I've been interested in new nukes for some time and at one time was ready to hop on the thorium bandwagon. Frankly, my loss of interest has less to do with one big problem for a hedgehog (waste, steam explosions) than with the accumulation of many smaller problems for foxes, most of them stemming from what I see as the radical incapacity of capitalism to grapple with the social scope of the associated issues.
>From what I can tell, several proposed new reactor designs could reduce the >waste-storage toxicity problem to the scale of a hundred or a few hundred >years rather than many thousands. Other problems, eg the management of molten >salt corrosiveness over decades and the possibility of eg massive accidental >releases of gamma radiation as a result of this in certain types of thorium >MSRs (David Walters help me out on this!) are lost in the fog of contending >promotions. It would be entirely reasonable, given the alternatives, for humanity to embrace responsibility for greatly reduced quantities of nuclear waste over a hundred or a few hundred years--it would require less of a sustained effort than the maintenance of Notre Dame Cathedral or the Aya Sofia Mosque, let alone the Pantheon. Surely a worldwide revolution would create conditions that would allow us to assume that responsibility. The Hanford and other bogeyman nuclear pollution sites mentioned here are relict of the US weapons program and constitute essentially a different workstream entirely from nuclear power station waste, as David Walters points out. This is not to minimize the problem they present--as does medical nuclear waste, also unrelated to power generation--but to put it in its place in the context of nuclear power generation as a climate-change mitigation strategy. The reality IMO is simply that we on the left do not possess adequate and trustworthy information on any of the proposed "solutions"--from Terra Power to ThorCon--because AFAIK none of those solutions has actually been built, and because the voices describing them are not responsible, objective scientific voices but the voices of businesspeople trying to sell "entrepreneurial" free-market products, most of which currently remain vaporware. Even in the case of the IMO undeniably brilliant Kirk Sorensen, still lless the lesser lights of Martingale, Inc.--what we are hearing is the voice of money talking--hence an alienated and completely unreliable discourse based on a model of production that cannot succeed at the level of social criticality required. Nuclear anything is difficult to understand and probably impossible to grasp in its full complexity unless one is a nuclear scientist or engineer. It's a fact that almost anything involving engineering design is a lot harder for the Hueys, Deweys, and Louies of the gutbucket left to grasp (myself included)--I personally fade out even when being lectured on the complexities of carburetors or the engineering required to produce really effective steam locomotives--but "nuclear" takes this to unimaginable heights. It's really too bad that apparently nobody of Haldane's caliber exists today to organize a standards-based left inquiry into these matters. Short of an international Marxist task force of qualified engineers and scientists--and who could verify their bona fides anyway?--there does not appear to be a way forward here. But IMO that is greatly to be regretted. Can we look to China? I doubt it. I suspect that a lot of nuclear normal scientists and engineers have inherited as a badge of pride the feeling that they have become Kali, the Destroyer of Worlds, without experiencing Oppenheimer's moral revulsion to that insight. To such people, perhaps the rest of us are mere arselings who cannot handle the truth. Many of them, I suspect, will say anything to silence criticism or delude critics. As long as this obstacle exists, if it does, no progress can be made on new nukes even if there does turn out to be a feasible way forward. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#1529): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/1529 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76806020/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
