They may never have provided any electricity in the first place. I have read, at length, some nuclear engineering papers, concerning accelerator driven reactors, subcritical thorium, and bluntly, they are like fusion reactors, they don't exist. There is research in a couple of places like the UK and Belgium, maybe India and China, but its been over-sold, as we don't have solid working models to evaluate. The closest working reactors would be Canadian CANDU reactors.
-----Original Message----- From: LizR <[email protected]> To: everything-list <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, Feb 18, 2014 5:50 pm Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating Would this have happened if Japan had been using subcritical reactors with thorium fuel? On 19/02/2014, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote: >> >> Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ >> liter >> >> NHK <http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20140213_22.html>, Feb. >> 13, 2014: *Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater* -- [Tepco] >> says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest >> levels >> of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the >> >> record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] >> >> 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be >> released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium >> 137 >> found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north >> last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates. >> > In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly > exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions, > that is also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the > fracking locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become. > on > Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic > meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not > result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models > predict. Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40 > deaths from Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control > in the aftermath. > > There have been revolutions in station design since plants like fukishima > were built, and that disaster isn't shaping up to the dire predictions > either. > > What most of all this derives out of, are long standing questions about the > > level of risk associated with exposure to radiation at low doses up to > somewhere below the 200 mark. There's no firm evidence of substantial risk. > > There's plenty of evidence for genetic protection. There's a whole plethora > > of statistics we could reasonably expect if low dose exposure was anything > like the risk that still sits there in the model. Airline cabin crew should > > have higher frequency cancer for all that time so near space for one > example. They don't. > > Conversely there are some major natural radiation hotspots in the world. > You'd expect those areas to produce more cancer and radiation poisoning > related disease. But the opposite is true. People exposed to dramatically > higher doses of radiation (inside the low dosage spectrum), actually become > > lower risks. There seems to be a triggerable genetic response when levels > increase. > > I'm over-compensating in the other direction a bit here. Not because I love > > the bomb, but if you only knew the power of the dark side. > > > > >> >> >> >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
