No number of solar panels and battteries are going to provide enough
electricity in Montreal and Fairbanks in middle of winter. Maybe we can
send it there from Arizona, but LFTRs and HTGR nuclear power looks like
a better bet to me. General Atomic is developing some relatively small
modular nuclear power plants.
Brent
On 7/26/2020 4:58 PM, spudboy100 via Everything List wrote:
For a piece of engineering we have to keep in mind what is the most
promising, and yet safe and affordable? This concern has nuked nuclear
reactors over the years. For those light water reactors that were
built over the 60 years, most are still operating and "reasonably
safe," so far. To expand the abundance of electricity that our species
needs to survive, we have to work within the constraints of
engineering. For the best efficiency and costs we need to use advanced
solar cells to power up advanced batteries, to be used for all
residences, on a 7 x 24 basis. Anything less, is just
environmentalists having their say over the rest of us. There have
been big advances in solar cells and batteries lately, and this is the
cheapest and easiest way to go.
One is the perfected perovskite solar cell, created by many of the
leading British universities all on their own. Before this, any
perovskite based device would crumble to dust upon exposure to air.
https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/research/semiconductor-materials-devices-nanostructures/photovoltaics
Or this-
https://energynow.com/2020/07/technology-breakthrough-could-increase-ev-range-battery-life/
For safer nuclear fission operation (uranium 235) Nuscale's mini light
water reactor uses this innovation, from Lightbridge, originally
developed by Purdue school of Engr.
https://www.ltbridge.com/lightbridge-fuel
Advantage? Safer because its much harder to melt down. It doesn't hold
the heat like the 1940's assemblies cobbled together by Enrico Fermi.
Or even better, these Triso fuel modules seem inherently safer, yet
this concept is for a gas reactor, and I fear that the coolant gas is
helium (short supply) rather than say, CO2, or Nitrogen?
https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-power-balls-triso-fuel/
-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Fri, Jul 24, 2020 11:13 am
Subject: Re: Planet of the Humans, produced by Michael Moore
On Fri, Jul 24, 2020 at 2:51 AM Alan Grayson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> https://planetofthehumans.com/
Largely correct, but omits the solution; thorium reactors. Check
Wiki for the residuals; no gamma rays. AG
*YES!* I've been a fan of Thorium reactors for years, in particular
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) and I'm very impressed, I
don't believe nearly enough is being done in this area. Consider the
advantages:
*Thorium is much more common than Uranium, almost twice as common as
Tin in fact. And Thorium is easier to extract from its ore than Uranium.
*A Thorium reactor burns up all the Thorium in it so at current usage
that element could supply our energy needs for many thousands, perhaps
millions of years; A conventional light water reactor only burns .7%
of the Uranium in it.
* To burn the remaining 99.3% of Uranium you'd have to use a exotic
fast neutron breeder reactor, Thorium reactors use slow neutrons and
so are inherently more stable because you have much more time to react
if something goes wrong. Also breeders produce massive amounts of
Plutonium which is a bad thing if you're worried about people making
bombs.
*Thorium reactors produce an insignificant amount of Plutonium, they
do produce Uranium-233 and theoretically you could make a bomb out of
that, but it would be contaminated with Uranium-232 which is a
powerful gamma ray emitter which would make it suicidal to work with
unless extraordinary precautions were taken, and even then the
unexploded bomb would be so radioactive it would give away its
location if you tried to hide it, and the gamma rays would destroy its
electronic firing circuits, and degrade its chemical explosives. As
far as I know a U-233 bomb was attempted only twice, in 1955 the USA
set off a Plutonium/U233 composite bomb, it was expected to produce 33
kilotons but only managed 22; the only pure U-233 bomb I know of was
set off in 1998 by India, but it was a fizzle, a complete flop, it
produced a minuscule explosion of only equivalent to 200 tons of TNT
due to pre-detonation. For these reasons even after 75 years no nation
currently has U233 bombs in their arsenal because if you want to kill
people on a mass scale Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239 are far more
practical than Uranium-233.
*A Thorium reactor only produces about 1% as much radioactivewaste as
a conventional reactor, and the stuff it does make is not as nasty,
after about 5 years 87% of it would be safe and the remaining 13% in
300 years; a conventional reactor would take 100,000 years.
*A LFTR Thorium reactor has an inherent safety feature, the fuel is in
liquid form (Thorium dissolved in un-corrosive molten Fluoride salts)
so if for whatever reason things get too hot the liquid expands and so
the fuel gets less dense and the reaction slows down.
*There is yet another fail safe device. At the bottom of the reactor
is something called a "freeze plug", fans blow on it to freeze it
solid, if things get too hot the plug melts and the liquid drains out
into a holding tank and the reaction stops; also, if all electronic
controls die due to a loss of electrical power the fans will stop the
plug will melt and the reaction will stop.
*Thorium reactors work at much higher temperatures than conventional
reactors so you have better energy efficiency; in fact they are so hot
the waste heat could be used to desalinate sea water or generate
hydrogen fuel from water.
* Although the liquid Fluoride salt is very hot it is not under
pressure so that makes the plumbing of the thing much easier, and even
if you did get a leak it would not be the utter disaster it would be
in a conventional reactor; that's also why the containment building in
common light water reactors need to be so much larger than the reactor
itself and why the walls of it needs to be so thick. With Thorium
nothing is under pressure and there is no danger of a disastrous phase
change, like ultra hot pressurized water turning into steam, so the
super expensive containment building can be made much more compact.
John K Clark
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