Robert Lynn <[email protected]> wrote:
> 100MW/year is about 70kg of thorium in a LFTR (about 250 times less than a > conventional non-breeding uranium reactor requires), at average 6ppm there > is about 70kg of thorium in the accessible column . . . > Yes, thorium does have higher overall energy density. I was talking about uranium. Also I meant uranium which is not used in a breeder reactor. The point is that existing CSP is heavy but the environment means that it > can't be made much lighter to reduce costs. > CSP mirrors are much lighter than they were 30 years ago, and they use much less materials. Most of the equipment is now in the tower. > Nuclear is not cheap! Not after Fukushima. Fossil fuels are only cheap >> because the power companies do not pay for the 20,000 they murder every >> year, and they will not pay for the cost of global warming. Add in those >> costs and coal or natural gas would cost FAR more than CSP. >> > > That is ridiculous, every industry has a death toll and of course the > fossil fuel industry pays for those lives, in insurance levies, higher > salaries for dangerous jobs etc. > The coal industry pays NOTHING for the 20,000 people it kills. Not one dime. I guess they have have to pay expensive lawyers to fight periodic lawsuits, and of course they have pay for the Member of Congress they have bribed, but those are trifling expenses compared to what an industry would pay if it killed 20,000 urban middle class or wealthy people. You can kill off as many rural poor people as you like. It is always open season for them. As for nuclear power, it is never covered by insurance. Only governments cover it. See the Price-Anderson act. They have a similar arrangement in Japan. There is no way TEPCO will ever begin to pay the cost of the Fukushima accident. It would bankrupt them a dozen times over. ~90,000 people have lost their houses, schools, factories, town halls, roads and livelihoods, which in the aggregate costs millions of dollars per person. TEPCO has offered them $16,000 per family. Coal is 15 deaths per TWh in USA, but almost 300 in China. > Coal costs far more deaths than that in the U.S., according to the EPA. That is just the direct cost of accidents and mining. Coal smoke kills far more people. As I said, the power companies pay a few lawyers and buy off members of Congress, in return for a license to commit mayhem and murder. Nuclear is in global terms still extremely safe even after Fukushima and > Chernobyl, and will be very cheap once perfected . . . > It is not close to being perfected after 60 years. There is no chance it will be now. The Japanese are shutting down the entire industry. I expect other countries will follow. It is possible that one or two nukes will open this summer and next year, in the Osaka area. After that, I predict that all 54 plants will be closed permanently. Perhaps it is unwise to precipitously abandon nuclear power, but Japan is a democracy and the voters have spoken. If an MP were to suggest they should continue using nuclear power, he would lose the election by a landslide. - Jed
