Fusion and Fission/LFTR: Let's Do Both, Smartly 218
TheRealHocusLocus writes: Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel. I too was happy to see Skunkworks' Feb 2013 announcement and the recent "we're still making progress" reminder. I was moved by the reaction on Slashdot: a groundswell of "Finally!" and "We're saved!" However, fusion doesn't need to be the only solution, and it's not entirely without drawbacks.
All nuclear reactors will generate waste via activation as the materials of which they are constructed erode and become unstable under high neutron flux. I'm not pointing this out because I think it's a big deal — a few fusion advocates disingenuously tend to sell the process as if it were "100% clean." A low volume of non-recyclable waste from fusion reactors that is walk-away safe in ~100 years is doable. Let's do it. And likewise, the best comparable waste profile for fission is a two-fluid LFTR, a low volume of waste that is walk-away safe in ~300 years. Let's do it.
Why pursue both, with at least the same level of urgency? Because both could carry us indefinitely. LFTR is less complicated in theory and practice. It is closer to market. There is plenty of cross-over: LFTR's materials challenges and heat engine interface — and the necessity for waste management — are the same as they will be for commercial-scale fusion reactors. To get up to speed please see the 2006 fusion lecture by Dr. Robert Bussard on the Wiffle ball 6 plasma containment, likely the precursor to the Skunkworks approach. And see Thorium Remix 2011 which presents the case for LFTR.
All nuclear reactors will generate waste via activation as the materials of which they are constructed erode and become unstable under high neutron flux. I'm not pointing this out because I think it's a big deal — a few fusion advocates disingenuously tend to sell the process as if it were "100% clean." A low volume of non-recyclable waste from fusion reactors that is walk-away safe in ~100 years is doable. Let's do it. And likewise, the best comparable waste profile for fission is a two-fluid LFTR, a low volume of waste that is walk-away safe in ~300 years. Let's do it.
Why pursue both, with at least the same level of urgency? Because both could carry us indefinitely. LFTR is less complicated in theory and practice. It is closer to market. There is plenty of cross-over: LFTR's materials challenges and heat engine interface — and the necessity for waste management — are the same as they will be for commercial-scale fusion reactors. To get up to speed please see the 2006 fusion lecture by Dr. Robert Bussard on the Wiffle ball 6 plasma containment, likely the precursor to the Skunkworks approach. And see Thorium Remix 2011 which presents the case for LFTR.
Fission is Dead (Score:3, Insightful)
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What exactly is "the public"?
Re:Fission is Dead (Score:4, Interesting)
What exactly is "the public"?
It means the American voters, because many Americans think that only America matters. Fission reactors are unpopular in America. They are also unpopular in Japan, Germany, Britain, and other countries. But there are also plenty of countries where nukes have public support, including France, China, India, Russia, etc. Fission power is far from dead.
We need Nuclear here! Fission and fusion. (Score:5, Interesting)
P.S. How can you call an airtight, air-locked, negative-pressured, yards thick of specially hardened reinforced concrete, enough to survive at least 2 9/11 style airplane crashes, "building" anything but an above ground bunker?
I have to say that where we built our nuclear plants geologically, population-wise, and climate-wise, are the best places to put such nuclear plants. Far better than in the crowded Northeast US or on the West Coast.
In Georgia we have no single "go-to" on alternative energy for base electric generation, no desserts for large scale solar projects, like Nevada, nor massive amounts of land for large scale wind farms, like the Plain states, and we lost much of our hydro capacity in the last 30 years or so. Natural Gas and Nuclear are our go-to for large scale base electric generation and our chance to break from coal. We use too way much coal here in Georgia our air quality has suffered immensely for it. At least nuclear plants do not create millions of tons of CO2 and makes our air cleaner.
I sincerely hope that the fusion plants can be built here.
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That's because you cain't find nobody to read the instructions.
I mean, we're talking Georgia.
You just build them next to that damn meth lab.
I found this documentary about the people building
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> nor massive amounts of land for large scale wind farms
I had to look this up because I thought you were wrong. But you're not. Georgia has crap for wind:
http://apps2.eere.energy.gov/wind/windexchange/wind_resource_maps.asp?stateab=ga
What up with that?
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I sincerely hope that the fusion plants can be built here.
Congratulations on achieving ~22% nuclear electricity [eia.gov] in July 2014.
My state of no-nuke Oklahoma [eia.gov] is powered by natural gas and coal (which arrives by train), considers itself a nexus of wind power but after decades of investment, hundreds of turbines and probably much more money spent --- net generation of mostly-wind ~809GWh for July is still less than the ~855GWh that would have been generated that month by the single two-reactor Black Fox Nuclear Power Plant [wikipedia.org]. That is... if it had not been the only nuclea
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Umm, it's literally right there, first country name in the 3rd sentence.
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Watch The Discovery Channel/History channel, CNN, MSNBC or Fox News for about 8hrs strait...
While doing so, pretend you hadn't graduated high-school and need something other than your own failures in life to blame for your continuous and unabated fear of your unstable future.
Then it will all make sense.
You'll also either start calling the president Obola or chanting "Bush lied, people died"
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Your ignorance isn't a valid counter-argument.
Re:Fission is Dead (Score:4, Funny)
A preponderance of the people.
As Pete Porter in Pasadena precisely put it.
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AK Marc shitting on i kan reed is like Hodor beating up Helen Keller.
It's mildly entertaining and saves me the trouble of doing it myself, but he'll still be riding the short bus to the kid's table on Thanksgiving.
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What the hell is with the random prepper "saying"? How the fuck does that relate to the rest of TFS?
It was a segue between the claim that we need to do things "smartly", and the inane Pollyanna gibberish that followed.
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What the hell is with the random prepper "saying"? How the fuck does that relate to the rest of TFS?
If you are having difficulty understanding the concept that one must always have a backup plan or spare tool on hand in order to ensure survival... then perhaps you should not be discussing nuclear technology.
Some of the nuance was lost when my submission was edited for the front page. It ended like this,
[referring to the two videos] "Four hours well spent. Saving humanity is worth having at least two eggs in the basket."
Re: Fission is Dead (Score:2)
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Those baskets had better be woven from different materials, and one needs to be (at least) off planet, too. And if those eggs aren't "organic", well, that's it then, we're all going to die.
Re:Fission is Dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say I had a tested, working LFTR design. Do you really think it would be very hard to convince the public that it is inherently safer than other fission designs. Safer than a coal plant. Safer than hydroelectric. It is pretty easy to understand that a plant that is inherently impossible to cause a melt-down might be a different kind of plant than a light-water reactor design.
True, there is radiation, but it is very modest. Few people seem to have NIMBY issues with LWR reactors based on the normal radiation. It is the fear of a Chernobyl event.
Re:Fission is Dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Safer than hydroelectric.
Including Chernobyl, there have been something like 56 direct fatalities, 4000+ deaths from cancer attributed to the radiation, and 350,000+ displaced peoples due to fission reactor failures. I'm not aware of any deaths *directly* attributed to Fukushima but let's round that off to an even 60.
Banqiao hydroelectric dam collapse: 26,000 drowned, 145,000 dead from disease and famine, 11+ million displaced.
Adjusted for GW capacity, hydroelectric power (970GW) is an order of magnitude more dangerous than nuclear (372GW).
Ban hydro power! ;)
=Smidge=
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Re:Fission is Dead (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately yes.
It is easy enough to get a big public outcry for any new nuclear plant, irrespective of its safety. The public has learned that nuclear = big accident (sooner or later). If you ask an activist if he want a coal or a nuclear plant, he will say 'neither' and fight both, but probably more vigorously against the nuclear one. That makes investing into any kind of nuclear stuff a very risky proposal.
The only way to change is when other fuels get expensive and we'll see rolling power outages again and the public experiences that we need new plants.
Markus
Re:Fission is Dead (Score:4, Interesting)
We've heard it before. So why should we believe it this time?
Of course, the proponents claim the problems are overblown, but nobody wants to find out. The only approved reactor was put on permanent hold. So we may never find out for sure.
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The problem here is the demand for perfect safety. The terrible old reactor designs have the best safety record of any large scale baseload power production technology, ever. Now we're looking at newer designs that are at least an order of magnitude, and likely two to three orders of magnitude, safer, and also don't produce the volume and type of waste that has been a concern. Why would we hesitate?
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Why don't we just force the private power industry to use the fission reactors designed, tested, used, and debugged by the US Navy since the 1950s?
How well would those designs scale? Even on the largest ships, the reactors are small compared to commercial power production..
(While they're are some technical advances to using more small reactors, the construction costs would be higher. Also, while I like the idea of putting small power plants nearer the loads they serve, there will be a lot resistance to building new fission plants closer to urban areas than they already are.)
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The other thing to remember about those reactors is they assume the availability of the ocean as an effectively limitless source of reasonably cool water. This influences aspects of their design from basic operation to last-ditch emergency measures in ways that just don't apply on land. Sure, you could build a bunch of them along the coast, but offshore construction on that scale is not cheap (and then you still need to get the power to the cities that need it). Worth investigating, but not an obvious win.
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So far every "inherently impossible" to meltdown design has been proven to be susceptible. The pebble reactors were meltdown-proof, until it was shown that the pebbles will, over time, change in a way that would eventually guarantee a meltdown, shortening the useful life, and greatly increasing the risk.
We've heard it before. So why should we believe it this time?
Of course, the proponents claim the problems are overblown, but nobody wants to find out. The only approved reactor was put on permanent hold. So we may never find out for sure.
Engineers rarely use the word "impossible". With your standards, we'd never build another boat.
Re:Fission is Dead (Score:5, Insightful)
So far every "inherently impossible" to meltdown design has been proven to be susceptible.
Liquid fuels are already 'melted' while in operation, but I do catch your drift, as in runaway catastrophe.
Meltdown with atmospheric release of radioactivity is possible where decay heat comes into contact with water (hydrogen, Fukushima) or graphite (Chernobyl). While the danger of graphite ignition pebble reactors has been posed and disputed [wikipedia.org], they punt by saying, we'll keep a runaway pebbl;e reactor it contained and starved of oxygen (via inert gas) and it won't be a problem.
My worst case scenario is worse than theirs. My LFTR-killer event involves an explosion powerful enough to destroy the containment vessel and building, in the rain. It would be an awful mess. But the salts would merely solidify and remain bound to the heavy elements mixed in, and aside from some steam which would be barely radioactive (because they only react with water slowly) there would be no need to evacuate the day care center over the ridge as the cleanup begins.
So a LFTR 'disaster' is merely a local mishap. To solve the world's energy problems one could not hope for better.The Thorium video [youtube.com] describes the failures at Chernobyl and especially Fukushima in greater detail.
Re:Fission is Dead (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not about nuclear itself. We just can't trust the people running the industry, and that includes government oversight. They will cut corners and claim cost overruns every chance they get. It turns out that big business is just as funky as a traveling carnival show... They're all a bunch of hucksters. This is what makes nuclear look bad. Well, that, and a couple of well publicized accidents, caused by what? Corner cutting and corruption. Nuclear can be very safe and secure.
Re:Fission is Dead (Score:4, Insightful)
> Let's say I had a tested, working LFTR design
Ok.
> Do you really think it would be very hard to convince the public that it is inherently safer than other fission designs
No.
But you make the common mistake of assuming that fission isn't being built because of NIMBY. Fission isn't being built because of $8 to $10 overnight CAPEX.
So, is your LFTR three times cheaper to build than a AP1000? With all that plumbing? Are you sure? Because it has to be - three times cheaper.
Not safety, benefit (Score:2)
Do you really think it would be very hard to convince the public that it is inherently safer than other fission designs.
I expect that you can convince them that LFTR is safer than our current reactors but that is not the same as convincing them that it is safe enough to build. If you want to do that they best way to do it would be to sell them cheaper electricity. They are unlikely to be able to sensibly judge the risk but at least this way they see that they are benefiting from having a plant nearby.
However there is still the issue of nuclear waste. Both LFTR and fusion still generate it but the advantage of fusion is t
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> It doesn't matter how safe modern fission designs are;
It makes no difference one way or the other.
Modern fission plants cost between $8 and $10/Watt. Wind turbines cost about $1.50/Watt. See page 11:
http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf
Since the average fission plant has a CF around 85% to 90%, and the average wind turbine has a CF around 30 to 35%, that means that in energy-equivalent terms, wind has an equivalent cost of about $4 to $5. As a result, the *uns
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Is that the study from the other day that was summarily dismissed because it made up bogus costs for nuclear power, to make wind look better?
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> Is that the study from the other day that was summarily dismissed because
> it made up bogus costs for nuclear power, to make wind look better?
Ummm, no.
Maybe you should google up Lazard.
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> as you are including both subsidies and non-generation costs
Sorry, are you replaying to my post?
If so, I think you need to look up the definition of overnight costs.
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I believe you are wrong. Molten salt reactors are so safe it will take a comet / asteroid / military precision strike to cause a significant radioactivity release, and there is no water pressure on the inside to spit stuff out.
If you want to make the reactor 99.999999999999999% safe just bury it deeper. conventional reactors are too big to be buried, molten salts are compact enough you could install them 10 feet underground (with 10ft of reinforced concrete above it), and have all of its connections first g
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Well said. Let me risk '-1 Troll' moderation too by saying I agree with almost all of your points.
The problem isn't the disaster but rather Linear no threshold radiation cancer models which were created by deeply anti nuclear weapon scientists desperate to instill fear on governments undergoing nuclear weapons tests.
The Linear no-threshold model [wikipedia.org] needs to be reevaluated, especially the way it is used in statistical tomfoolery to establish a "integer death count" for extremely large populations from doses that can be lost in the noise of background radiation... the official explanation is they were applying the Precautionary Principle [wikipedia.org] to something for which they had no hard data. Some references and angles to LNT in this p [slashdot.org]
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Smarter countries than the USA are racing ahead with smarter U235 reactor designs and thorium reactors. Growing, not dead.
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> Smarter countries than the USA are racing ahead with smarter U235 reactor designs and thorium reactors.
Hmmm, let's see:
India - been trying to commercialize thorium reactors for, what, 45 years now? How many are in commercial operation? Zero? Right.
Canada - so convinced of the future of nuclear power that they sold off the entire reactor division of AECL for $15 million and a $770 million tax right-off (so basically negative $750 million).
China - the latest saviour for everyone's flavour-of-the-month de
Um (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell am I reading?
>Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel.
How does a non-nonsensical saying apply to energy? Explain yourself.
> I too was happy to see Skunkworks' Feb 2013 announcement and the recent "we're still making progress" reminder. I was moved by the reaction on Slashdot: a groundswell of "Finally!" and "We're saved!"
How did we move from crazy people sayings into nuclear energy? This is the worst written summary on /. in a very long time.
Also, learn what a comma is and how it's used. For the love of god, this reads like stream of consciousness passed through google-translate a few times.
Re:Um (Score:5, Informative)
>Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel.
How does a non-nonsensical saying apply to energy? Explain yourself.
Monoculture is bad. Choosing one form of baseload generation to emphasize is bad, because however great it looks on paper, if some horrible problem emerges 10 years later, you're screwed. If all new powerplant construction for decades were split between 2 technologies, and one of them proved problematic, we have a "shipping, tested solution" to migrate to immediately. Expensive, but possible. All of which is even more true when it comes to designs that aren't yet production ready.
> I too was happy to see Skunkworks' Feb 2013 announcement and the recent "we're still making progress" reminder. I was moved by the reaction on Slashdot: a groundswell of "Finally!" and "We're saved!"
How did we move from crazy people sayings into nuclear energy? This is the worst written summary on /. in a very long time.
We need something not-fossil-fuel based that can be used by any city anywhere. (Yeah, yeah, solar and wind have their upsides, but there are plenty of cities where both are nonsense.) Fusion would be wonderful, but we should use "maybe oneday fusion" as any reason not to also pursue sane, modern fission designs. And regardless, we should pursue 2 unrelated technologies, because monoculture is bad.
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Base load power production is not the problem.
Load following and peak load plants are.
Oh, you belong to the crowed who does not know what base load actually means?
Re:Um (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no reasonable solution today for non-fossil baseload generation. I personally have no problem with natural gas, but lots of people do. And we shouldn't abandon coal/gas/ancient nuclear for just one replacement technology, lest the unexpected bite us.
I also really like orbital solar following PG&E's design strategy, but it's still in shadow many hours each day. I doubt we have the tech yet to make the Asimov Orbit practical ("hovering" over the poles, thanks to solar sails), but that's also an eventual option, and might be practical before fusion, if fusion's history is any guide.
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There's no reasonable solution today for non-fossil baseload generation.
Depends where you are. Many places have enough geothermal or hydro to meet their needs, e.g. parts of Africa.
The other thing you have to realize is that even if it isn't possible today, that doesn't mean people will be willing to fund the developments that FTA wants. Tens of billions of Euros and tens of years to get it off the ground, at a time when other technologies are developing rapidly and in Germany even new coal plants are looking like they will never turn a profit.
With energy you have to look at th
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Mankind has never used less power, over all, though regions have faltered. Power = standard of living. As more heavy industry becomes robotic over time, power becomes the primary cost of, well, everything. Efficiency will of course keep getting better, but that just leaves room for more!
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> I also really like orbital solar following PG&E's design strategy
OMG.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/the-maury-equation/
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It makes sense for PG&E - it's about NIMBY, not cost. They put a lot of effort into how to prevent the sat from becoming an orbital weapon.
Anyhow, give the new companies a chance to bring the price of launches way down - I expect the can shed an order of magnitude off launch costs. Further, it's only a matter of time and robotics until it becomes feasible to drag asteroids into orbit, so that we don't have to lift bulk materials, which won't help photoelectric solar, but solar thermal is dead easy to
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What the hell am I reading?
>Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel.
How does a non-nonsensical saying apply to energy? Explain yourself.
A saying like "Ai = MTBF/(MTBF+MTTR)" just doesn't have that same ring to it. Preppers aren't known for a keen embrace of statistics.
Closer to market (Score:5, Insightful)
If you've got a valid business plan, then get investors like any other business.
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Mod this guy up!
You have hit the nail on the head.
No conspiracy of hippies is keeping U.S. nuclear power off the table. Commercial ventures can get licenses if they want (and have). The issue is straight-up capitalism and profit-making business decisions -- the capital cost of a nuclear plant is very high so it is an unattractive investment as long as coal or natural gas are available.
Re:Closer to market (Score:4, Insightful)
NIMBYism drives up costs. You can't completely dismiss something just because it's not a direct contributor to the problem.
A Load Of Marketing (Score:2, Insightful)
Nobody has built a large-scale reactor of this type. What we had and have is THTR300 and CANDU converting Thorium. What we figured was that is IS HARD, ENGINEERING-WISE. I am not saying we should not do it, quite the opposite. But -
Now we have a bunch of folks claiming that an unproven-in-reality concept is "easy". What year do we have ? 1317 ???
Better look at the record of CANDU and the Russian fast breeder. These things ACTUALLY WORK.
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> Nobody has built a large-scale reactor of this type
Yup.
> I am not saying we should not do it, quite the opposite.
The *only* question is "how much can we do it for".
If it's over $4 a watt, and I'd say the chance of that is 99%, then there's no point trying.
LFTR (Score:5, Interesting)
I love the idea of LFTR. Honestly. A thousand years of cheap and plentiful fuel, simplified nuclear design, smaller physical footprint, lower risk of cataclysmic meltdown & resulting fallout, waste having a much lower half-life, no CO2 emissions...
But it's still an idea. After Oak Ridge, there's been no government-led development of LFTR reactors in the states. Our only hopes at present are either with the Chinese [telegraph.co.uk] or a private company called Flibe Energy [flibe-energy.com] that's trying to gather investment funds to build LFTE reactors for army bases.
I agree with this sentiment. (Score:4, Interesting)
There's almost zero reason we should put LFTR and Fusion into an adversarial relationship.
LFTR is closer to market right now, and fuel for it is ridiculously plentiful. It can easily power this planet for hundreds of years.
At the same time, Fusion is around the corner (though it's been "around the corner" for several decades).
Still, instead of dealing with:
* Nasty, polluting fossil fuel generation
* Solar/Wind/Hydro installs that fuck up the local ecology
* Dirty, ancient solid-fuel fission tech
Take the first step forward with LFTR and MSR fission.
Yes, we'll have waste still. But it's FAR easier to design storage/depletion facilities that last 100-300 years. Current fission plants are producing stuff that'll be hot for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. And, quite simply, we can't guarantee anything we engineer will last that long. The oldest (mostly intact) megastructures on this planet are the Egyptian pyramids. And they're only about 4500 years old. Mostly because they're just a giant pile of stone.
Still with LFTR/MSR, we can lower emissions and give ourselves time to grow and improve the grid while we get the kinks out of Fusion technology.
With portable, modular solutions like Boeing's fusion skunkworks project, we can put cheap, safe power generation capacity just about ANYWHERE.
When more power's needed? Just drop another unit next to the first and keep adding until your requirements are met.
And when it's time to decommission a unit? Simply truck it away!
And both of these technologies are engineered, from the get-go, to be inherently safe.
With LFTR/MSR fission. If power is cut, you don't get a runaway reaction. By design, the reactor dumps the medium into dump tanks, away from the reagent.
With fusion, you turn off power to a fusion reactor or change the dynamics inside the reactor, and the process shuts down naturally. Snuffed like a blown out candle.
But, will all the "nuclear = bombs" hysterics ever allow this to go through?
Hell no!
Both yes, but as Fusion-Fission hybrid (Score:5, Interesting)
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What's not to love? You get the cost and complexity of having both a fission and fusion reactor but no more useful work done than if the reactor did just one or the other.
I thought of how one might build a fission/fusion hybrid reactor and realized just how complex such a device would have to be to work. Everything inside the reactor would be very hot, bombarded by neutrons and gamma rays, and have to be precise and powerful enough to maintain confinement of a fusion reaction. I suspect that at some poin
First rule in government spending (Score:3)
Quoting S.R. Hadden (from Contact [wikipedia.org]): "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?"
Its all PR (Score:2)
There is no such thing as a "safe" fission reactor (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the three big reactor failures: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. All three were caused by human error. For Chernobyl, it was a dangerous design and running dangerous tests. For TMI, it was a less dangerous design, and they still screwed it up with bad procedures. For Fukushima, they made a series of globally bad design choices because they refused to consider realistic worst case external events. Plus they uncovered a flaw in the containment structure design that lead to the hydrogen explosions.
All of these are human error.
And it's not just reactors. The British Petroleum oil platform blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was human error. The sinking of the ferry Sewol in Korea was human error, as was the sinking of the Concordia off of Italy. BP also had a refinery blow up in Texas because of bad operations and ignoring a known problem with volatile fume leakage.
So no matter how secure a technology looks, it will still suffer a complete worst case failure. Assuming anything else is wishful thinking.
What's the worst case for LFTR? No one seems willing to even talk about it. It's remarkably like the head in the sand attitude that lead to the Fukshima disaster.
So here's a question: what happens when a molten salt containing fluorine, uranium, thorium and other miscellaneous radioactive elements comes in contact with water? Does it explode? Does it burn in air? How toxic are the substances entering the environment? (Trick question: both uranium and fluorine are very toxic elements. Fluorine forms many toxic compounds with carbon.) What is the equivilant explosive energy of tons of molten uranium salts?
If it is burning, how do you put it out? (Note: with fluorine compounds water is a bad idea. It's explosive.) How do you build a containment vessel that will withstand all of that? How will the cost of proper containment and emergency planning and equipment impact the economics of power generation?
A burning LFTR makes a burning graphite reactor seem like a campfire for a marshmallow roast. Good luck with that.
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no, you are confused. The worst case is exactly what LFTR addresses and of course its engineers talk about that. Blow a hole in a LTFR reactors, the fuel drains into collection tanks and cools like glass. The salts are chemically stable and don't burn, decompose or explode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
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If it is burning, how do you put it out?
You are confusing fluorine with fluoride. A fluoride will not burn because it has already reached a state with a potential lower than that it would have with water or air.
With that said most every LFTR design I've seen does have fluorine as a gas at some point in the process but that is in the chemical processing of the fuel while outside the reactor. There is little to no fluorine in the reactor vessel.
There would not be a fire because the stuff in a LFTR does not burn. If there were things burning then
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first, a fusion reactor can't "explode". It operates in a vacuum, and the amount of material fusing is less than a cup of deuterium gas (heavy hydrogen). If the fusing material does start to "explode", the fusion goes out and and the hydrogen dissipates in the vacuum.
Deuterium fusion has the lowest require startup energy, and produces the least amount of neutrons. The goal of fusion is the production of helium 4. The only stray neutrons come from making helium 3 - and that doesn't happen that often (it requ
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Deuterium fusion does not produce the least amount of neutrons. :)
There are plenty of fusion processes that produce ZERO neutrons, that is less than your proposal
Fission = bad, but not super-bad (Score:2, Insightful)
Fission is only "super-dangerous" if you compare it with unicorn fairy energy sources. REAL ones badly compare to fission in terms of people killed/TWh. Just figure how many people fall off roofs installing solar panels and divide that by the funny leccy you get from that. Or better, dont get in rainy days and need coal backup. Or better Gazprom-based backup like we Germans idiots do it.
People killed/TWh (Score:4, Informative)
Actually pretty interesting numbers
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/... [nextbigfuture.com]
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Count all those and nuclear power is still safer by at least an order of magnitude, as repeatedly stated by numerous studies.
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This is actually the point of LFTR. They operate at low pressure and are inherently unable to "meltdown". It's a design that has lots of promise if not for the fact that we no longer really need it.
We have 6 fission reactors under construction or licensed to begin construction. These are proven reactors designs and there is no shortage of fuel for them to burn. Thorium is more plentiful, but at present consumption levels we already have a worldwide supply of uranium to last another 230 years.
So who is
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>but at present consumption levels we already have a worldwide supply of uranium to last another 230 years.
That's great, but at present uranium is only supplying 12.3% of the world's energy generation - switch to an all-uranium energy economy and that number drops to only 28 years, even assuming energy consumption remains constant (which it won't). It's not a viable option except as a stopgap as more sustainable alternatives are deployed. As I recall even thorium will only provide several centuries at
Re:Fission = bad, but not super-bad (Score:4, Informative)
... As I recall even thorium will only provide several centuries at 100%, though we could increase that by an order of magnitude by developing seawater extraction technology.
Good that you brought up seawater extraction technology. Using that we have enough uranium, even just using once-through burning, for something like a 10,000 year supply at current consumption rates. Increase nuclear power ten-fold (125% of current world electricity consumption) and it is still 1,000 years. If we implement breeding (we could get the bugs worked out in a few centuries I imagine) then we are back up 100,000 years or so.
Why does thorium need to enter the picture?
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Because thorium might end up being cheaper and easier than uranium. The reason we were able to go from the speed of a horse to beyond the speed of sound is because we were able to find cheap and plentiful energy in coal and petroleum. As energy gets cheaper the more things become feasible.
Why is it that people don't have flying cars? We certainly have the technology for everyone to have their own personal aircraft. The limitation is the price of energy. It just costs too much to fly a helicopter for a
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...though we could increase that by an order of magnitude by developing seawater extraction technology.
Good that you mentioned seawater extraction. If we did that for uranium then we would have a 10,000 year supply at current consumption rates. If we increase nuclear power 20-fold, to 250% of world electricity production today, it is still 500 years. If we implement breeding (I suspect we could get the bugs worked out by then) we are back up to a 50,000 year supply.
Where is the necessity of thorium?
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I believe you're overestimating by an order of magnitude or two, but perhaps I'm misremembering. Or perhaps my source was assuming energy consumption would continue to increase exponentially.
Regardless, we don't have seawater extraction technology today, and are unlikely to develop it in the next thirty years, so it's irrelevant to the discussion at hand - we still need some other energy source in the short term.
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You don't get thorium from seawater; there isn't enough there. Uranium can be recovered from the ocean, and there is enough thorium on land to last nearly forever.
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Mining uranium is one of the dirtiest parts of the process. The idea that we should mine out all the easily accessible Uranium is just as foolish as to drill all the oil or mine all the coal.
With breeder reactors, either designs like the LFTR or more established designs like SFRs, we don't need to mine significant amounts of additional fissionables for a century. And with the SFRs there's not much left to develop - we can just deploy the existing designs more widely.
Re:Fission = bad, but not super-bad (Score:5, Informative)
How the hell did this get modded insightful? It's full of total BS.
First, as the summary even pointed out, fusion will produce waste due to the high neutron flux. You didn't even read the summary, nor do you have the faintest idea what you're talking about.
Second, LFTRs were designed to NOT meltdown. In fact, you need to heat the piping in order to have the salt not freeze. Again, your statement that all fission reactors melt down is proof of your ignorance. You're full of FUD.
Third, they tested them. They just walked away. And it shut down by itself. No special magic, no SCRAM. Then they walked away for 40 years. And it didn't melt down. Instead, it froze. Yes, there were problems discovered later, like the evolution of fluorine gas--but these are not even on the same scale of challenges as preventing an inherently meltdown-prone PBWR from going south for the winter. Also, you don't need to use water as your coolant. As we all know very well, water is dangerously prone to turning into a fuel-oxidizer mix and going off.
Also, what would make you think that solutions need to be expensive? Why is THAT your criteria for a safe design? See, PBWRs are bad because they're inherently unstable. I hope we never build another. However, I'm still pro-nuclear, and I think that a LFTR is the way to go for now, since the design is inherently walk-away safe. Yes, there are materials challenges. You need to use special piping doped with 1.1% niobium and so on. But these are things we've researched and can continue to refine. Solutions should be judged on technical merit, not simply on, "it's expensive, so it must be good!"
Also, why the hell would you suggest launching old nuclear reactor parts into space? Which orifice did you pull that out of?
You're so full of FUD that I can only wonder which energy conglomerate you're shilling for. Care to tell us?
Re:Fission = bad, but not super-bad (Score:4, Insightful)
The fusion "waste" isn't even in the same category. The fission reactor has the same problem with the neutron flux of the containment vessel and adds on a waste stream from the reaction. On top of that processing the fuel is not without it's own waste stream. It's that very processing which did in breeder reactors because it was dirtier and more polluting than the reactor.
Saying they generate approximately equivalent waste streams is an out and out lie. The fusion systems neutron enriched vessel and systems can be taken care of by leaving on site for 50 years then decommissioning and burying it in a conventional low level nuclear landfill or waiting 100 years and then melting it down and reusing it. The waste products generated from not only the fission reactor, the vessel, and the processing of the fuel are not even in the same category, the vessel alone might be close but even that will likely be contaminated beyond just neutron enrichment.
This is a total bullshit claim.
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Where did I say they generated equivalent waste streams? Seriously, quote it. You've got a straw-man going. I was pointed out the problem where the GGP claimed fusion was 100% clean!
FFS learn to read already. All I said was "fusion will produce waste due to the high neutron flux". I don't know HOW you read anything else into that. Not once did I discuss waste from fission, except to say that launching it into space is a preposterous idea.
You're so full of it, it isn't even funny. You're imagining words wher
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Unbunch your panties.
My reply was more targeted at the summary than your reply but I replied to you because you perpetuated that same line of thought by claiming Fusion generates a waste stream. Fusion and Fission aren't in the same ballpark. Anyone claiming Thorium reactors are just as good is full of shit.
Now calm down, you're hyperventilating over a comment on slashdot. If this is typical behavior you should consider seeking medical help with your anxiety problem.
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Wow. More straw-man. Where did I say thorium reactors were just as good? Fact is, I didn't. And you're STILL lying your ass off. You're insisting I said things that I never did--and you can't quote them, because I didn't say them.
Will someone mod this idiot -1, Flamebait already? This isn't a case of disagreeing; he's flat out lying about what I said.
Re:Fission = bad, but not super-bad (Score:4, Informative)
...fusion will produce waste due to the high neutron flux.
Not necessarily. The most viable fusion approach does not produce neutrons as a product of the reaction. [focusfusion.org] In addition, they don't need to contain and stabilize the plasma which is the bane of most fusion programs. They intend to leverage the inherent instability of plasma to produce 200 small reactions or pulses per second. They won't need steam generators since most of the energy is released in the form of an ion beam.
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I love being proven wrong. +1 Informative. You learn something everyday.
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Not necessarily. The most viable fusion approach does not produce neutrons as a product of the reaction. [focusfusion.org] In addition, they don't need to contain and stabilize the plasma which is the bane of most fusion programs. They intend to leverage the inherent instability of plasma to produce 200 small reactions or pulses per second. They won't need steam generators since most of the energy is released in the form of an ion beam.
"Viable" roughly means "practical", the first step for something to be practical is to be able to do it. Did you read page you linked to? It admits that "Humanity hasn't figured out how to harness it yet." Actually that is a half-truth. We haven't learned how to harness convention tritum+deuterium fusion yet. But we at least can demonstrate it in a laboratory. With aneutronic thermonuclear fusion can't do it at all under any circumstances!
This isn't in a class with fairies, unicorns and pixie dust since it
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"You're so full of FUD that I can only wonder which energy conglomerate you're shilling for. Care to tell us?"
He is not he is a green.
You see the truth is that there are a good number of "activists" that make a living telling people that "you never know".
The will spout off about solar and ignore the problems like storage and the fact that solar peak is not the same as usage peak. They will just use buzzwords like "smart grid" and then complain about the cost of nuclear being greater than natural gas but ign
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That brings to mind this quote, which seems to adequately describe much of the hoopla surrounding this topic. (Don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-solar or other technologies, but each has its place. Nuclear is a superior baseload technology and can even be operated in load-following mode.)
The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man. But it is a lovely work if you can stomach it.
-- RAH
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I have always felt the problem of fission waste disposal has been overblown.
If the goal is "walk away safe", then fission fuel is walk away safe in about 300 years too. The high level radiation emitted by the fission products comes from cesium and strontium and in 300 years, it will all be gone. Leaving low level radioactives, Uranium and a tiny amount of plutonium. In 300 years, the used rods will emit the same level of radiation as the unused rods. Since plutonium is an alpha emitter, the used rod wi
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The reason the US stopped reprocessing nuclear waste from its reactors is because one of the steps in the process results in weapons-grade material and there was (and still is with the terror threat) a proliferation risk.
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This sounds like a fanboy cheerleading
True, but why should this energy related article be any different from all the other ones?
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This sounds like a fanboy cheerleading. Nothing really informative here just someone saying I support this.
TL;DW eh? Glad you picked up the subtle nuance. When did 'fanboy cheerleading' become an insult? Were your comic book heroes aloof and distant, battling enthusiasm everywhere with snide epithets and apathy-vision?
I'm just glad that the late Dr. Bussard's lecture [youtube.com] made it once again onto a Slashdot page. And Thorium Remix [youtube.com] for the first time ever. Everyone needs to look into these topics. With attention always on the new even if it is short on substance, hard lectures are always is good to find.
Dr. Brussar
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Bullshit.
First, radioactive materials aren't that dangerous. You don't want to be near them, but it's only moderately worse than any other common industrial waste. Second, people can read signs even after revolutions. If you put "severe radiation, stay out" on a concrete building, it'll be fine.
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What fantasy land are you living in?!
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Second, people can read signs even after revolutions. If you put "severe radiation, stay out" on a concrete building, it'll be fine.
An additional advantage to those signs is that in a dystopian future, the terrorists are usually the good guys. The info will help direct those good guys to where they can find materials helpful in the fight against evil governments.
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Not hardly. Dirty bombs are unpleasant for those affected, but its mostly a cleanup problem, it's bloody difficult to spread it around enough to be a major issue. You could make some serious cleanup of Times Square necessary, but polluting a significant portion of the city, much less the state would be a real challenge without a nuclear weapon to disperse the material with.
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I agree, acronyms should generally be expanded the first time they're used in the summary. Hell, I'm even rather familiar with LFTRs, but had to google it to remember exactly *which* reactor family with an L-starting acronym it was.
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screw you. Fusion has the potential to fuel all energy needs and future ones with minimal waste. How do you plan on creating solar panels with no energy? it costs a mountain of coal/gas/oil to produce. Solar has some big issues involving night time, scaling and expanding to meet future needs.
How will you launch rockets using solar? You won't. You'll never reach that level of energy production. You can with a fusion reactor.
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...How do you plan on creating solar panels with no energy? it costs a mountain of coal/gas/oil to produce...
Where did all the energy go? Is solar energy tainted and unusable for making new solar panels? The energy payback time for current solar technology is 3 years, and steadily dropping. It should reach 1 year over the next decade.
You can with a fusion reactor.
How? They don't exist.
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> Look up "energy return on investment" if you want to know more.
I did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested#Economic_influence_of_EROEI
Wind outperforms nuclear, 180%. PV is 70% of nuclear.
So, you were saying?
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> Fusion has the potential to fuel all energy needs and future ones with minimal waste
For infinite cost.
Sheesh, how do people not understand this fundamental point? There are hundreds of forms of energy out there, thousands. We don't use them because they cost to much. Fusion costs more. Even if the price of energy goes up, that means we'll use one of the thousands we're not using now. There is an infinity of money between now and fusion.
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History has shown (most recently with the baby boomers) that humans don't handle abundance so well.
I've got great news! Abundance, especially abundant energy and grid electricity, really works!
Take a look at Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four [youtube.com] to see the interplay of "wealth" and life expectancy over time. In case you're wondering why the life bubble for China took a sudden dive in 1959, that was Chairman Mao. Let's not do that again.
Which leads into Hans Rosling's Child Mortailty, Family Planning & the Environment [youtube.com] where it is revealed that in a progress