not: they are wind turbines, and if you don't understand the distinction you know nothing about the subject)
2) The ignorance of the difference between fuel and plant capacity, and why that means that wind energy reduces our fossil fuel use.
The first one isn't a major flaw, more a sign that you don't really know the subject, but the second one is a pretty major problem.
And that's not good either.
"The main risk and source of public outcry in the US has been the contamination of drinking water. The routes to pollution are multiple, and include leakage from the well, spillage from the site and handling of thousands of gallons of liquid which flows back from the well after fracking.
Also serious threats to locally produced food, and the risk to wildlife and animals is huge."
Quotes from the Save The Ribble campaign http://save-the-ribble.blogspot.com/
...and competitive transmission rates would push sales of town-sized thorium reactors.
The problems to be solved with thorium are financial and engineering. Forward looking companies around the globe have devoted resources to the engineering side.
The net base demand for electrical energy and the high cost of building transmission infrastructure make investing in local power generation very attractive.
Factories needing process heat would buy the appropriate model, and sell excess energy to the grid. Small nuke is a game changer.
There is nothing wrong with wind, per se. But wind probably has the highest death rate if you include tornados and suchlike in your data stream.
A true Carbon Tax would force drivers to extract the hydrogen from their fuel oil, and return the carbon. This becomes very attractive combined with mature low temperature fuel cell technology. Hydrogenated diesel is already available, the ideal fuel would give up most of it's hydrogen yet remain liquid to be recharged with hydrogen at a fueling facility..
I worked on 660/1220 MW AGR stations (660MW per reactor, 1220 per station). Of the four reactors at Heysham, 3 just about covered Manchester's load, 1 Liverpool's.
As a working assumption, peak load is about 1GW per million population, average load about 2/3rds of that.
And about 2/3rds-3/4s of the UK's population live in the big conurbations - London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle, etc.
this is just a pad piece for a book (very badly written and using far too simplistic economics by all accounts) written by a UKIP swivel eyed loon. You know the type, the blog and get fringe publishers and make a big thing how they have written a book and claim it is fact.
Just a rehash of the common lies being put forward by these idiots.
Why windmills?
>>> Tibetan prayer wheels (called Mani wheels by the Tibetans) are devices for spreading spiritual blessings and well being. Rolls of thin paper, imprinted with many, many copies of the mantra (prayer) Om Mani Padme Hum, printed in an ancient Indian script or in Tibetan script, are wound around an axle in a protective container, and spun around and around. Typically, larger decorative versions of the syllables of the mantra are also carved on the outside cover of the wheel.
Tibetan Buddhists believe that saying this mantra, out loud or silently to oneself, invokes the powerful benevolent attention and blessings of Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion. ...
With the introduction of Tibetan Buddhism into the West, new types of Mani wheels have come into being. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said that having the mantra on your computer works the same as a traditional prayer wheel.<<< [http://www.dharma-haven.org/tibetan/prayer-wheel.htm]
Of course, here in the West we do things better and bigger. Behold our windmills! Feel our compassion!! Observe our sufferings (to come, natch, when the lights and the heating go out)!!! (Our windmills don't need mantras to be inscribed on them, as thanks to the BBC, these are well enough known already).
Why is it still going forward?
Kyoto basically.While the obligations on reducing the manufacture of plant food as a side-effect of a developed economy have not been met, the agreement binding on the 23 select developed nations to pay for the costs of all the others has been very successful. In fact it has been so wildly successful that politicians of all persuasions have noticed its efficacy as a revenue collection machine, and are busy transferring receipts from any green projects to general funding (net of the costs of propaganda). That is why all parties appear to be green. They are of course all playing chicken with energy security - but hey, while the money's rolling in, let's party (and increase our pension provisions).
The rent-seeking United Nations Organization has noticed not just that the money has been coming in, but also that it's not being put their way in the quantities they would like.The arguments about the environment have turned into arguments about money (as the Greens have noticed), and the UNO has lost control of the game: the beneficiaries of Kyoto are not suddenly going to agree to become sugar daddies for the others (as Copenhagen demonstrated). In anticipation of the failure (or non-occurrence) of Rio 2012 the UNO has been floating other ways of skimming the hoi polloi, such as a global tax on aviation, a global Tobin tax on financial transactions, etc. Unfortunately, while the UNO counts national leaders as their friends, and so can influence legislation, the national chancellors keep other company which determines financial ways and means beyond politicians. The UNO scammers have themselves been scammed. While there is scope for a scam, the windmills will continue.
But I get twitchy when people start saying things like how it should provide 20%+ of our power in 10-20 years:
1. The wind doesnt always blow, and prudent utility management practices mean you always have a backup of power/gas/potable water for times of peak demand or when there is something wrong with the delivery infrastructure.
2. Thats an awful lot of rare earths for the controls on all those wind turbines. Not sure we can mine and process that much in time.
...according to CBC News.
Hydro and nukes mostly. It seems perfectly feasible to reach *zero* percent if They wish. A few more nukes. Windmills and Fundy tidal power. They will hopefully run an undersea hydro electric power cable from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia. 120,000 LED highway lights mandated in NS - five year payback claimed. It all seems rather hopeful in the mid-term.
Actions that make a real difference: insulate your damn house, fool!
Actions that make no difference whatsoever: turning off your stupid lights for an hour.
Green on the outside
Red on the inside (don't tell me you didn't realise all the communists had vanished - ? Well now you know where the went).
Most Greens are a-scientific; and demonstrate no understanding of how anything more advanced than a wheel and a wood fire actually work. They can normally be spotted telling OTHER people how to live; frequently ignoring their own (unwanted useless) advice
Have been putting out ads on local television opposing the building of a "dangerous new nuclear plant." Ignoring entirely the fact that the new nuclear plant is 1) A modern, safe design. 2) The *existing* reactor is one of the infamous GE Mark Is, it'd actually be safest to build an *extra* new reactor and shut down the Mark I compared to keeping it running through the 2030s, which is the plan now.