China Will Spend $3.3 Billion to Research Molten Salt Nuclear-Powered Drones (scmp.com) 194
Long-time Slashdot reader WindBourne tipped us off to some news from The South China Morning Post:
China is to spend 22 billion yuan (US$3.3 billion) trying to perfect a form of technology largely discarded in the cold war which could produce a safer but more powerful form of nuclear energy. The cash is to develop two "molten salt" reactors in the Gobi Desert in northern China. Researchers hope that if they can solve a number of technical problems the reactors will lead to a range of applications, including nuclear-powered warships and drones. The technology, in theory, can create more heat and power than existing forms of nuclear reactors that use uranium, while producing only one thousandth of the radioactive waste. It also has the advantage for China of using thorium as its main fuel. China has some of the world's largest reserves of the metal...
The reactors use molten salt rather than water as a coolant, allowing them to create temperatures of over 800 degrees Celsius, nearly three times the heat produced by a commercial nuclear plant fuelled with uranium. The superhot air has the potential to drive turbines and jet engines and in theory keep a bomber flying at supersonic speed for days.
One Beijing researcher says these drones "would serve as a platform for surveillance, communication or weapon delivery to deter nuclear and other threats from hostile countries." He asked not to be named, but provided one more advantage for a nuclear-powered drone flying at high-altitudes over the ocean.
"It will also have more public acceptance. If an accident happens, it crashes into the sea."
The reactors use molten salt rather than water as a coolant, allowing them to create temperatures of over 800 degrees Celsius, nearly three times the heat produced by a commercial nuclear plant fuelled with uranium. The superhot air has the potential to drive turbines and jet engines and in theory keep a bomber flying at supersonic speed for days.
One Beijing researcher says these drones "would serve as a platform for surveillance, communication or weapon delivery to deter nuclear and other threats from hostile countries." He asked not to be named, but provided one more advantage for a nuclear-powered drone flying at high-altitudes over the ocean.
"It will also have more public acceptance. If an accident happens, it crashes into the sea."
Clever Move (Score:2)
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What does 'air superiority' mean to you? Is it taken by bomber sized aircraft?
I don't know who put the drone/military spin on this. IMHO it reflects internal Chinese politics, we aren't the intended audience, but it's interesting.
China getting into the salt cooled reactor research business is generally good news. Actual, practical, military applications are pretty few and far between. If anybody can get fast breeders to work, it will be good for the world. And sure, _maybe_ future carriers and subs wil
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And sure, _maybe_ future carriers and subs will be powered by them.
Why not commercial shipping? Get rid of bunker oil as a fuel and go a long way to eliminating greenhouse gasses. Nukes were tried once [wikipedia.org]. Had they held out for a few more years (through the first oil crisis) this would have even become economical.
Re:Clever Move (Score:5, Interesting)
When you let a salt cooled reactor shut down, the salt solidifies and you're fucked. Now it's time to take it apart and cleanup.
That's how these experiments usually end. How they ended for the USA, France and Japan. Good luck to China, seriously, good luck to them, not snark.
The commercial shipping world isn't known for it's record of scrupulous preventive maintenance and professionalism below decks. Much of it is known for the opposite.
Bunker oil is dirtier, more sulpher, more soot. Same CO2, more or less. The particulates are, if anything, countering the warming. The seas are huge and not densely filled with shipping. Pollution from ocean going shipping is low on sensible priority lists. 'All costs are opportunity costs!'
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Yes, this is one of the reasons a number of islands in Arcrtic seas are now permanently off-limits to humans as the radiation levels will remain too high from nuclear submarines that were scuttled or were accidentally lost and their reactors breached. Sadly, so many fish sticks and other fish-food products now have higher baseline levels of radiation.
Re:Clever Move (Score:4, Interesting)
Low = around 150 degrees C, not room temperature. Still needs a heating system to keep the reactor from "freezing up."
There are metals that are liquid at room temperature. Mercury is heavy and nasty to work with -- dissolves metal piping as well as being toxic. So is gallium.
There are sodium potassium alloys that are also liquid at room temperature, but they react explosively with water, making them amusing to work with.
Re:Clever Move (Score:5, Interesting)
Low = around 150 degrees C, not room temperature.
The eutectic has a melting point of 123.5 C. An unmentioned problem with lead-bismuth cooling is the volatile and extremely toxic polonium that is continuously produced by neutron bombardment of the bismuth.
The coolant doesn't need high pressure to keep it from flashing to vapor, and it doesn't explode on contact with water - both good things - but polonium release is a severe hazard.
But hey! Free polonium! (Free except for the cost of the purging system to remove it.)
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Low = around 150 degrees C, not room temperature. Still needs a heating system to keep the reactor from "freezing up."
There are metals that are liquid at room temperature. Mercury is heavy and nasty to work with -- dissolves metal piping as well as being toxic. So is gallium.
There are sodium potassium alloys that are also liquid at room temperature, but they react explosively with water, making them amusing to work with.
I for one, really, really, eally want to see a sdium cooled reactor plunge into the Ocean. Just not too closely.
I think the nuclear reactor flying machine business has been tried before, and it tends to have some interesting problems. problems. Although I'm assuming this will be closed cycle, so spewing radiation out the ass end won't be an issue.
Shielding and it's weight will be an issue, so there will be some real logistics issues with drone prep. I'm making an assumption that there won't be much
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You only NEED radiation shielding on a manned aircraft. A bomber sized drone outfitted with lots of missiles and good air defence would be a game changer.
The individual missions are only one part of the process. You need some way of preparing the device, and working on it.
Think about it, unless radiation hardened, fully unmanned facilities are there to repair and re-arm the drone, some folks are gonna get a dose. And the concept of single use weapons is going to put a helluva lot of expensive fissile material out of human reach when they dunk into the ocean.
This device would be more at home in a 1947 Popular Mechanics magazine than in real life.
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CO2 aside, ships pollute a lot
http://www.industrytap.com/wor... [industrytap.com]
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When you let a salt cooled reactor shut down, the salt solidifies
How do you start it the first time? (I'm guessing some sort of heating loop.)
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The particulates are, if anything, countering the warming
We need global regulations to establish a minimum particulate output for diesel engines to stop people using particulate filters. /s
Actually I wonder if you could use high sulphur jet fuel to introduce sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to do geoengineering.
The Royal Society did a report on geoengineering here which mentions sulphate aerosols - basically the SO2 forms droplets which increase the albedo and cool the planet
https://royalsociety.org/topic... [royalsociety.org]
https://royalsociety.org/~/med... [royalsociety.org]
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If you look on page 48 of the pdf you'll see
https://royalsociety.org/~/med... [royalsociety.org]
An increase in acid rain appears to be unlikely to be a problem, as the perturbation to the global sulphur cycle by these stratospheric emissions is quite small (natural volcanic emissions
are ~50 MtS/yr, and industrial emissions are much larger).
Delivering between 1 and 5 MtS/yr to the stratosphere is feasible. The mass involved is less than a tenth of the current annual payload of the global air transportation, and commercial transport aircraft already reach the lower stratosphere. Methods of delivering the required mass to the stratosphere depend on the required delivery altitude, assuming that the highest required altitude would be that needed to access the lower tropical stratosphere, about 20 km, then the most cost-effective delivery method would probably be a custom built fl eet of aircraft, although rockets, aircraft/rocket combinations, artillery and balloons have all been suggested. Very rough cost estimates based on existing aircraft and artillery technology suggest that costs would be of the order of 3 to 30 $/kg putting the total annual cost at 10s of billion dollars (US National Academy of Science 1992; Keith 2000; Blackstock et al. 2009). The environmental impacts of the delivery system itself would of course also need to be carefully considered.
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Perhaps so, but these thorium reactors are not fast breeders. I think they are, techinically, slow breeders.
Rabbits had it sorted out aeons ago.
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I know what it means. Darren Bane doesn't.
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One of the great accomplishments of the developers of game theory is that the moved us beyond strategy that was based on assuming your opponent would do something stupid.
Flying nuclear reactors != clever (Score:3)
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Flying nuclear reactors are never a clever idea.
Hanford nuclear reservation (USA) tried an Atomic Airplane. The problem they couldn't avoid is the sheilding required made it too heavy to fly. Guess drones don't require any, just distance.
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> unless you want the ground crews and mechanics to die of radiation exposure.
Right, because suits aren't an actual thing.
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doable Flying nuclear reactors (Score:2)
e.g. a semi-permanent drone patrolling the uninhabited pacific at 2 km high would not need much shielding and could easily even avoid ships and planes closer than a few miles. Hang a few antiship, air-to-air, and antipersonnel missiles on it, and replace much of the blue water surface navy patrols.
2 km distance makes even popping a neutron bomb less hazardous...
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Meanwhite... (Score:5, Insightful)
While China is exerting its technical superiority, here in the US, the regime in power has banned the use of the phrases, "science-based" and "evidence-based" from government-funded scientific organizations.
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
We are so fucked.
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While China is exerting its technical superiority,
It's not technical superiority, it's political superiority.
US scientists and engineers could build you a molten salt nuke . . . if you let them. Any talk of nuke research will arouse the anti-nuke folks, who will block it.
In China, folks who oppose their nuke projects are given shovels, and forced to help build it.
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They did - the Seawolf (SSN-575) had a molten salt reactor in the 50's. Hell, Russian Alfas had them in the 70's/80's/90's.
BTW, I heard they dumped the Seawolf's off the Farallon's at some point and replaced it with the more common water cooled version.
It wasn't thorium based though.
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Re: Meanwhite... (Score:2)
Uhhh... That's exactly what a molten salt reactor is...
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Molten salt involves a molten ionic compound (salt). Not a pure metal or alloy.
Back to Chem 101 wit'ch'ya.
Re: Meanwhite... (Score:2)
Sodium is a metal. Maybe you shouldn't have dropped. I noticed how you tried to disqualify it though.
You seem to be confused between molten salt fueled versus molten salt cooled reactors.
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Re: Meanwhite... (Score:2)
Originally Seawolf reactor was sodium cooled, later replaced with more conventional water cooled reactor. It's still distinctly detectable (I've heard) in the dumping area near the Farralon's.
It's why Seawolf wasn't launched before Nautilus, even though it was laid down first.
I was mixing salt cooled with salt fueled, not you, apologies. I was lumping them together for some reason.
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It had a sodium-cooled (liquid metal) reactor
That's exactly what a molten salt reactor is...
Molten salt involves a molten ionic compound (salt).
Sodium is a metal.
So your "logic" is that because salts can contain metals, metals are salts? That's not how implications work. That's how equivalences work, but there's no equivalence here.
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US scientists and engineers could build you a molten salt nuke... If you *pay* them.
It's not a good investment. No one is willing to throw billions at a technology that has failed repeatedly in the past and which is rapidly being replaced anyway.
The Chinese government is only doing it for military purposes.
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Re:Meanwhite... (Score:4, Insightful)
We need a happy medium
Part of what is occurring now is because of the anything that works effort of destroying Obama. It is so much easier to find someone to blame than it is to actually fix something. The racism and such that was appealed to was not new, but the flames were fanned and are still being fanned. Intellectualism is now considered a very bad thing. The great people succeeded on guts and greatness, right?
I have no idea on how to get elections won by the best candidate. Right now it looks like they are going to be won by the least hated, with it bouncing back and forth. Of course the republican hypocrisy in the current tax bill is staggering. The dems should run commercials pointing out how much debt they are adding on for our kids and their kids.
As far as China researching nuclear reactors, well, why not, as long as they take reasonable care. I'm not sure I want flying nuclear reactors in any form, but they certainly have a right to research.
Actually the United States credit should get the threat of a major downgrade if they pass this tax crap, and actually get it. That may be how China could help. They could threaten to not buy our debt.
The current tax bill is basically a hit of crack. It may accelerate things, but there is gonna be one hell of a crash sooner or later. From what I can tell they are timing it so it blows to hell when a Dem will likely be in power. That way they can blame the dem for causing it all and the uniformed will buy it, again.
I rather think a few of China's nuclear drones would make for a smaller catastrophe.
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Part of what is occurring now is because of the anything that works effort of destroying Obama.
Hardly. I saw the Democrats say the most horrible things about Reagan, and Bush Derangement Syndrome was quite real.
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And let's not forget Borking.
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Sadly, there is nothing "safe" about flying nuclear reactors. Once they crash and the contents of their reactors breached, radioactivity is rapidly concentrated in top predators (= humans), which get 50% of their protein from the world's oceans.
We would do better seeking a world-wide ban on flying nuclear reactors rather than encouraging our potential adversaries to build them.
Given the Trump administration's approach to global warming and undoing rational planning, one can now legitimately wonder whether
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There's no need to put science deniers in prison. We just need to ignore them, which is China's approach.
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There is something seriously wrong with those people:
Trump administration is banning the federal health agency from using seven words or phrases in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.
The words are: “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”
Soon expressions like "Russian influence" and "buying election manipulation services with pocket money from the father-in-law" are banned as well. Isn't entitlement just a normal word in budgets, taxation and compensation package contracts? And how might one research fetus health without mentioning the word fetus? Or research seasonal flu within the vulnerable parts of the population without using the word vulnerable? Maybe they just call them unmentiona
Re:Meanwhite... (Score:5, Interesting)
The GOP recognizes that such word bans will now be essential, since they are essentially ending funding for prevention of the spread of Zika Virus and other mosquito vectored diseases. The last thing they want to have is someone quoting the terms "science-based" or "evidence based", or "fetus" in government documents that demonstrate that the failure to mitigate the deleterious effects of these diseases in arguing against the Trump administration's anti-science based positions that are likely to kill thousands in the decades to come, particularly now that with global warming is expanding vector ranges of tropical diseases northward at an astounding clip.
If the evangelicals ever figured out that Zika will probably kill more of the "unborn" than abortions in the decades to come, it would have a devastating effect on his base. Better to ban the word, than let the truth come out from their perspective.
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I think they should stick to "susceptible*, *rights*, *variance*, *identity transposition*, *foetus*, *research indicates* and *verifiable by testing*"
It would have the added benefit of being more convincing in an argument. Most tire of the same dross spewed out by style manuals and their ilk.
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From the Washington Post article
Someone needed to turn in an article, so wrote one about the Washington Post article saying such and such, and their proof is from an anonymous source from the original article.
"anonymous source" Who knows if it is true or not, so until a fact appears a sane person would disregard it!!
Just Saying!!
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This from the crowd that brought you Pizzagate.
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This from the crowd that brought you Pizzagate.
Oh, that's real. Pizzagate ships teh Children to the sge in the Arizona Desert where the fake moon landings were filmed by Kubrick, and O'Blama and Hellery have theie way with the kids on top of the barrels of chemtrail juice and the real copies of his Kenyan Birth certificate. It's also where the 50 plus people that the Clinton's had murdered are decomposing while they take videos and laugh, laugh, laugh.
Republicans are all about fact based shit.
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Here in Soviet California, grad student's AI runs on YOU.
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Luckily the CDC does not provide the oversight for military nuclear power reactors, so not sure why you think this is relevant. You also might want to read a source article instead of whatever headlines made into your echo chamber, because your presentation doesn't match the facts. You pasted a link, but you seem to have not read it.
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I suppose we should wait until the Trump administration tells the Department of Energy that they're banning the words "radiation" and "nuclear waste".
Re:Meanwhite... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've read the original WaPo report on this *carefully*, and at present the effect is limited to budgetary documents that are being sent to Congress. It does not affect working scientists or epidemiologists... yet. So my interpretation is that while we should expect policy and research priorities to change, the ban on the seven dirty words at the CDC isn't evidence of that. At present it seems to be more about how the agency presents itself to Congress.
It's interesting that "evidence-based" and "science-based" should be thrown into the ban-bin with "fetus" and "transgender" as terms that are likely to cause an unfavorable Congressional reaction.
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I'm pretty sure scientists or epidemiologists are not likely to use words like, "science-based" or "evidence-based", because duh.
Why is the Trump administration banning words at all?
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I've read the original WaPo report on this *carefully*, and at present the effect is limited to budgetary documents that are being sent to Congress.
/quote? Well, we are working in teh right direction. Words need to be banned. It's the American way.
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It's interesting that "evidence-based" and "science-based" should be thrown into the ban-bin with "fetus" and "transgender" as terms that are likely to cause an unfavorable Congressional reaction.
"Interesting". I do not think that word means what you think it means.
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While China is exerting its technical superiority, here in the US, we are building a state-of-the-art coal powered steam drone. #MAGA!
FTFY
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Make that "clean coal".
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Make that "clean coal".
Just takes a little dishwashing detergent.
Re: Meanwhite... (Score:2)
Let's wait until November 2018.
The US has been down this road before... (Score:5, Interesting)
Project Pluto, a nuclear-powered cruise missile popping out H-bombs like Pez. One of the "advantages" of the thing was the radioactive exhaust from its air-cooled reactor, also known as "halitosis" -- it was a weapon in itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Molten salt is probably better than direct-cycle air-cooled, but it will still be an ecological disaster if it crashes into the sea. Also, why bother vs satellites and solar or fuel-powered drones (for surveillance) and conventional missiles (for attacking things).
Conventional hardware (ex solar) might not be able to stay in flight for as long, but a country can make more of them for a fraction of the cost of nuclear-powered drones.
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The Ford Nucleon was a real concept car...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Also, nuclear-powered (radiothermal generator) pacemakers were installed in the 1970s - some are still in use today. It might seem like a joke, but that was extremely reliable tech and saved the patient more surgeries to replace batteries or the pacemaker in the future...
https://uk.reuters.com/article... [reuters.com]
No reason to use nuclear when we have cheap solar (Score:2, Interesting)
Hopefully in 50-100 years we will be using renewable power everywhere, and dirty tech like coal and nuclear, while they had their day, are unnecessary. Molten salt is a big reduction in waste, but the fuel is still dangerous and the waste not easily managed.
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If I only had a million dollars, I could have sex with two chicks at one time...
Everything is easy, if you just assume the solution.
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That can be had, much, much cheaper. Hookers aren't $500k a pop.
It is the money that gives you the stamina and the super-versatile genitalia. It is not simply a matter of getting two chicks!
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Storage absolutely is viable, or at least on the cusp of being so. The the economics of storing renewable energy is different from the economics of storing non-renewable energy. Even if you lost 90% of the solar energy you tried to store, it's energy you got for free. As long as the cost of conversion and storage is low enough, waste isn't critical. That wouldn't be true of energy you generate from stuff you have to buy, like oil.
I read a few years ago about a group experimenting with photovoltaic housep
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Betting the planet on a speculative technology that isn't quite there yet would not seem to be tremendously sensible.
In contrast we could build nuclear plants (using half-century old designs, even) that would work, and by any reasonable standard would deserve to be called "clean".
But let's go back to our regular scheduled anti-nuclear fear-mongering. It's not like frying the planet is anything to worry about.
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Betting the planet on a speculative technology that isn't quite there yet would not seem to be tremendously sensible.
No bet at all. It's no-risk, all-reward, results are practically guaranteed. I mean yeah, the planet COULD be hit by an asteroid, rendering the investment ineffective, but so what?
In contrast we could build nuclear plants (using half-century old designs, even) that would work, and by any reasonable standard would deserve to be called "clean".
There have been numerous delays, flaws, and bankruptcies resulting in all but one single nuclear plant in the US being canceled, and that previous plant was started in the 1970s. Apparently we cannot build them.
But let's go back to our regular scheduled anti-nuclear fear-mongering. It's not like frying the planet is anything to worry about.
No need to fear monger, EVERY PENNY WASTED (and that total is billions) on nuclear power since say, 2005, could have
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You guys always talk a good line. Try not to get the planet fried with your obsessions.
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Climate change is real. Solar has a low capacity factor(20>-30%), and storage is not viable.
Not a problem. Solar is becoming cheap enough that even with the extra capacity required it is still economical. And there is also wind, even cheaper, which blows at night. And storage is viable right now. Pumped water storage is a commercially viable proven technology. And with the nearly century old technology of high voltage DC power lines (no, they do not have to be "superconductive") the power can be shipped from where ever it is generated to where ever the demand or storage sites are, and likewise fro
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Too bad the capitalists who build power plants for profit consider it a bad investment. Not so renewable power. The hard-nosed businessmen have spoken. The age of nuclear power plants has passed.
So where is all that base load power going to come from then? Storage isn't even in the ballpark right now. Where are those 50 TWhs of power are going to come from? We have to get base load from fossil fuels today and for likely the next several decades mostly due to your poorly informed objections to nuclear power.
The main speaker for the Sierra Club on the topic of nuclear power for 20 years didn't know what background radiation was. As a result, we have to keep those coal fired plants online for an
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"Base load" is a fancy word for "inflexible production which can't follow demand". Which is exactly what solar and wind power is.
There is absolutely no problem with solar and wind taking over the inflexible power generation. They just need the flexible power generation for when their output doesn't line up with the load. Exactly like nuclear or coal. On the upside, at least they are reasonably easy to throttle on short notice, unlike traditional nuclear, and you never have a gigawatt of wind or solar offlin
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Yes, but Trump promises to change that by imposing tariffs on non-US made components in order to drive up prices and thereby provide additional subsidy to fossil fuels, by once again making them cost-competitive with alternative power technologies.
Trump gives no though to the fac that tariffs imposed by Smoot-Hawley greatly intensified the Great Depression by throwing hundreds of thousands out of work, just as Trump proposes to do for the US solar industry.
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Storage is already viable, as Musk recently demonstrated in both Australia and in Puerto Rico. Not only viable, but extremely cost effective, not to mention saving the costs of environmental cleanup.
But of course the modern GOP would have us all believe there is no problem living in sh_t, whether it be chemical, nuclear, or sociological, because after all, modern republicans don't need a clean environment in which to thrive.
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Solar will be incorporated into construction and should eventually become the default roofing material in all places where it can offset a fraction of the power usage of the structures underneath. Wind will become an unsustainable maintenance nightmare as soon as the subsidies for it expire. Few people realize that the nacelle located right behind each set of wind turbine blades is crammed with mechanical gearing, with about the same complexity as an automatic transmission. That's high up on a pole, lashed
What could go wrong? (Score:2)
"It will also have more public acceptance. If an accident happens, it crashes into the sea."
Do you want Gojira? Because this is how you get Gojira.
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Why is it that so many people think that the oceans should be used as an open sewer and that there is no such thing as ocean currents?
Why the US rejected the idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
It does not create weapons grade radioactive materials. If you have a thorium based nuclear reactor you end up with low amounts of radioactive waste and can not build nuclear bombs. If you use the more traditional nuclear power plants, you get all this fun stuff that can be used to build a nuclear bomb.
The USA wanted nuclear bombs, so we ignored this technology.
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The difference is that the US is a democracy and it's very, very hard to get any kind of public support for anything that won't make anyone money until after most of the people currently in office will probably be out of office.
Despite democracy's many advantages, it doesn't mean that a one-party autocracy run by apparachniks with long term career security can't have its own advantages.
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And what pleases it is what keeps it in power. In general projects that don't generate cash for contributors in the near term don't qualify. So you can start a fighter plane project that will take over a decade to produce anything usable, but that's because it generates huge cash flows right from the get-go.
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Re:Why the US rejected the idea. (Score:4, Informative)
actually, thorium reactor does create U-233 which has been used in weapons, but also contains U-232 which causes the problems of high gamma ray emission and hence argument that the the U-233 would be too radiactive to easily handle, and also that it would make near-critial masses unstable with risk of predetonation....but there are now ways the two could be separated, for example by laser. So certainly a government with deep enough wallets to have a thorium reactor program (russia, india, china) could also make bombs from one.
Nuclear Aircraft again... (Score:3)
The United States did some work on the idea of nuclear powered military aircraft way back when-- it was always a pretty whacked idea. Like, part of the design involved shielding just the pilot compartment and spewing radiation to the rear and the sides (thus discouraging pursuit aircraft! Win-win!). They got as far as building a gigagntic "hot-cell" to park the thing in so it could be worked on without killing yourself.
As Freeman Dyson once put it, ideas like this might be most charitably be regarded as welfare programs for engineers and scientists.
Are they telling themselves that if they're drones they won't need any shielding at all? And that they'll use remote manipulators to do cargo-handling and maintenance work?
I don't have anything against research in molten-salt reactors though, and I guess if you need to say "drones" to sell a project, we might politely look the other way. (Why not motlen-salt mobile smart phones?)
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This is more than just salt as a coolant (Score:4, Interesting)
The SCMP article, being a typical simplified newspaper account, talks only about using molten salt as a reactor coolant. Salt is already used for heat transfer in many industrial processes, including solar thermal plants like Ivanpah, because of its high specific heat (heat absorption per unit mass) combined with its much higher boiling point than water. This would mean a more compact reactor that operates at ambient pressure.
But this research is a lot more advanced than that. The designs being investigated use fuel dissolved in the coolant, with graphite rods as a moderator, the opposite arrangement from existing commercial designs. This allows a greater range of fuels, including thorium and spent fuel from current reactors. Some of the designs being investigated are breeders, producing fissile fuel from U-238 and thorium.
China did not think of this design first; the US did, and ran a test reactor for years at ORNL. Now a science-friendly country will carry on where we left off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Gobi desert (Score:2)
Bottleneck (Score:2)
The civilization bottleneck theory explains The Great Silence, why there are no radio or TV signals from other stars. Every natural selection civilization self-destructs itself at a certain stage of political&military competition.
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more public acceptance
China. You will be told what you will like. The rest of the world can just go and fuck off.
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You seem to be unaware of just how vulnerable warships are to aircraft. If drones can be made cheaply, particularly relative to warships, then the battle will largely be over before it has begun.
Besides, China is busy making electric, battery powered ships, that cost much less than nuclear powered ones. Looks as if US military strategy is about to learn some lessons the hard way, should war break out down the road. At that point, the best outcome we could hope for is mutually assured destruction, not exa
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Or you happen to eat seafood, which incidentally comprises about 50% of all protein consumed by humans.
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Wouldn't be hard, all you would need is lots of balloons, a source of helium, and a giant mist net.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Actually, some water-cooled reactors operate at about 600 degrees C -- the coolant is highly pressurized, so doesn't flash to steam at 600 C.
Converting to Kelvin, that's 873K vs 1073K for the molten-salt reactor. More like 125% the temperature. Not sure about heat, but water probably has a higher heat capacity than most molten salts.
The advantage isn't temperature/heat in itself -- it's not needing a pressurizer and pressure vessel to keep the coolant from suddenly flashi
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Some people likely called you a fool when you installed a metal annealing oven in your kitchen. But you just laughed...