Debunking the Thorium Reactor fantasy?

[Nordic]

Oh I'm starting to get it. Stephen Morgan is merely an optimist. And I'm a pessimist.

I wouldn't want Stephen Morgan to be the captain of any barge or ship heading for any port near me.

"I know we're travelling at 60 miles and hour toward the docks, and we're only 100 feet away, and this thing weighs three thousand tons! We're just floating on water, it'll be easy to stop! Watch!"

CRASH.

Stephen, the whole point is that a transition is POSSIBLE, but only if it's done in a timely manner and done aggressively and smartly.

None of that is happening. Instead, thanks to the political power of Big Oil, we're being piloted over the edge of the cliff like a bunch of lemmings. The only thing is, the rich fuckers who run Big Oil know this, and they're the ones who don't care how many people die, because they're the ones who are rich and know what's coming and have taken care to protect themselves.

I don't know how your mind transfers that into blaming, say, ME, for being beholden to Big Oil. It's really kind of weird.

Jimmy Carter had the right idea 30 fucking years ago about how to take aggressive action to make some kind of transition. But they killed him off (not literally but politically). Replaced him with the idiot "optimist" Reagan, who just made things about 30 times worse. The 12 years of Reagan/Bush managed to brainwash entire generations of people into believing that Big Business would solve all our problems through "free market" nonsense.

So those of us who have been paying attention are in that giant barge, heading toward the dock at breakneck speed, knowing damn well that there's no way the damn thing can slow down in time to avoid crashing into the dock.

Get it yet?

The ship's gonna crash. The transition is gonna happen one way or another. It can be nice and orderly and intelligent, or it can be total destruction and mayhem.

It seems you and those like you would rather just deny that the ship is gonna crash, and instead insist blithely on some dream to save you.

[stickdog99]

[Nordic]

exactly. that's what we would like to avoid.

and gas prices aren't high now out of fear of peak oil. they're high because of "instability". wars and rumors of war. currency issues, "uncertainty" over the dollar's hegenomony, all that crap which is used to drive up the price of everything.

so that kind of blows a hole in your theory.

[KUAN]

It's about time we had a big leap forward.
Interesting doco and some of the 'experts' seem credible.
Not that I'm the least bit technically minded.... which is why I can only provide a link


Motherboard TV: The Thorium Dream:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ9Ll5EX1jc

[Iamwhomiam]

A bit of an overview for those of us (me) unable to view videos would be much appreciated, KUAN.

[KUAN]

Seems that the U.S. had a working thorium reactor but it was decommissioned because the industry went with the first system that was up and running and which could also provide the military with material to make weapons and also had the advantage of being too difficult for newer and smaller players compete with. (long sentence) According to the scientist who was in charge of the thorium project, the big difference (advantage) in the thorium reactor is it requires management to to keep it going, or in other words to stop it becoming inert; whereas the reactors in common use are the opposite; they require management to stop them getting out of control...

[Rory]

I love 'magic energy bean' discussions.

It is sad that the military/big-oil suppressed the 'magic energy bean' technology.

But it's going to be great once someone (re)invents this 'magic energy bean' so we can have free, pollution free energy. I love the optimism in the face of such negativity (how can people poo-poo 'magic energy beans'!? - they will fix everything!).

It will be great, once we work out what they are, how they are sustainably (let alone renewablely) fueled, how we plan, fund and implement a changeover from our oil gas and coal based energy/electricity generation. Once we work out how to control the inevitable, resultant massive species kill-off, deforestation, over fishing, freshwater pollution, over harvesting of crops and the degradation of arable soils, increased strip-mining and catastrophic population boom, our quality of life is going to go sky high!

The future is bright and things will always get better - if only those bad men released the files and the negative nellies stop asking awkward questions.

[StarmanSkye]

I'm still kinda cautiously optimistic AND skeptical about the magic energy-bean technology of Thorium/flouride reactors. Except for the enormous lack of appropriate infrastructure, governmental impasse/inertia in changing horses from uranium-based fuel with its heavy production facility development and 'untouchable' sacred cash-cow value to its industrial managers (with lucrative world-wide civilian-energy contracts) and nuclear-weapon 'dependency', and not least the absence of practical energy-production history, there's nothing not to like or even LOVE about thorium as a new-generation safe, cost-effective energy source. Apparently, its not corrosive as some critics claim, esp. to heavy nickel-based alloys, nor is it prone to crack-failures as Oak Ridge tests demonstrated. Most of its few problems are within the range of achievable technological solutions.

India or China might yet make the first commercial thorium reactors, and then license the technology.

Well, at least the debate continues.

Another good primer by Sorenson, one of the top thorium-reactor boosters, discussing key pro-and-con aspects:

[Iamwhomiam]

Thorium reactors are just as insane an idea as conventional nuclear reactors. They are extremely dangerous and need a nearby reprocessing facility, and there are none of those, either.

The only commercial thorium reactor utilizing molten salt to boil water that I'm aware of is under construction in India. I've not heard of another anywhere else being developed, though China may be engaged in such a project.

Nuclear Power, I've said before, is the failed experiment of mad scientists.

[Rory]

So Nuclear electricity plants have quantitatively and qualitatively the wost damage worst possible, cataclysmic disaster scenario attached.

Off shore oil rigs are close in potential for 'worst conceivable disaster' rating, should the admittedly unlikely probability and they leaked a horrific amount of hydrocarbons into the local environment (may the gods forbid that someone be so stupid and 'make things better' by releasing toxic solvents in after the oil).

How does thorium compare? I figure that 'liquid salt', implies some serious temperature/pressure manipulation - that shit is gona be unstable at some stage: How much? i am pretty sure there is going to be some toxic shit at the end of a Thorium debacle: Is it going to be Kyshtym toxic/radioactive, or Chernobyl 'hot'?

Maybe I was a bit trite - energy is only one of several important issues facing or immediate future - maybe it's is a one shot kill, and will resolve the others, but I think our friends at the till, have the ultimate say on 'how' the boat crashes: Until they are negotiated with, or deign to jump before it hits, remain the key.

Anyhow, I would love magic thorium energy, but it just reeks of 'the other', and seems unstable at best; laughably unpredictable at worst. (when I read its PR and whatnot)

Energy in, energy out. Newton may have been a virgin, but his simplistic energy equations provide a useful benchmark: And Building, pressurizing (at speed and high variability), along with heating and electrolyzing a liquid salt, let alone an inherently unstable, radioactive one, albeit mildly, relative to Plutonium (the most toxic heavy metal-radioactive combo, known to man), seems to be over complicating things. Just a bit.

Why not just boil the fucking water with the fossil fuels to begin with? We need another way

[StarmanSkye]

From what I gather, the Indian reactor is/will be hopelessly compromised by using it to boil water, undoubtedly 'better' in many respects than uranium-fueled LWR's but still an archaic reversion that will be much less efficient than having the molten salt convection currents directly spinning turbines, and using the reactor's high-heat to process coal into ultra-clean-burning synthetic fuels. Or something like that.

I'm not sure that reprocessing will be more dangerous or the enviro/social risks greater than many other industries. The thing is, with the keen demand for energy by 7 billion people and-counting, acceptable trade-off compromises of cost/benefit WILL be made. The biggest obstacle to reasonable, well-informed & wise energy policies that benefit the greatest number will be our corporate-controlled, MIC-compromised techno-bureaucracy driven by elite & feudal special-interests.

Compared with the health-effects, inefficiencies, pollution, enviro degradation, negative quality-of-life impact, expense and deaths caused by dirty oil & coal industries, thorium reactors may end-up being one of the more invaluable 'new' breakthru technologies to transform & greenify large-scale commercial power generation. At some point, it may even become possible to downscale & streamline thorium reactors/power stations for economic electric power supply of neighborhoods and small communities.

One of the worst things going for thorium power-plants following the decades of severe disillusionment with nuke power in light of the wildly extravagent claims for 'safe' and 'too cheap to meter' electricity by which the cold-war era weapons-industry forced them on a naive & optimisticly gullible public -- may be that they appear to be too good to be true.
Slightly OT:
One of my personal favorite high-tech clean energy-production ideas is high-orbit satellite power-stations trailing miles-long high-current-capable conductive wires that act as electric-motor/generator armatures which generate electron current flow as they 'move' thru the earth's high electric fields like giant inside-out strpped-down dynamos, which current is converted to microwave frequencies and 'beamed' to earth-based recieving stations that reconvert it to ordinary AC/DC high-voltage current as-needed to be routed to commercial and industrial users either via transmission land-lines or for re-radiated-broadcast according to Tesla's wireless-energy discovery. Sooner-or-later, I believe this technology WILL be developed and used -- unless something even better like a way to harness the zero-point energy of the universe's ground-state vacuum will be found. Or tapping the earth's own electric field currents directly.

[DrEvil]

China and the USA partner for molten salt thorium reactor project and India plans a Thorium Reactor

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/china- ... -salt.html

[Iamwhomiam]

India's thorium reactor was to be a molten salt reactor, not a boiling water reactor, Starman, and last I heard it was on schedule to be completed in 2020.

Starman wrote:
I'm not sure that reprocessing will be more dangerous or the enviro/social risks greater than many other industries.

But honestly, no one who knows anything about the history of reprocessing nuclear fuel would ever claim it to be comparable to any other environmental or industrial risk because it is far worse, being extremely dangerous and its consequences remain with us for millions of years, or virtually forever.

Google West Valley, NY or Hanford, WA., Rocky Flats has supposedly been "cleaned-up." More on West Valley here. Read fact sheet #2.

Billions of people living today are without electricity from any source, so while it would be an admirable goal to provide everyone with electricity, the most feasible way to do so would be by small off-the-grid power sources, wind, micro hydro and solar, not by building a huge, problematic infrastructure powered by nuclear fuel.

Starman wrote:
Compared with the health-effects, inefficiencies, pollution, enviro degradation, negative quality-of-life impact, expense and deaths caused by dirty oil & coal industries, thorium reactors may end-up being one of the more invaluable 'new' breakthru technologies to transform & greenify large-scale commercial power generation. At some point, it may even become possible to downscale & streamline thorium reactors/power stations for economic electric power supply of neighborhoods and small communities.

Nuclear power cannot be compared to any other fuel driven electricity producing technology. It and the danger it poses is unique.

Stand-alone thorium reactors must have a nearby reprocessing plant, so believing that many hundreds or thousands of small thorium reactors could be a possible solution is, well, it is not. The thought of doing so, frankly, is quite maddening to environmentalists.

We simply have to realize that nuclear power is not a solution and in the long run it will be seen to be as helpful as giving a sick patient mercury to cure their ills. Time to move forward, not to revisit failed killer technologies.

Nuclear power is not safe, cannot be made safe and will never be safe. There is no know technology that can eliminate the radioactivity of fissile materials to make it safe.

StarmanSkye Wrote:
One of my personal favorite high-tech clean energy-production ideas is high-orbit satellite power-stations trailing miles-long high-current-capable conductive wires that act as electric-motor/generator armatures which generate electron current flow as they 'move' thru the earth's high electric fields like giant inside-out strpped-down dynamos, which current is converted to microwave frequencies and 'beamed' to earth-based recieving stations that reconvert it to ordinary AC/DC high-voltage current as-needed to be routed to commercial and industrial users either via transmission land-lines or for re-radiated-broadcast according to Tesla's wireless-energy discovery.

Well, this too is impractical for several reasons, a few I'll mention: First how many geosynchronous satellites would be needed to provide power to eveyone? Dozens? Hundreds? And then, let's not forget that microwaves heat things up, in this case our atmosphere. Maybe one may not be so bad, but when the numbers necessary to power our world are put into the mix, it too becomes untenable logistically, to say nothing about its expense.

We need only a very small land area dedicated to solar power, 7/10 of 1% of our world's landmass, to generate enough power to meet the world's energy demand, so why not let's focus on developing the safest, least environmentally harmful technology, rather than the most risky and dangerous of all?

P.S.: 7/10 of 1% of our landmass equates to the area covered by the US states of N&S Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and a chunk of Vermont. How many square miles of rooftops do you suppose there are when all of our world's structures roofs are tallied?

Shouldn't we try the safest method possible before choosing the most dangerous of all to pursue?

Germany's abandoning Nuclear and is furthest ahead of all nations in installing solar.