China Achieves Thorium-Uranium Conversion Within Molten Salt Reactor (scmp.com) 120
Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: South China Morning Post, citing Chinese state media, reported that an experimental reactor developed in the Gobi Desert by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics has achieved thorium-to-uranium fuel conversion, paving the way for an almost endless supply of nuclear energy. It is the first time in the world that scientists have been able to acquire experimental data on thorium operations from inside a molten salt reactor according to a report by Science and Technology Daily. Thorium is much more abundant and accessible than uranium and has enormous energy potential. One mine tailings site in Inner Mongolia is estimated to hold enough of the element to power China entirely for more than 1,000 years.
At the heart of the breakthrough is a process known as in-core thorium-to-uranium conversion that transforms naturally occurring thorium-232 into uranium-233 -- a fissile isotope capable of sustaining nuclear chain reactions within the reactor itself. Thorium (Th-232) is not itself fissile and so is not directly usable in a thermal neutron reactor. Thorium fuels therefore need a fissile material as a 'driver' so that a chain reaction (and thus supply of surplus neutrons) can be maintained. The only fissile driver options are U-233, U-235 or Pu-239. (None of these are easy to supply.) In the 1960s, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA) designed and built a demonstration MSR using U-233, derived externally from thorium as the main fissile driver.
At the heart of the breakthrough is a process known as in-core thorium-to-uranium conversion that transforms naturally occurring thorium-232 into uranium-233 -- a fissile isotope capable of sustaining nuclear chain reactions within the reactor itself. Thorium (Th-232) is not itself fissile and so is not directly usable in a thermal neutron reactor. Thorium fuels therefore need a fissile material as a 'driver' so that a chain reaction (and thus supply of surplus neutrons) can be maintained. The only fissile driver options are U-233, U-235 or Pu-239. (None of these are easy to supply.) In the 1960s, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA) designed and built a demonstration MSR using U-233, derived externally from thorium as the main fissile driver.
Nuclear Power Industry won't be happy (Score:4, Insightful)
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I remember years ago reading that the nuclear power construction companies purposely setup regulatory roadblocks so that the West would be stuck using 1940's ERA reactor designs originally for producing weapons grade uranium. It's sad that this is another breakthrough technology coming out of China due to the west not willing to move away from legacy nuclear power...
Hold that thought until we see actual operational systems in China. This is a proof of concept with an experimental reactor. Scale may prove to have its own challenges.
Also hate reading headlines wondering how easily they will turn into hey, whatever happened to endings after a decade of waiting, because some billionaire coal pimp filed a patent infringement claim. When we find this purposely hidden technology is as old as Greed.
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Scale *will* have its own challenges. So will maintenance. This is an "always true". They may well but soluble, but that sure isn't guaranteed.
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China is building new-technology nuclear reactors literally as fast as they can select sites and pour concrete. They've issued 30 permits for new plants in the last 3 years (and are exporting 15 more around the world), in spite of the average cost of $0.08/kwh (US cost is $0.18, Ireland is $0.45). This is yet another high tech industry that the West has given up on and allowed a country which a generation ago was clearly in the Third World to take over.
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Re:Nuclear Power Industry won't be happy (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been several experimental thorium based reactors developed in Western countries. They all ended in failure. New problems discovered, very expensive to fix and deal breakers for commercial operation.
The reason they keep returning to old designs is because they are proven. Developing new reactors is expensive and slow. They are a huge financial risk, because they often don't work and not only is the investment is lost, there is a huge clean up cost too.
Right now there is also the fact that renewables are much cheaper and rapidly gaining dominance, so even if your wonderful new reactor does work, will anybody want it in 20-30 years time? Maybe... If it provides weapons grade material.
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Renewables still all come down to not being always available. Which means complex storage solutions, or generation by alternative means. Right now that's mainly natural gas and coal.
Will people in 20-30 years want power at night in the middle of a large wind storm that requires the wind turbines to be parked? I'd wager so.
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It's fairly easy and cheap to get to 95% renewable power, and use gas for the rest. Offset or capture the gas emissions and you are at net zero, with that energy being incredibly cheap most of the time.
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Gas takes time and money to get those boilers (steam engines) up and running... What is done, is that hydro is shutdown quicker so that the gas/coal/nuke can continue to run. Hydro is more like a mechanical battery (charged by the rain or a pump;) sadly, your gas actually reduces the hydro and battery usage. If we're talking adaptable grids, there is no practical place for this base load BS the industry argues to prolong their steam engines. The profitable times are during high demand and the losses are
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Not really...relative to the other energy techs, gas is one of the quickest and cheapest to toggle on and off as needed. That's why they're ideal as peakers.
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not ideal. batteries are ideal. hydro is ideal. Simply using distance grid transport is great too. They are still not great to flip on and off constantly. For short spikes, flywheels are probably better.
Still, base load power for the grid is a myth; it's not going to be cost effective, it probably isn't already - not too many run those turbines very long.
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Gas turbines spin up very quickly and produce electricity, though maximum output, using the waste heat to boil water is slower to ramp up.
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That would be true if you could just scale the gas to this 5% load demand and let it produce 24/7 like that.
The problem is that we have times where 50 or even 70% of renewable generation cuts out for twenty minutes. You cannot pay for 70% load in gas and you cannot turn it on fast enough to stop a cascade failure from happening.
Numbers in the hands of quick draws are a dangerous thing. This is a complex problem. Simple solutions to complex problems are always false.
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If 70% of renewables cut out for 20 minutes you would be more concerned with the on going huge natural disaster that probably brought down many of the power lines anyway.
For hours of low output we have storage.
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Renewables still all come down to not being always available. Which means complex storage solutions, or generation by alternative means. Right now that's mainly natural gas and coal.
Will people in 20-30 years want power at night in the middle of a large wind storm that requires the wind turbines to be parked? I'd wager so.
I have a solar battery system that has had 100 percent uptime since installed years ago. In the meantime, my mains power was off for over a week earlier this year, and a number of days last year. So that storm that knocks out wind will knock out any power source. Regardless energy storage isn't all that complex, given that hydraulic storage is in regular use, and the present electrical grid gets along pretty well via switching power. A cell array, battery array, charge controller, and inverter isn't te
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For a single home? No, it's not that complex, but can be expensive depending on total needs. Average cost is $15-16,000 USD to start and goes up for more capacity.
Grid level storage? Much more complex.
The goal isn't to have 99.99999999% grid uptime. It would be supporting known common events. It's night? You don't have solar? Strong storm? Wind is parked. A foot of snow, and then overcast for the next week with the 8.5 hours of sunlight per day? Much more difficult.
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Strong storms like you describe mean no power for a week, using traditional generating plants, hydro here. Just today there are all kinds of power outages with the current storm.
Funny enough the last really big storm seen every highway wiped out from flooding, along with the train tracks and all pipelines shutdown. Gas rationing as it was barged in, yet the lights stayed on mostly.
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deal breakers for commercial operation.
And that's the issue, isn't it? If it doesn't make money for someone within five years than it's no longer considered worth exploring since those executives will have moved to looting some other company by then. Once upon a time ATT could fund bleeding edge work in basic science without concerning itself whether Bell Labs would return a profit within the current CEO's term, and they were the world's technology leader in many fields. Those days have gone, we've passed the baton to China and India, who hav
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Investors are willing to throw money at nuclear fusion, but that's because it's actually reasonably clean and safe.
Nuclear fission for energy production has been going since the 1950s, and 7 decades later it's still not really commercially viable or a safe investment. People keep claiming to have the next miracle solution for it, but I think most experts can see that none of them are very likely to make any real difference.
Most of the basic science has been done here, it's really about figuring out how to h
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"it's still not really commercially viable or a safe investment" in the United States or EU.
FTFY. We're not the whole world.
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Spot on. (An EU guy)
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It's often worse elsewhere. They would need to develop a whole nuclear industry, and convince their neighbours that they aren't going to produce weapons.
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Not really, most of the countries which have nuclear power plants don't refine their own fuel. They buy a power station from (now China, formerly the US/EU) and then fuel from (now Russia, formerly the US/EU), and just send techs to be trained in its operation. As far as the power grid is concerned it's just another power station, it doesn't care where the electrons come from.
This is why China has been able to sell 15 nuclear power plants just in the last few years to other BRICS+ countries around the wor
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They need a nuclear industry for more than just refining fuel. They need to be able to run those plants, handle the waste, have regulatory oversight. Deal with the IAEA. Can't just pay China to come build a plant, set it and forget it.
They may well come to regret buying those plants, when they discover that they are dependent on China to keep them operating.
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Of course China and Russia are going to provide support, and they'll probably regret it a lot less than those countries which bought plants from the US!
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Investors are willing to throw money at nuclear fusion, but that's because it's actually reasonably clean and safe.
Good lord, that's what they like to say, but nowhere near true. The only fusion reaction likely to be achieved soon is D-T, and that sprays neutrons out like a firehose. Everything nearby gets neutron activated. The reactor itself has only a finite lifetime before it's too radioactive to use.
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It's never one thing, it's never one group. It's always a cartel or conspiracy, there are always multiple goals being pursued, usually by individual participants let alone the aggregate of the groups.
Knew they were working on it (Score:1)
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Waste from a molten salt reactor should be fairly stable. Put it in the center of a glass brick and use it as a low level heat source. (Actually, that's what I think they ought to do with most reactor waste except the stuff that's too hot for glass to hold. And you might need a couple of barriers within the glass. Glass would stop alpha and beta cold, but some gamma might need a lead foil screen.)
Yes, there's a paper saying that given enough centuries the waste will slowly leach out. But the level of t
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Or you could bury it at the bottom of an oceanic trench, where "given enough centuries" it will be subducted into Earth's mantle.
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Or you could bury it at the bottom of an oceanic trench, where "given enough centuries" it will be subducted into Earth's mantle.
This has been studied and it's not that simple. First you have to get it there, then you have to ensure it doesn't break open and spread before it gets subducted. I had the same idea, it just turned out to not be a good one.
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Glassification works for the majority of the waste, and if a glass block "breaks open" nothing spills out. While mining at extreme depths is problematic the opposite, burying something, should not pose much difficulty if it's done robotically. We've been exploring the ocean trenches for a couple of decades now with robots, and the advances in the technology the last few years is amazing. Life in sediment at the benthic depths is mostly limited to the upper few meters because of the lack of gas exchange,
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Glassification works for the majority of the waste, and if a glass block "breaks open" nothing spills out.
Glassification is viable in every way but financially. It's incompatible with capitalism.
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It's incompatible with capitalism.
**sigh**
Yeah, most good things are . . .
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I think your idea of how fast subduction happens is a little off by some orders of magnitude.
However encasing it in something that won't leak (like glass) and dumping it in a very deep and dead part of the ocean is plausible and may be the best idea we have. There is no need to aim for the subduction fault, that makes no difference.
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In addition to the other objection, "low level heat" is a useful commodity. Why not use it rather than throwing it away.
Neat. Now if someone could come ... (Score:3)
... up with a method to convert radiation to electricity directly, we'd be ready to back to nuclear power.
Until then it remains a dead end.
Nuclear fuel or power isn't the problem. Nuclear Fission steam power and nuclear waste is.
Now if someone could come... (Score:4, Informative)
... up with a method to convert radiation to electricity directly, we'd be ready to back to nuclear power.
We have the means to produce electricity directly from radiation, betavoltaics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Depends on what kind of radiation. Betavoltaics convert beta radiation, but most of the nuclear power sources we talk about don't emit betas (energetic electrons). There are also alphavoltaic devices, but so far these tend to degrade due to radiation damage, so they have only limited lifetime. Actual nuclear reactors emit neutrons and fission fragments, which tend to radiation degrade anything nearby.
Using this on large scales is apparently still a problem
I'll say! Commercial devices (using tritium as the source) are in the microwatt range.
but we can use this for "nuclear batteries" such as those used on deep space probes,
Not yet flying on space missions, but the tech is getting better. I wrote a review on this a while back: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ab... [ieee.org]
Where's the Thorium Guy? (Score:2)
We should hear from him. He must be having multiple Os over this.
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His right hand might be too sore to type right now.
Finally.. (Score:1)
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oh right, we want that steam catapault, i forgot.
Why Molten Salt is best Thorium Reactor (Score:5, Interesting)
From https://world-nuclear.org/info... [world-nuclear.org]
"The TMSR-LF (liquid fuel) stream claims full closed Th-U fuel cycle with breeding of U-233 and much better sustainability but greater technical difficulty. SINAP aims for a 10 MWt pilot plant by 2030 and a 100 MWt demonstration plant by 2040."
The fuel is both corrosive (F) and Toxic (Be). Still better than *radioactive*.
"A TMSR-LF fast reactor optimized for burning minor actinides [from LWRs] is to follow"
This design minimizes nuclear waste, similar to a breeder reactor.
"SINAP sees molten salt fuel being superior to the TRISO fuel in effectively unlimited burn-up, less waste, and lower fabricating cost, but achieving lower temperatures (600ÂC+) than the TRISO fuel reactors (1200ÂC+). Near-term goals include preparing nuclear-grade ThF4 and ThO2 and testing them in a MSR. The US Department of Energy (especially Oak Ridge NL) is collaborating with the Academy on the program, which had a start-up budget of $350 million."
We already have proof of concept in Tennessee.
"However, the primary reason that American researchers and the China Academy of Sciences/ SINAP are working on solid fuel, salt-cooled reactor technology is that it is a realistic first step. The technical difficulty of using molten salts is significantly lower when they do not have the very high activity levels associated with them bearing the dissolved fuels and wastes. The experience gained with component design, operation, and maintenance with clean salts makes it much easier then to move on and consider the use of liquid fuels, while gaining several key advantages from the ability to operate reactors at low pressure and deliver higher temperatures."
Solid fuel is practice reactor.
"Accelerator-driven reactors: A number of groups have investigated how a thorium-fuelled accelerator-driven reactor (ADS) may work and appear. Perhaps most notable is the âADTRâ(TM) design patented by a UK group. This reactor operates very close to criticality and therefore requires a relatively small proton beam to drive the spallation neutron source. Earlier proposals for ADS reactors required high-energy and high-current proton beams which are energy-intensive to produce, and for which operational reliability is a problem."
So, no more U233 or U235 required to to start the MSR?
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Small demonstration plant by 2040, so useless for addressing climate change. Even if the demonstration plant works, commercial scale will still be decades away.
Nothing about them being able to use less enriched fuel or make it impossible to produce weapons grade material. The fuel being illegal has been an issue for some projects.
The thing that usually kills MSRs is the corrosive nature of the salt.
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Small demonstration plant by 2040, so useless for addressing climate change.
If you are around in 2040 you will still be complaining about continued fossil fuel use and that nuclear takes too long.
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Small demonstration plant by 2040, so useless for addressing climate change.
Climate change is a long term problem. We will still need energy sources in 2040.
Nothing about them being able to use less enriched fuel or make it impossible to produce weapons grade material.
That's one of the selling points of thorium cycles, that it's more difficult to use to make weapons grade materials. Note "more difficult" may not mean "completely impossible."
The fuel being illegal has been an issue for some projects.
That would be highly-enriched uranium ("HEU"), not thorium
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Fusion? (Score:2)
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This transformation occurs through a precise sequence of nuclear reactions. The thorium-232 absorbs a neutron to become thorium-233, which decays into protactinium-233 and then further decays into the final product – a powerful nuclear fuel.
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I thought that adding to the nucleus (232 -> 233) requires fusion. Can someone please explain?
Neutron capture is not usually considered fusion.
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But how do you go from Thorium to Uranium without fusion?
Thorium 232 captures a neutron, turning into Thorium 233. Thorium 233 decays to Uranium 233 by successive beta decays.
Corrosion (Score:3)
Fort St. Vrain (Score:2)
I thought that China... (Score:2)
was going to have 5 Thorium reactors on line this year.... Guess that didn't work out so well.
No funny (Score:2)
Another rich target missed...
In the past (Score:2)
In the near past, we Westerners would take any claims of success from China with a grain of salt. It's probably vaporware, etc etc.
Not so much now. Meanwhile, the US is making coal great again, handing out new drilling leases, powering data centers with methane from the fracking fields.
Re:An endless supply of nuclear waste. (Score:5, Funny)
Unless they find something to completely use up all the uranium or convert it into something else.
You know what they say. Go Green or Glow Green.
Re: An endless supply of nuclear waste. (Score:5, Insightful)
What is "green"? During all of its effort to shutdown nuclear plants, Germany tried to replace them with Russian gas. Not only an incredibly stupid (and easily foreseen) strategic blunder, but if the goal is to reduce carbon output, it seems to be exactly the wrong direction.
Though you guys always want to kill off anything that you don't understand, which not only includes nuclear energy, but also GMO crop, which increases crop yields, thus reducing the landmass and carbon required to produce the same amount of food.
Greenpeace seems to be the opposite of what it claims to be, as do you.
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The concern with GMO comes from a lack of trust in government. Some modifications causes the plant to produce its own pesticide, which clearly has a potential for harm if it ends up in the edible parts. So if the regulatory body has been bought out by the industry, how do we know they did the necessary investigation to ensure safety? Moreover, our understanding of genetics is pretty limited at this time so it's not possible to predict all of the side effects of any particular change.
Re: An endless supply of nuclear waste. (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it isn't any of that. You guys keep changing your argument like you change underwear, and the reason for that is quite simple: You fear what you don't understand.
Some modifications causes the plant to produce its own pesticide, which clearly has a potential for harm if it ends up in the edible parts
That's called Bt, which is a protein toxic to invertebrates. Bt crop has an abundance of it, and you've probably eaten plenty of it already, even if you've never been within 1,000 miles of any GMO food. With the exception of rsilvergun, most people aren't invertebrates. Humans in fact gain nourishment from it, much like any other protein. I alr
Re: An endless supply of nuclear waste. (Score:2)
How do you know that's the change they made to the crop? It's all self reported. Have you done the generic analysis yourself? How do you know the studies showing the pesticide is safe were not tampered with?
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How do you know that's the change they made to the crop? It's all self reported. Have you done the generic analysis yourself? How do you know the studies showing the pesticide is safe were not tampered with?
If you are going to worry that “they” are going to lie about the actual changes they make, or what studies show you are thinking small.
If “they” are going to lie about those, why would they tell the truth about using GMO v non-GMO crops? If you can’t trust them to tell the truth about the food supply you can’t trust them to tell the truth about, well, the food supply can you?
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The best lies contain nuggets of truth. Do you remember them telling you that Teflon is safe? Well, it turns out Teflon is indeed safe, but the process of making it creates extremely toxic PFAS that they can simply release into the environment, where it will persist forever and can poison you even when it exists on the order of a few parts per trillion. They were able to do this because the government simply believed the industry's own "studies".
It's impossible to lie about GMO existing because they want to
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You're about as uneducated as they come.
https://www.scientificdiscover... [scientificdiscovery.dev]
Re: An endless supply of nuclear waste. (Score:2)
Cancer mortality is not the same as cancer incidence rate you dolt. Mortality can be improved by better healthcare technology. Instance rate is coming from environmental factors.
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How do you know that's the change they made to the crop? It's all self reported. Have you done the generic analysis yourself? How do you know the studies showing the pesticide is safe were not tampered with?
This is the conspiracy theory version of "I live in fear of what I don't know, and so should you." You're guilty until proven innocent.
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but also GMO crop, which increases crop yields
While there are some crazies out there yelling about frankenfood and such, the real resistance to GMO is the IP ownership issues surrounding it. Farmers have been sued for GMO grain from another farmer's fields 'infecting' their own. Most of those lawsuits were actually legit and the farmer was trying to skate by, but even one lawsuit against a legit farmer is WAY too much.
( CAPTCHA is evolve, this is ridiculous )
Re: An endless supply of nuclear waste. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: An endless supply of nuclear waste. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with nuclear waste is that it is difficult and dangerous to handle, making it very expensive.
As for being the fastest way to zero emission, what are you smoking and can I have some? Nuclear is extremely slow to build, and this is just an experimental process so will probably take decades to develop even into a demonstration scale reactor.
The market has decided, renewables are the cheapest, the fastest, and the easiest to deal with. It's sad that we aren't able to manufacture or install them on the scale that China is.
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The problem with nuclear waste is that it is difficult and dangerous to handle, making it very expensive.
As for being the fastest way to zero emission, what are you smoking and can I have some? Nuclear is extremely slow to build, and this is just an experimental process so will probably take decades to develop even into a demonstration scale reactor.
It is also expensive to a fault, and has to be propped up liability-wise.
I've always said that extremely safe fission based electrical plants can be built. Just not by humans. Humans have bean counters who want cheap, management that wants fast, and people who ignore the rules, calling any disagreement the province of tree huggers.
The market has decided, renewables are the cheapest, the fastest, and the easiest to deal with. It's sad that we aren't able to manufacture or install them on the scale that China is.
Things like Solar and wind become more installed all the time, and storage is proceeding apace (although lot of wind emplacements don't need storage)
I'm okay with not having
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Nuclear is extremely slow to build
You're looking at it through the lens of US history, China builds nuclear reactors is six years or less. They've issued 10 permits a year for the last three years and currently are exporting 15 more to countries whose leaders aren't utter morons, a nuclear power plant is no longer a one-off custom-made Hennessey luxury car, China has made them into an F-150.
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And yet they are talking about 2040 for a small 100MW demonstrator plant. That's 15 years away. For the demonstrator.
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And how long has it taken China to ramp up its nuclear industry to the point where they can start 10 projects a year? Without looking, I'd say 30+.
For America, one example I heard was simply forging a containment dome takes at least a year and that is the current capability. Need lots of supply chain and educated work force to ramp up nuclear plant construction and thousands are needed if they're the major source of power.
China has a huge advantage when it comes to long term planning, especially as in the w
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As the west gets more polarized, and our corporate executives get ever more focused on short-term profits which improve their bonuses over long-term gains. The prevailing mindset seems to be, "Why would I invest in something which won't show profits for ten years when by that time I'll be looting some other company?"
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Nuclear is extremely slow to build
The US Navy has entered the chat... No, really, I saw a quote about that the other day and was a bit startled by it so I looked it up myself. Historically it's about 4 reactors per year and currently about half that. Their models are compact, low maintenance with a long service life between refueling, and can quickly spool up or down on demand. They are also operated and maintained by 20 year olds with two years of training.
Next up on how "the Navy is different". Yup, so maybe we should step out of the
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Naval reactors use fuel that is illegal for civilians in most countries.
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Naval reactors use fuel that is illegal for civilians in most countries.
So we let the Navy both own and operate the reactors. Kinda like how it's being done right now...
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That's a novel solution, but I think most countries would be reluctant to allow the Navy to own and operate such critical infrastructure.
The fuel isn't the only issue anyway. And as always, it comes back to "why bother?" We have a cheaper solution, available now, with no issues beyond the usual NIMBYism. Maybe if we get to 95% renewable and there is a real problem that nuclear could solve cost effectively, we could look at it again.
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That's a novel solution
No "novelty" to it, the US Navy has been building and operating high quality reactors non stop for 70 years. Their reactors can quickly spool up or down. Their reactors are designed to take abuse. Ever seen that explosion they set off near a new ship in sea trials? The infrastructure to build and deliver these is already in place. So is the training facility to operate and maintain them.
but I think most countries would be reluctant to allow the Navy to own and operate such critical infrastructure.
Not my place to push for proposals in another country. But it'll work here because we are already doing it.
The fuel isn't the only issue anyway.
The US Na
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Re: An endless supply of nuclear waste. (Score:5, Informative)
The GP's comment wasn't accusing there of being a nuclear waste problem (there isn't). They were talking about how nuclear waste can be burned in a breeder reactor, producing orders of magnitude more than the burning of a couple tenths of a percent of the natural uranium in a conventional reactor does.
Despite the press hype about thorium (which is way more popular among the media and nerds on the internet than with actual nuclear engineers), nuclear power is already basically unlimited, even without breeder reactors (which are very much viable tech, and much more mature than thorium). Only with an incredibly weak definition is it in any meaningfully way "limited" - if you limit yourself to currently quantified reserves, at current fuel prices, with production mining tech, you have a bit over two centuries worth at current burn rates. But this is obviously nonsense. Uranium production tech isn't going to advance in *two centuries*? Nobody is going to explore for more in *two centuries*? And as for "at current prices" - fuel is only a very small percentage of the cost of fission power, so who cares if prices rise? And rising prices or advancing production tech doesn't just put linearly more of a resource onto a market, they put exponentially more onto the market. As an example with uranium: seawater uranium could power the world's current (overwhelmingly non-breeder) reactor fleet for 13000 years, and current lab-scale tech is projected to be nearly as cheap as conventional uranium production [hackaday.com] at scale.
Also, if you switch to breeder reactors, you don't just extend the amount of fuel you have by two orders of magnitude - the cost of the raw mined uranium also becomes two orders of magnitude less relevant than its already very small percentage of the cost of fission power generation, because you need so much less per kWh.
As for any thoraboos in the comments section: thorium fuel is more complex and expensive to fabricate (fundamentally - thorium dioxide has a higher melting point and is much harder to sinter), it's more complex to reprocess (it's more difficult to dissolve), its waste is much more hazardous over human timescales, the claimed resistance to nuclear proliferation is bunk, the tech readiness level is low and the costs are very high, and it's unclear it'll ever be economically competitive - most in the nuclear industry are highly dubious (due to what's needed to actually burn it vs. uranium). Hence the lack of investment. And I say this with the acknowledgement that nuclear power is already a very expensive form of electricity generation.
Thorium and Uranium [Re: An endless supply of ...] (Score:2)
Despite the press hype about thorium (which is way more popular among the media and nerds on the internet than with actual nuclear engineers), nuclear power is already basically unlimited, even without breeder reactors
Citation needed. All the data I've seen say that unless we have breeders, the uranium will run out in a few years if we try to produce all our power with nuclear.
(which are very much viable tech, and much more mature than thorium).
The problem with breeders is that they also breed plutonium isotopes that can be used for bombs. This makes breeder reactors a security risk. Breeding uranium isotopes from thorium, on the other hand, doesn't. And the very article we're discussing is about maturing the technology.
Only with an incredibly weak definition is it in any meaningfully way "limited" - if you limit yourself to currently quantified reserves, at current fuel prices, with production mining tech, you have a bit over two centuries worth at current burn rates.
"At current burn rates".
People are proposing to produce all of our e
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Actually they've known how to dispose of it since the early 1960s, bury it at the bottom of oceanic trenches where it can be subducted into Earth's mantle. The reasons for not doing that are entirely political, no engineering or technology stoppers. The fantasy of politicians is that the "bad guys" will somehow excavate it and use it to create a weapon, but if they have the tech to go to the bottom of an ocean trench and dig it up then they have the facilities to do something considerably worse than a dir
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let the market decide, instead of being a political decision based on feelings. But that is unrealistic:-(
It's unrealistic because the market doesn't get to decide. Logic doesn't decide on the supply side OR the demand side. On the supply side, the market is controlled by regulations which were put into place because power companies proved they couldn't be trusted to function without them. On the demand side it's limited by physics, power has to get to places before it can be used.
In the USA for example power companies are really only able to profit from new generation projects, so they are motivated to produce
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Yes, nuclear fission plants generate waste which have to be stored, and no realistic technology can make it disappear.
I am guessing you haven't heard of breeder reactors?
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so not only do they kill bald eagles, they also cause climate change... mind blown
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"to match nuclear would actually affect the climate", zero evidence for that.
Wind already generates a little more than half the electricity as nuclear in the US (10.2% versus 18.6%).
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A wind farm "stops" a smaller amount of air flow than a forest in the same place would. Just because a fact-free claim is repeated a million times doesn't actually make it true.
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[Citation Needed]
You sound like you actually believe that.
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Water vapor increases global warming.
From NASA: Water vapor is Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas. It’s responsible for about half of Earth’s greenhouse effect.
Water in the atmosphere [Re: Cart before, make...] (Score:3)
Water vapor increases global warming.
Correct! Water vapor is in fact the main greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere, and responsible for most of the natural greenhouse effect. The anthropogenic carbon dioxide greenhouse effect is in addition to the natural greenhouse effect
Water vapor also has a residence time in the atmosphere measured in days-- it removes itself from the atmosphere in the form of rain, snow, and dew. It does not accumulate.
Most notably, however, water vapor evaporates (from the ocean, from lakes and rivers, from soil, f
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Yeah but nobody else does either.
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Do you think your opinion at the voting booth is actually held in account by the PTB? Really? That's adorable!
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They have the one man, one vote thing. That one man is currently Xi.
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Hah right. Just keep telling yourself that.
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Actually no, it's owed by AliBaba Group not the CPC.
BTW, it's 'Communist Party of China' (CPC), not 'Chinese Communist Party' (CCP). Get your talking points right if you're going to spout propaganda.
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No they aren't. They're a Hong Kong newspaper. The state-run news agency is Xinhua.
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thorium is that it has a sufficiently short half life
Only 14 billion years.