Agreed.
-----Original Message----- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List <[email protected]> To: everything-list <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, Apr 5, 2015 9:37 pm Subject: RE: Fast moves for nuclear development in Siberia 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 -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
