On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 3:01 PM <[email protected]> wrote: > John, about Stephen Hawking, that was my dry humor that he, though > brilliant, can be wrong on things. He was wrong with his bet with L. > Susskind, >
All great scientist have been wrong about something, there is no disgrace in that, it comes with the territory. > *> No I am not advising the Scandinavians to change a thing. However, here > is a correction for you. The Scandinavians are no longer, economically, > socialist fellow travellers. * > If the Scandinavians are not socialists then why do you scream SOCALAST! Every time an American suggests doing something 1/10 as radical as what the Scandinavians are doing? *> Off topic, but related, because of this, here is a result of not being > stuck in 1970 utopianism: One is this Danish company planning to mass > produce salt moderated fission reactors for use at sea. Let me know what > your opinion is, and if you think it might work or be a disaster on the > high seas?* > https://newatlas.com/energy/seaborg-floating-nuclear-reactor-barge/ > Sounds like a great idea to me, although environmentalists will probably torpedo it because they've never seen an energy source they didn't hate. I've been a big fan of liquid fuel fission reactors for years, especially Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR's). A reactor that used Uranium fuel in a liquid state would be good, better than any in use today, but a Thorium reactor would be even better. I think LFTR's are what fusion wanted to be but never achieved, despite tens of billions of dollars poured into it a fusion reactor has never produced one watt more of power than was put into it. Certainly LFTR's are far better than conventional nuclear fission with their 1950s designs. I've written about this before a few years ago but I'll repeat it now. *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, 100%, so at current usage that element could supply our energy needs for many billions of years; A conventional light water reactor only burns .7% of the Uranium in it. We'll run out of Thorium in the Earth's crust about the same time that the sun will run out of Hydrogen. * 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 produces an insignificant amount of Plutonium. *Thorium does 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 presents if you tried to hide it, destroy its electronic firing circuits and degrade its chemical explosives. For these reasons even after 76 years no nation has a Uranium 233 bomb in its weapons inventory. 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 200 tons due to pre-detonation *A Thorium reactor only produces about 1% as much waste 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 Uranium reactor would take 100,000 years. *A 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 is also why the containment building in common light water reactors need to be so much larger than the reactor itself. With Thorium nothing is under pressure and there is no danger of a disastrous phase change so the expensive containment building can be made much more compact. *> When I refer to the socialists mass killing people this fact cannot be > disputed. For China, yes sir, their economics have changed absolutely, but > the Party, the Communist Party China is still is full tyrannical control. > Not the millionaires, nor the billionaires, * > That's because the Chinese communist party is totalitarian, but if it was really Communist in anything other than name there would not even be any millionaires or billionaires in China, and during Mao Zedong's lifetime there weren't any. When he died communism died with him, but unfortunately totalitarianism didn't. And when China junked communism it experienced the fastest economic boom in human history and lifted about a half a billion people out of poverty, and they can thank capitalism for that. Being rich and unfree is bad but it's better than being poor and unfree. *> The Hitler Atheist thing is, for me, irrelevant John. * > Then why do you keep talking about it? > * Atheism didn't cause Joe Stalin, or Pol Pot to be more reasonable.* True, but it didn't make them less reasonable either. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> rdx -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0vbtZAtWXAmhbhJ_%3DeKkwBbGqdnC2qtEOa7DHKt12yhA%40mail.gmail.com.
