Electric cars are a pipe dream

Why in the WORLD would those bozos include removing carbon free NUCLEAR power in their plan to eliminate dependence on FOREIGN oil and eliminate greenhouse gas emissions? Ridiculous! Including nuclear just proves that the whole "plan" is a mindless "watermelon" charade. "Green" on the outside, "pink" on the inside.

Their stated goals would best be met with the reliability of LFTRs (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors), the Leanest, Cleanest, Greenest energy source bar none (except maybe fusion if it ever actually happens). And it is the safest too.

 

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LFTR's have a long, long way to go before they're a viable energy solution. (For example - what do you do with the spent fuel? How do you keep them from freezing during a Fukushima-style disaster? Where do you get the U-233 for startup?) For short term (within the next 20 years or so) LWR designs are the way to go. The GE AP600 is a great option for example.

 

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Yes molten salt reactors have passive safety features that make them far more prone to freezing up then melting down, in fact a melt down may not even be physically possible (then again since the core is already molten they are technically melted down already) And yes HAD we invested in their development decades ago (another thing Nixon axed) we would be far better off today.

As for coal power, it is estimated that from disease exasperated or caused by emissions that they kill over a 100,000 people every year, and that in fact it would require one Chernobyl nuclear disaster PER YEAR for nuclear power to match coal's deathtoll. Its clear the the 'little death' of increased lung cancer, asthma and the such are perfectly acceptable by people over the extremely rare event of exposure to deadly and proven cancerous amounts of nuclear radiation, Humans have such poor risk assessment skills.

 

It is more accurate to say that the cold war axed the AEC´s early focus and interest in Thorium reactors, which are useless for making easily chemically separated plutonium for atomic bombs. As it later turned out the problem of separating U235 from U238 was solved with either of two simple technologies and a LOT OF MONEY. The gaseous diffusion technology used at Oak Ridge´s U235 plant* is no longer used as the electric power required by the pumps cannot be significantly reduced, but centrifuges have been refined to spin faster with much less power required now.

BTW, your comments on the dangers of coal are right on target. Even if one only focus on the radiation released by burning coal, it is a greater source of radiation than a properly operating nuclear power plant producing the same energy, but of course coal kills many more just in the process of mining it, not to mention lung diseases in the general population, etc.!

* It was located there as the TVA (Tenn. Valley Authority) had the excess electric power generation required. (I, when a youth living in southern W Va, in several vacations, fished in waters behind TVA´s Norris Dam. - It was then a very rural area with little need for the power TVA could generate. So in some sense the power needed to produce U235 was free. One vacation of only a week, allowed us to come home with a full sized metal trash can full of fish and dry ice, to give away! Most of the fish were caught in the last two days, after we discovered the critical depth for the hooks: + or - only a foot made a huge difference in the rate of catching all identical fish called "croppie"!)

 

1) We have spent far more money developing nuclear reactors than we've spent on solar or wind.
2) Our solar power system has been quite reliable.

True. Also true of conventional nuclear fuels.

"Fission products" is the problem in any nuclear waste. LEU fuel for light water reactors is pretty safe to handle; U-238 is not radioactive, U-235 is only mildly radioactive and LEU contains only a small percentage of U-235. However, once burned in a reactor the fission products (and the decay products of those products) are highly radioactive. This is a problem common to most fission reactors, not just LWR's (or thorium reactors.)

Agreed - but if you are reprocessing spent fuel, then most of your problems for LWR fuels go away anyway.

No fission reactor is very clean, primarily from spent fuel. However they are definitely cleaner than coal plants.

 

Since the death toll from Chernobyl stands at 50, with a POTENTIAL for another 4000 MAYBE BUT NOT LIKELY, we would need at LEAST 25, and maybe 2000 Chernobyls per year to equal what you say coal does. Of course those who claim coal does 100,000 per year also say Chernobyl has killed "millions upon millions", so I don't trust either number.

None-the-less, the easily counted deaths from coal each year far exceed the worst plausible total from Chernobyl so the reality will be somewhere between your 1 and my 25.

And Chernobyl was a DUMB design. LFTRs will be absolutely safe in comparison to Chernobyl!!

 

Sorry Billy but the Nixon administration axed the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor (MSBR) because there were many more electoral votes to be had from states with labs that were working on the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor ( LMFBR) than were available from the one state that had a lot to do with the MSBR. The fact that the LMFBR seemed at the time to promise a faster doubling time also played into the decision given that folks were still thinking that electricity use would grow as fast as it had been for the prior several decades.

Since power reactor (solid fuel) grade Plutonium is almost useless for bombs, the fact that PURE Plutonium was good for bombs had little to do with it.

 

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President Nixon left office in 1974, and had other political concerns in 1974 than the MSBR. That is 2 years BEFORE the MSBR was axed. The main reason that for 8 years U235 reactor efforts got 37.5 times more funding was that only they lead to an atomic bomb; however, you are correct the “political pork” considerations were also part of the reason for 37.5 times lesser funding for MSBR.

Before US decided to participate in the funding of LHC accelerator, there was discussion of US building in the US the next generation accelerator and what type it should be. One wag noted there was really no choice about the type – it had to be a long linear accelerator as only it could pass thru half the states!

 

It got way more money and delivered way more power total - which makes sense.

Put enough money into ANY system and it wins hands down. The question is - what do you put the money into? LWR's are very low risk, relatively low cost. Renewables are low risk, relatively low cost. Advanced reactors are higher cost, medium risk. Fusion is very high cost, very high risk. You pay your money and you take your chances.

Yep. It's cool to be the only house with lights on during the occasional blackout.

Agreed on dry cask. Indeed it is sufficient for most sorts of nuclear waste.

At the end of a reactor's life you will end up with far more radioisotopes than you started with due to neutron bombardment - not just of the fuel but of the reactor itself. Claiming that it's "net negative waste" or something isn't accurate.

 

Actually, the program was axed about three years earlier but managed to receive minor funding to do minor studies for a short time longer. Nixon (and his administration (read Milt Shaw) killed the MSBR but not because it couldn't make weapons material. NO power plant has made weapons material AFAICT. The LMFBR would not have been any different.

 

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True most power plant reactors are designed for energy production, not A-bomb fuel production. US had one in Washington state, designed for bomb fuel production, and I think a few others. It is well known as it made a lot of local contamination but AFAIK, none with a positive thermal coefficient like is the best design for plutonium production reactors were made in the US.

The USSR´s reactor at Chernoble (and some others, I think) was of that "positive coefficient" bomb-fuel production design and the idiots running it decided to measure the temperature coefficient. I.e. they shut down all the safety controls that would stop the reaction and pulled out control rods to measure the rate of temperature climb. Some "warping" in the core prevented re-insertion of all the control rods and what happened then is well known.

 

The problem, or should I say the FINAL problem at Chernobyl was that the control rods had graphite tips, so when they finally pushed them in, the graphite send a surge of moderated neutrons and the thing ran away. Russia says they have replaced the tips in all the control rods of all the remaining reactors of that type with something that doesn't moderate the neutrons. Thus, they SHOULD be safER.

 

Nope. No matter how much you redefine the term "risk" - a reactor technology that has never been used to produce power is not lower risk than existing technologies that are currently producing power. More research would be a good idea, though, and I agree it is promising.

What tempers my enthusiasm are the even more glowing claims made about light water reactors in the 1950's. "Electricity too cheap to meter." "Failsafe design." That didn't pan out, even though the designers had the best of intentions.

10kW grid intertie system for most power generation. Sunpower panels and inverters.

Backup system - 4kwhr battery bank, Trace SW4024 inverter/charger, Xantrex XW80 charge controller to drop array voltage to battery voltage.

 

Do you have any link stating that? I´m pretty sure, if pressed, I could find links telling the operators were trying to measure the positive thermal coefficient of that design and had turned off the safety shut down systems etc. as I told before.

I also doubt that even if the contol rods had carbon tips, they would do much moderation as they were thin with small transit distance thru them. Even water, which has much greater ability to remove energy from fast (17+ Mev ) neutrons needs (random scatter) neutron path thru it of more than a meter total to thermalize the neutrons. (Each "head on" collision of a 17+Mev with a proton of water can drop neutron energy down 50% but carbon nucleus by less than 10%. Most collisions are much less effective as not "head on." I.e. many 10s of thousands of collisions are required to drop the neutron energy down to even 100 times hotter* than "thermal" (which is ~0.03ev for boiling water). Thus I don´t believe even pure carbon control rods would make much moderations of neutrons.

Also control rods are not designed to moderate, but to absorb neutrons - why would carbon, which rarely absorbs neutron (if ever?) be used in control rods? There are many high temperature metals (and ceramics, some even containing boron) that could be used. That is why I ask you for a link supporting your claim that the carbon tips on control rods moderated the neutrons.

To achieve the required moderations, the world´s first reactor, used more than 10 thousands large carbon bricks. Here is a photo of it:

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It takes a huge volume of carbon do do the required moderation!*
World´s first reactor did use carbon moderation and cadmium-coated control rods to absorb the neutrons. Boron is even better absorber than cadmium and "physics legend" has it Fermi stood on top of the ladder with a bucket of boron solution to stop any run-away disaster. If that had been needed, Fermi would have less than 10 days more to live. He was very confident as periodically the physics graduate students building the pile of carbon brick moderators stopped and when the level of activity stabilized, it was exactly what Fermi had predicted it would be.

* I.e. down to 3eV - that is a neutron energy decrease by factor of more than 5 million !

 

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Interesting; I was not aware of any LFTR that has ever produced power. (We were specifically talking about LFTR's, not the more generic MSR's.) Which facilities produced power?

So were light water reactors. There were so many safety systems that there was no conceivable way to have a serious LOCA. At least in theory.

Like I said, LFTR's are a great idea and should be researched further. But decades of real world experience will uncover problems that lab/prototype tests will not - which is why current LWR designs have a safety edge over more exotic designs. That may not always be true, of course.

It gives me one night; daytime production is high enough that even cloudy days allow operation of the basics (refrigeration and computers.)

Uh - OK. I guess I can live with unreliable power that is 100% reliable under my use cases.