RE: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia

Sun, 05 Apr 2015 18:38:47 -0700 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Sunday, April 05, 2015 2:05 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia

 

Really, it's an interesting piece of tech, but it just seems too clumsy and too 
costly. Please note that I love this kind of tech, if for no other reason in 
that the promise of fusion just keeps on receding into the future. We can talk 
of everything from tokamaks, to inertial confinement, to colliding beam fusion, 
to muon catalysis, and so forth. With fission, it's the same thing, with gas 
cooled reactors, betavoltaics, pwr's, bwr's, mini-reactor's, CANDU reactors. 
Here, also, the proper engineering, costs, and safety, as well as waste 
disposal just keep fading back into dreamland. I love this stuff, being a nerd, 
and all, but I can no longer listen to the blissful b.s. proffered by newsies, 
and academics, alike. What's holding back solar is one great flaw, storage. You 
cannot run a modern large city on solar during cold nights and cloudy days, so 
storage has to be demonstrated over solar cell efficiency. Barring the 
development of solar storage, there's natural gas (methane) and coal. Right 
now, despite solar enthusiast's claims, gas turbines are beating all other 
energy sources down. Some are sure that shale gas is just another economic 
bubble, and it may be, but there is the use of gas hydrates on the horizon, not 
economically, but in 20 + years, or longer, than yes. This is the future, 
unless we get some fixes in for fission, fusion, solar, geothermal, or anything 
else. 

The rapid spread of all electric vehicles and plugin hybrids is also a build 
out of a distributed electric energy storage network that will provide 
significant peak load capacity or the much easier to provision dribbles of 
energy (relative to peak load demand) that are needed in the middle of the 
night when the sun isn’t shining (but the wind generally is blowing). The 
problem is solving itself; it is not insurmountable; spinup reserves of nimble 
medium scale gas turbines could fill the rare gaps.

 





-----Original Message-----
From: meekerdb <[email protected]>
To: everything-list <[email protected]>
Sent: Sun, Apr 5, 2015 4:39 pm
Subject: Re: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia

On 4/5/2015 11:09 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
> Actually
compared with the Uranium fuel cycle the Thorium fuel cycle is neutron poor, a
 
> LFTR produces enough neutrons to burn up 100% of the Thorium but there isn't
a lot of 
> wiggle room, however this is an advantage not a disadvantage. If
somebody tried to 
> secretly siphon off some of the U233 produced in a reactor
to make a bomb the reactor 
> would simply stop and it would be hard to keep
that secret, also fewer neutrons means 
> less damage to the equipment, you
already don't have to worry about the most important 
> maintenance problem
that a conventional reactor has, cracks in the solid fuel rods 
> caused by
neutrons, because a LFTR has no solid fuel rods, it's fuel is a liquid and you
 
> can't crack a liquid.
 
The reason LFTRs have been touted as proliferation
resistant is that the U233 is mixed 
with U232 which makes its use in a weapons
almost impossible.  But the proliferation 
problem for a LFTR is that
Proactinium can be chemically remove from the cycle, which 
prevents the
accumulation of U232.  Then the U233 can be siphoned off and used.  A 2GW 
LFTR
is expected to produce about 60Kg of excess U233 per year; enough for 7 to 8
nuclear 
weapons.  So the proliferation resistance is
exaggerated.
 
Brent
 
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