If you want to be give a convincing argument, at least link us to a paper or two you've written comparing the costs and benefits of "renewable" energies to alternatives including LFTRs.
No LFTRs have been built so it's impossible to say for certain how expensive power from one would be. Typically with a non-fossil fuel power plant fuel costs are relatively unimportant. Capital costs (construction, equipment, financing etc.) tend to matter the most.
With a yet unproven technology LFTRs would likely produce expensive energy initially and only be worth it if they were committed to on a large scale (build many, many LFTRs). This could only happen if the technology could be proven to be economic and governments and citizens were willing to clear away most of the regulatory hurdles that would get in the way of their construction.
If you want to be give a convincing argument, at least link us to a paper or two you've written comparing the costs and benefits of "renewable" energies to alternatives including LFTRs.
No LFTRs have been built so it's impossible to say for certain how expensive power from one would be. Typically with a non-fossil fuel power plant fuel costs are relatively unimportant. Capital costs (construction, equipment, financing etc.) tend to matter the most.
With a yet unproven technology LFTRs would likely produce expensive energy initially and only be worth it if they were committed to on a large scale (build many, many LFTRs). This could only happen if the technology could be proven to be economic and governments and citizens were willing to clear away most of the regulatory hurdles that would get in the way of their construction.
Right, I was mainly just going against the notion that thorium will run out while so-called "renewable" energy sources like geothermal, solar, and wind will not, (or at least that there will be a significant time-span difference).
I agree that capital costs and lobbying costs will matter the most for now.
As I understand it, Flibe Energy is trying to get the U.S. Military to adopt LFTRs for bases, which if successful, should pave the way for commercial use. As for getting the public to come along, this thread provides some evidence that there tends to be very little opposition among the those people who hear about it. However, there are some (exceptionally poorly researched) counter-attacks that some newspapers have published to try to be even-sided.
On January 28 2012 21:26 enemy2010 wrote: Two words: renewable energies.
I study energy ecomonics, and I personally thing this is the only way.
What does that even mean.
No energy source lasts forever. Every star will burn out, every molecule will decay, even black holes will evaporate to hawking radiation in the end. Entrophy reduces all to dust.
And lots of new stars are created everyday. Don't worry about entropy the universe is self-sustaining and in fact is self-increasing. It is anti-entropic.
On January 28 2012 21:26 enemy2010 wrote: Two words: renewable energies.
I study energy ecomonics, and I personally thing this is the only way.
What does that even mean.
No energy source lasts forever. Every star will burn out, every molecule will decay, even black holes will evaporate to hawking radiation in the end. Entrophy reduces all to dust.
And lots of new stars are created everyday. Don't worry about entropy the universe is self-sustaining and in fact is self-increasing. It is anti-entropic.
That makes no sense... the fact that it increases in volume has nothing to do with its energy. Also, how is it "self sustaining"? Eventually, as he said, stars burn out. Sure their remains can create other stars and such but eventually all energy will be gone.
On January 31 2012 07:46 Kupo wrote: OP should include disadvantages with the technology as well. The general consensus among the reactor people where I study is that it is highly unsafe since it violates the fundamental defense-in-depth principle. Without the fuel cladding it's somewhat comparable to a PWR with a core meltdown. Because of this reason many consider the technology unrealistic.
Personally I wouldn't mind if more research is performed on molten salt reactors, since it would solve so many problems with generation IV (proliferation is a huge problem with other designs). But I'm not sure if the technology has a future.
Without the fuel cladding? What do you mean exactly? The fuel is a fluid, without the cladding what would contain it? Without the fuel cladding PWRs wouldn't do so well. Is that an argument against PWRs? No, but there are plenty of other ones that you can't make about LFTR.
The MSRE ran for three years without incident, proving it can be done safely. If you watch the Kirk Sorensen's ProtoSpace talk he talks about how they used to turn the test reactor off on Friday and start it up again on Monday, the thing was so simple.
That it is a realistic viable solution was shown over 40 years ago. Many consider the technology unrealistic? Who are these people? And what are their arguments based on? Lots of people think that reptilians control the planet, should I listen to them? Of course not, they don't know what they are talking about.
On January 28 2012 21:26 enemy2010 wrote: Two words: renewable energies.
I study energy ecomonics, and I personally thing this is the only way.
What does that even mean.
No energy source lasts forever. Every star will burn out, every molecule will decay, even black holes will evaporate to hawking radiation in the end. Entrophy reduces all to dust.
And lots of new stars are created everyday. Don't worry about entropy the universe is self-sustaining and in fact is self-increasing. It is anti-entropic.
That makes no sense... the fact that it increases in volume has nothing to do with its energy. Also, how is it "self sustaining"? Eventually, as he said, stars burn out. Sure their remains can create other stars and such but eventually all energy will be gone.
How do you know this? The universe is constantly creating new galaxies. If energy is never created or destroyed, then how will all the energy eventually be gone? This view is not backed up by the evidence we have about the universe. In fact if you really want to get into quantum theory we can get into multiverses and resonance and discuss more about how much there is out there that seemingly has always been and will always be that we can't even see.
If you want to be give a convincing argument, at least link us to a paper or two you've written comparing the costs and benefits of "renewable" energies to alternatives including LFTRs.
No LFTRs have been built so it's impossible to say for certain how expensive power from one would be. Typically with a non-fossil fuel power plant fuel costs are relatively unimportant. Capital costs (construction, equipment, financing etc.) tend to matter the most.
With a yet unproven technology LFTRs would likely produce expensive energy initially and only be worth it if they were committed to on a large scale (build many, many LFTRs). This could only happen if the technology could be proven to be economic and governments and citizens were willing to clear away most of the regulatory hurdles that would get in the way of their construction.
Right, I was mainly just going against the notion that thorium will run out while so-called "renewable" energy sources like geothermal, solar, and wind will not, (or at least that there will be a significant time-span difference).
I agree that capital costs and lobbying costs will matter the most for now.
As I understand it, Flibe Energy is trying to get the U.S. Military to adopt LFTRs for bases, which if successful, should pave the way for commercial use. As for getting the public to come along, this thread provides some evidence that there tends to be very little opposition among the those people who hear about it. However, there are some (exceptionally poorly researched) counter-attacks that some newspapers have published to try to be even-sided.
Yeah I wouldn't quote that guy too much his "critical analysis" is very poorly done, full of errors. About the only point of his that is entirely correct is the technical challenge with the hastelloy pipes which has to be overcome. Almost everyone involved in the LFTR community will admit this is the biggest technical challenge, no one denies it. But on a scale of 1-10 of insurmountable human engineering challenges this is only 3-4 max.
You know the LFTR is a good match for your website title "TeamLiquid"
The liquid concept is exactly why this radically different design to a nuclear reactor is so much better. In a liquid state Fission gets more than one chance to get it right. Entropy is allowed to be maximized so that most of the fuel gets used up. Conventional solid fuel reactors leave 99% unburned. LFTRs are so much better. Read Superfuel by Richard Martin
If you want to keep up to date on trends in Nuclear Energy check out my blogs
On April 19 2012 05:18 RickMaltese wrote: You know the LFTR is a good match for your website title "TeamLiquid"
The liquid concept is exactly why this radically different design to a nuclear reactor is so much better. In a liquid state Fission gets more than one chance to get it right. Entropy is allowed to be maximized so that most of the fuel gets used up. Conventional solid fuel reactors leave 99% unburned. LFTRs are so much better. Read Superfuel by Richard Martin
If you want to keep up to date on trends in Nuclear Energy check out my blogs
Man oh man awesome, a Canadian as into Thorium and nuclear power as I am. Nice to meet you man. Definitely gonna be checking in on your websites often. All the best!
It does, though sadly not that often. Do a Google News search for Thorium, you will get some hits. Here is one of the links at the top of the search I just did:
China has revealed their schedule and many interesting details regarding their molten-salt reactor program.
They are making a slat-cooled reactor by 2015. If it goes well, then they expect a salt-fueled reactor by 2017. Then they will take several incremental steps scaling this reactor up. If every step is a success, commercial design will be available in 25-35 years.
Please have a look at this video for details (it's a new video that hasn't been posted here yet):
If it happens, it will be a revolution in Energy. If you haven't seen the following video, I think it explains it better than others (it has been posted in the thread, but I'd like to emphasize it once again):
I am not sure you will like that, but I am honestly lazy to go all through the material and have not seen a simple answer.
So, Is there anyone willing to explain to me are you going to convince anyone that you actually can contain the liquid fuel in the case of physical damage to the facility? It gets already quite difficult in water reactors (because even the water is a significant issue, although it has a tiny fravction of the overall radioactivity), and that is just water involved, not a highly corrosive molten salt.
This post is full of so many technical and scientific inaccuracies I don't even know where to begin. I don't know why there is a childish bandwagon obsession of thorium based technology but this has to stop.
The part where you said fluoride is less reactive than sodium is a red flag to a chemist let alone a physicist that this is total bullshit con job.//(I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume fluoride salts because liquid fluoride is literally the most reactive substance known to man. You can torch ice with it)
For those who ACTUALLY want to lean something the reason why we are not pursuing thorium based technology is three-fold. 1) It's more difficult to produce energy from however the ore is cheaper. This might change if a market developed. 2) The waste and implementation are exactly the same for all nuclear material. 3) We don't want to add another source of fuel into the world that needs to be regulated.
Even though I spent 7 years in the research of theoretical space-time geometries, the degree I'm pursuing is in Nuclear Engineering. Why NE? Because it's the highest paying tech job in the world so why the fuck not. Physics is physics.
3) We don't want to add another source of fuel into the world that needs to be regulated.
And this is another thing that makes me wondering thorough this entire topic. Is this really so important? There are all these sorts of argument about profiliteration and so on, but should we be really basing our technology sources on that? People/countries who want to obtain mass destruction capabilities will do it either way or another, why should we limit our energy technology because of that? And this argument is even weaker, there are so many regulated things, one more will not hurt anyone.
On October 04 2012 19:25 opisska wrote: I am not sure you will like that, but I am honestly lazy to go all through the material and have not seen a simple answer.
So, Is there anyone willing to explain to me are you going to convince anyone that you actually can contain the liquid fuel in the case of physical damage to the facility? It gets already quite difficult in water reactors (because even the water is a significant issue, although it has a tiny fraction of the overall radioactivity), and that is just water involved, not a highly corrosive molten salt.
If you don't use huge reactors with a lot of fuel, in smaller reactors in the case of physical damage to the reactor itself (for example a terrorist act) salt will cool down very quickly and crystallize. Then it's equivalent to solid fuel that just stays in one place.
There will also be no explosions, since nothing in a molten-salt reactor design has a large pressure differential (unlike current pressurised-water reactors).
If physical damage applies to anything else in the facility (not the reactor itself), than it does not matter at all, since in molten slat reactors you don't need any active cooling or any other engineered safety systems to prevent a meltdown. Molten slat reactors are passively safe even if you destroy all the facility but the reactor containment vessel and the drain tank itself.
On October 04 2012 19:48 Thenerf wrote: This post is full of so many technical and scientific inaccuracies I don't even know where to begin. I don't know why there is a childish bandwagon obsession of thorium based technology but this has to stop.
The part where you said fluoride is less reactive than sodium is a red flag to a chemist let alone a physicist that this is total bullshit con job.//(I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume fluoride salts because liquid fluoride is literally the most reactive substance known to man. You can torch ice with it)
For those who ACTUALLY want to lean something the reason why we are not pursuing thorium based technology is three-fold. 1) It's more difficult to produce energy from however the ore is cheaper. This might change if a market developed. 2) The waste and implementation are exactly the same for all nuclear material. 3) We don't want to add another source of fuel into the world that needs to be regulated.
Even though I spent 7 years in the research of theoretical space-time geometries, the degree I'm pursuing is in Nuclear Engineering. Why NE? Because it's the highest paying tech job in the world so why the fuck not. Physics is physics.
I agree that the OP is not very good and has quite a few mistakes.
Thorium seems to be just a hype word to calm down those who fear uranium and plutonium. The real goal in this research is a molten salt reactor (powered by whatever nuclear fuel you want to use). The only real advantage of thorium over uranium in breeders is that it's harder to make nuclear weapons from thorium (since U232 [that is difficult to separate from U233] is a strong gamma emitter). For the near term I believe that the focus in this research should be on uranium/plutonium-powered molten salt reactors. The design is just very nice: it's passively safe (no meltdowns possible, no cooling required), reduces waste through simple in-situ reprocessing, does not need thick steel walls or huge containment buildings etc.
p.s. Do you think NE really has a future outside of China and some other developing countries, or are you planning to move there after you get a degree? It seems to me that a lot of countries (quite probably US in the near future as well) are looking towards gradually excluding nuclear energy from their energy portfolio.
The funny thing is lots of money is being spent on developing nuclear power everywhere. The Obama and Bush administration have already allocated money for research and construction of new nuclear plants here in the US. Europe is always looking for a way to "appear" high tech and the east is looking for cheaper safety mechanisms. There is an emerging and current strong market right now for QUALIFIED engineers.
I also like to add that I don't believe sodium reactors will ever gain popularity for the same reasons MERCURY reactors failed in Russia. On paper, when everything is going according to plan, they seem efficient only to find out that when anything goes wrong you have a destroyed, highly toxic reactor. Water based cooling is just fool proof assuming the country (/cough.....Russia) doesn't take fool to a whole new level.
I'm looking over the designs for these theoretical reactors and they don't seem to have a good way to control the nuclear reaction, to assume that the reaction will sustain ITSELF....well goes back to bringing fool to a whole new level concept. One of the advantages of the current reactors is the ease at which we can make them go hot and cold while at the same time the initial fuel is safe enough to handle while the reactor is being set up. According to my research these reactors would be dangerous 24/7.
On October 04 2012 19:25 opisska wrote: I am not sure you will like that, but I am honestly lazy to go all through the material and have not seen a simple answer.
So, Is there anyone willing to explain to me are you going to convince anyone that you actually can contain the liquid fuel in the case of physical damage to the facility? It gets already quite difficult in water reactors (because even the water is a significant issue, although it has a tiny fravction of the overall radioactivity), and that is just water involved, not a highly corrosive molten salt.
The molten salt is not held at pressure, like the water is in PWRs, so if there is a leak/malfunction the molten salt would spill on to the floor and be contained by the steel walls. It would be messy, but it would be 100% containable and would not affect the surrounding neighborhood. And in real life the odds of this happening are about zero, since there are numerous safety considerations for the molten salt to drain safely into the drain tank in an emergency. But in the very small chance that it leaks out of the machine, it would not escape the containment walls.
On October 04 2012 19:48 Thenerf wrote: This post is full of so many technical and scientific inaccuracies I don't even know where to begin. I don't know why there is a childish bandwagon obsession of thorium based technology but this has to stop.
The part where you said fluoride is less reactive than sodium is a red flag to a chemist let alone a physicist that this is total bullshit con job.//(I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume fluoride salts because liquid fluoride is literally the most reactive substance known to man. You can torch ice with it)
For those who ACTUALLY want to lean something the reason why we are not pursuing thorium based technology is three-fold. 1) It's more difficult to produce energy from however the ore is cheaper. This might change if a market developed. 2) The waste and implementation are exactly the same for all nuclear material. 3) We don't want to add another source of fuel into the world that needs to be regulated.
Even though I spent 7 years in the research of theoretical space-time geometries, the degree I'm pursuing is in Nuclear Engineering. Why NE? Because it's the highest paying tech job in the world so why the fuck not. Physics is physics.
FLOURINE is more reactive than Sodium, but FLUORIDE, in this case a Fluoride salt with Beryllium and Lithium, is very stable.
Waste management and disposal for a LFTR would be radically different than the current method of storage pools, or re-processing in places like France. Almost all the fuel would be burned up in the reactor over time. You would not have only 1% or so of the fuel used before it becomes too brittle like the solid fuel in current reactors.
On October 05 2012 00:51 Thenerf wrote: @Alex1Sun
The funny thing is lots of money is being spent on developing nuclear power everywhere. The Obama and Bush administration have already allocated money for research and construction of new nuclear plants here in the US. Europe is always looking for a way to "appear" high tech and the east is looking for cheaper safety mechanisms. There is an emerging and current strong market right now for QUALIFIED engineers.
I also like to add that I don't believe sodium reactors will ever gain popularity for the same reasons MERCURY reactors failed in Russia. On paper, when everything is going according to plan, they seem efficient only to find out that when anything goes wrong you have a destroyed, highly toxic reactor. Water based cooling is just fool proof assuming the country (/cough.....Russia) doesn't take fool to a whole new level.
I'm looking over the designs for these theoretical reactors and they don't seem to have a good way to control the nuclear reaction, to assume that the reaction will sustain ITSELF....well goes back to bringing fool to a whole new level concept. One of the advantages of the current reactors is the ease at which we can make them go hot and cold while at the same time the initial fuel is safe enough to handle while the reactor is being set up. According to my research these reactors would be dangerous 24/7.
Water based cooling is fool proof (at 150 atm of pressure, Fukushima anyone?) while molten salt held at normal pressure would be dangerous 24/7? Where are you getting this from? I am currently doing a B.Eng in Electrical and plan on doing a Masters in NE as well.
EPT
