Nice Photovoltaik Peak in Germany

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Andi_HB

Some of the arguments from chappy are correct - but not all.
1. The "best" nuclear power station can never be safe like the Power of Wind and Sun.
2. Also is the final repository of the atomic waste is a unsolved problem for the next hundred generation. No Problem with wind and/or sun.
3. The costs of Energy produced with Wind & Sun are sinking in the Future - from other Energy the costs will rise because the Resources will decrease.

I would like to see a well-researched comparison of how much progress a similar amount of money invested in Thorium-fuel-cycle nukes (for which I started a placeholder thread here back in 2010) would likely have produced. Those solve most of issues #1 and #2, and even provide a means by which current accumulations of long-lived nuke waste - assuming they can still be safely transported to a Thorium-cycle plant - can be converted to short-lived waste with a half-life of less than a century.

BTW, one of the rhetorical questions I posted in relation to such tech is why the US abandoned a promising research program in this area around 50 years ago. A recent re-read of Richard Rhodes H-Bomb history Dark Sun provides the answer: It was precisely the *lack* of weapons-enhancing byproducts of the Thorium fuel cycle which caused the then cold-war-and-ever-more-and-bigger-weapons-obsessed US to lose interest. In other words, the US civilian nuclear power program was in effect a byproduct of the weapons program, and only technologies which served (or could be adapted to serve) the weaponeers were the ones which got subsidized by the government.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

BTW, one of the rhetorical questions I posted in relation to such tech is why the US abandoned a promising research program in this area around 50 years ago. A recent re-read of Richard Rhodes H-Bomb history Dark Sun provides the answer: It was precisely the *lack* of weapons-enhancing byproducts of the Thorium fuel cycle which caused the then cold-war-and-ever-more-and-bigger-weapons-obsessed US to lose interest. In other words, the US civilian nuclear power program was in effect a byproduct of the weapons program, and only technologies which served (or could be adapted to serve) the weaponeers were the ones which got subsidized by the government.

Sheesh! No surprise, but still another sickening cold war nuke factoid. If it's too clean, we don't want it. Kind of like wrapping a "relatively clean" H-bomb in a thick blanket of plutonium for more yield, plus immense fallout. When will we ever learn?

[xilman]

Originally Posted by kladner

Then too, the uranium mining also has a carbon footprint, as does refining, manufacturing, and transporting it. It also leaves very nasty mine tailings; and the leftovers from refining get converted into even nastier military projectiles.

OTOH, coal fueled power generation produces as much radioactive waste as current (U and Pu) fission reactors per gigaWatt hour.

Roughly speaking, coal is 1 ppm U and 10ppm Th. The radioactive waste from coal is comparable, the CO_2 emission is enormously greater and the hazards of mining and transporting it is markedly larger.


Give me fission any day. Much much cleaner than coal.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by xilman

Give me fission any day. Much much cleaner than coal.

IIRC the Thorium which occurs naturally in coal, were it easily separable, could provide several multiples of the energy yielded by conventional chemical burning of the same coal.

Not that I'm saying the 2 fuels are so separable, but "if you must burn coal" perhaps existing waste-gas-processing technologies such as electrostatic precipitation could be adapted to recover some of the Thorium freed by the burning, allowing it to be processed for reactor use. If the energy needed to extract the Th from the waste gas is less than that (in usable form) resulting from the secondary fission-reactor, it's a win.

[Xyzzy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_...afety_features

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_...afety_features

I found the section about the German THTR-300 research reactor especially interesting ... note that molten-salt reactor proponents similarly argue similar "self-shut-down in case of even catastophic failure" properties for MSRs. The reality appears to be a bit more along the lines of "even here, human stupidity can cause bad things to happen, albeit not Chernobyl or Fukushima-bad."

[chappy]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/c...-military.html

[chappy]

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/13/54...cial-operation

[kladner]

Originally Posted by chappy

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/13/54...cial-operation

Just WOW!

On the other hand, burning birds had not occurred to me as a hazard.

[Chuck]

Originally Posted by kladner

Just WOW!

On the other hand, burning birds had not occurred to me as a hazard.

This is interesting. My sister and I will be taking a driving tour of Yosemite and Sequoia this fall, and we will be spending a night in the Hotel Nipton which is right next to this generating facility.

[LaurV]

So, you get the electricity for free? Or only the daylight in the night?