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Clean - Totally
Safe - Although not edible.
Recycles - Can make harmful nuclear by-products safe.
Small - Could be pint glass sized for 600MW.
Fuel lasts a long time.
Fuel is Abundant.
Produces much more power.
etc...

Unfortunatly $1.8 billion for the first reactor.

Obama is on board, he hopes 5 years. China love this too. China and the US are even working together, although I don't know to what extent.

If this will have the usual pace of a snail pulling the tortoise, is anyone up for a KickStarter project? With crowdsourcing as well, we could outpace their efforts.

LOLZ.  The tech isn't the problem.  The red tape would strangle your kickstarter project in it's craddle.

Hell approval for construction of the next conventional nuclear reactor has taken .... 17.5 years and final approval hasn't even been given yet.  The company has broken ground but if final approval is denied or delayed another decade they are just building a multi-billion foundation for nothing.  Well maybe they can use it for the first exahash bitcoin farm in 2042.

Just to put this into perspective this is an existing nuclear utility with 40 years experience building a modern safe reactor (AP1000 over a dozen under construction in China) which is an evolutionary upgrade from an existing designs (with millions of operating hours and no serious events) at an existing nuclear power site (which already has two operating reactors and was originally approved to have eight).  Throw in the fact that the utility, the powerplant and the new reactor proposal has nearly unanimous support of the local community.    That ultra-conservative baby step has taken almost two decades.

I severely doubt this is any safer from the meltdown problem than other designs.

Since the "primer source" is nothing but some highly radioactive material all that has to happen for a meltdown scenario is that the mechanism regulating the link between it and the reactor to lock up. It's exactly the same problem.

Thoruim reactors however don't require many concessions to safety, like building a huge dome around them, because they can't explode/vent dangerously, or containing uranium carefully, because they don't contain any uranium and much of the earth is made of thorium so it's quite safe.

If they worked in the same way uranium nuclear reactors do there would be no point at all.

True although stopping active fission is relatively easy.  The harder to solve problem is decay heat.  Modern reactor designs employ passively safe measures which are designed to keep reactor cool (dissipate decay heat) without the need for pumps and/or electrical power.

Do you think we have the tech sorted today DeathAndTaxes, or that it wouldn't be a problem to develop it?

Why would they need the red tape at all being that there a very different thing to build, in the same way that a remote control car doesn't need a driving license?

Wouldn't it just be worth doing anyway? It's not like anyones got to know, it's not like trying to build a uranium power station, which would be near impossible to do in secret and have many more complexities and take up a lot more space.

Although I guess KickStarter would make it so much more transparent.

Yes it will require red tape unless you plan to buy enriched uranium or weapons grade plutonium from some illegal arms dealer. :)

The natural istope of thorium isn't fissionable.  It is however "fertile" which means it can by neutron capture become an unstable fissionable isotope.  

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/math/a/7/2/a7227e053c9106bd116944879c82ef48.png

The Th-232 is easy to acquire.  Just dig some out of the ground.   You don't even need enrichment.   The "n" in the equation is deceptively simple but the cross section of an atom is very small so most neutrons simply "miss" and you need a LOT of neutrons (like quadrillions per second) and the only source which is sustainable and cost effective is enriched uranium or plutonium.

A thorium reactor doesn't fission thorium.  It "builds" uranium (which it fissions very similar to a uranium thermal reactor) from Thorium as needed in real time.  However it needs a critical mass of uranium/plutonium to act as a "spark plug" and produce enough "n" in the equation above to produce a sustainable chain reaction. That fissionable critical mass produces enough neutrons to convert some small % of the Thorium fuel to Uranium and those Uranium converts more of the Thorium to Uranium. 

So once "started" the reactor is self sustaining but you need that "spark plug".  Without it you simply have a cold inert reactor.


Honestly Thorium reactors are the only nuclear power which makes any sense.   The waste is less toxic, has shorter half lives, and proliferation resistant  (waste is "contaminated with a high % of U232).   The fuel is cheaper, more abundant, and doesn't require expensive (and polluting) enrichment.  The fuel cycle is more efficient which means less mining is necessary per unit of energy.  The reactors are safer, requires less refueling, and suffers less neutron embrittlement.   The fuel also has some nice physical properties, higher melting point, non-oxodizing, and better thermal conductivity, which make it safer in an "loss of coolant accident".

So given all that why did we use a uranium fuel cycle .... Simple, you can't build bombs with thorium.  The sad thing is the uranium legacy was for nothing.   After the DOD co-opted the DOE nuclear program and steered (forced ?) development away from Thorium and towards weapon friendly Uanium  it become obvious that power reactors would never be able to produce the quantity of weapons grade material necessary.  So we built dedicated "bomb reactors" optimized for the production of weapons grade plutonium.   The rest of the world copied the US model since the R&D, designs, and expertise already existed and Thorium being theoretical and untested got sidelined for 60 years.  

Excelent post. When I've made more BTC, I'll send you a tip :)

Would the starter uranium be required for testing during the design/construction of the reactor, or could we do it all from theroy?

My problem is that the people on wikipedia claim that meltdown is impossible, and that is simply not true.
It's the usual thing with some fanatic proponents, especially in nuclear power... claim one thing and once you research it it turns out to be an exaggeration.

This is probably safer than the reactors running in current powerplants, but nowhere as safe as conventional power.

The main problem with any reactor imo is that is has to run as hot as possible in order to archive higher Carnot Efficiency. So they are constructed to the limits of what the material can withstand. With conventional power you have a limit on the temperature you are able to generate in the first place, not so with nuclear power. It needs a technology which is able to withstand such high temperatures to be able to leverage the higher efficiency in the first place. Steam is not it. Thermoacoustic devices might do it for example.

Great post.  Too bad the world of nuclear moves so slowly, Thorium would have been/would be/will be a great stepping stone from fission/fossil fuel to fusion and solar (solar includes wind, tidal and hydro for me since they are all cycles powered by the sun)

The politicians don't care, as long as they get money to campaign from industries.  If one were to do a kickstarter for a project like this all the funds would end up being spent in Washington DC and Ottawa.  Countries like Iran should have taken on the Thorium dream instead of Uranium, they could take over in energy technology because they would be building a whole system from scratch.


Which conventional power is safe?  Greenhouse emissions aside, I just heard a story about cows being exposed to the exhaust from Coal fired generators can get cancer.  Then when human's eat the cow cancer antibodies and protein (which are not destroyed by cooking) they cause problems.  Anyone who thinks there is such a thing as "safe" power is dreaming.

Read the Wikipedia article; it covers most of the basics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR). Take particular note of the "Safety" section. There are no high pressures in this design, nor flammable metals which generate explosive hydrogen gas when they get hot enough (zirconium).

There was a test reactor that was successfully built and operated from 1964-1969, based on a set of ideas that had been floating around the Manhatten Project engineers since 1945. All the possible show-stoppng engineering challenges were solved during that set of experiments.

The LFTR design can burn a wide variety of fuels, or even a mixture of them. It could be started on waste from existing reactors, or on uranium recovered from dismantled nuclear reactors, or on the same mined and enriched natural uranium that power existing reactors. It can also burn plutonium. It could take all the waste that's building up around existing plants, recover more energy from it, and convert into something that only requires 300 years of long term storage instead of 10000.

The only reason this technology didn't take off in the 1960s is because of politics. There is no engineering or technological reason this shouldn't have been done 40 years ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI)

Please explain what a "meltdown" means in the context of a liquid fueled reactor?

nit-picking aside the definition still holds true, that is the reactor is operating on close or above peak output with the cooling inoperable. Once that situation occurs and you can't do anything about it you'll have a meltdown.

What's melting is vital parts of the reactor itself not the fuel. That could be gas for all I care.


I am speaking of current state of the art, since this is about technology even beyond that I think that is only fair. I doubt this article was about a state of the art powerplant.
Yes there will always be some danger associated with it, but till I see an example to the contrary I maintain my opinion that nuclear power is more dangerous.

The safest commonly used power source is hydropower and while it still is harmful to the ecosystem it has the least impact on human civilization.

The situation is so completely different than what happens in a traditional reactor that it's deceptive to use the same word to describe it.

First of all the reactor couldn't operate at full power with no cooling for more than a very short period of time because of physics. High temperatures shut down the fission reaction.

Even if there was fracture in the reactor vessle or associated piping you wouldn't get an explosion, fire, uncontrolled criticiality resulting in a "China Syndrome", or massive release of airborne radioactivitiy

There would be a mess on the floor which would cool and freeze into an inert solid.

That is bullshit.

I understand that you have some kind of anxiety problem and want to manage it by controlling the facts you are exposed to but you really should really find a more productive way to deal with it.

A therapist could help you out with the anxiety and a physics textbook could rectify the deficiencies in your understanding of how nuclear reactions work.

The no starter uranium KickStarter project good to go then. We could provide thorium, there would be an input for the uranium and a simple instructions provided, other organisations that purchase the reactor can manage the red tape part.

Just needs somone more compitent than me in general, and in KickStarter, to set it up.

Helium-3/Helium-3 fusion is aneutronic... IJS.

But we are not building the reactor on the moon, so its properties are somewhat hypothetical ColinDiver.

By all means expose me to the facts. But they better be authentic.

It's properties are being hypothetical or not have nothing to do with deposits on the moon. Pure Helium-3/Helium-3 fusion is aneutronic.

Besides, the location is not the hold up.

If you're genuinely interested then my suggestion to find textbook was serious. To really understand you need to start from first principles of subatomic physics and work your way up to the macro implications. The specific term I was referring to is "temperature coefficient of reactivity". I can't recommend any of the textbooks I learned from because they are all considered Classified - you'd have to enlist with the Evil Empire to get access to them.

Alternativly http://www.scienceforums.net can prob help.

Just provide a quote of some research scientist or a paper outlining your claim and it will be fine. You made the claim you have to provide the facts.

Classified

LOL

You're just making yourself look like an ass and displaying your own ignorance. The effect of temperature on fission rates isn't something new - it's was already well-understood physics by 1950.

Any college physics textbook should describe the phenomenon and give you the information and the background to understand it.

My guess is he was part of US Navy nuclear propulsion program.  They do have some of the best practical application of nuclear theory textbooks and yes they all are classified.

Then it should be easy for you to come up with something. Just show me that somebody demonstrated a temperature limited thorium reactor.
Or at least an interview with a recognized research scientist outlining it, a paper, ... something.

Again you make the claim, you provide the facts.


And you believe this punk has access to them?

Still?  No if we was part of the nuke program any material is on a need to know basis and property of the US government.  You do realize that the US Navy accepts "punks" right out of highschool into the nuclear propulsion school right?  It isn't like you need to be a scientist with a PHD.  Was he part of the nuke program?  I don't know.  Just pointing out it wouldn't be impossible for someone remember something from a textbook they no longer have because it is classified.

Also BTW he is correct the fission rate of a material does depend on the temperature among other things.  If a reactor gets too hot it becomes fission hostile.  Not all neutron strikes will cause fission, very few actually do and sustaining a chain reaction requires certain temps and speeds (neutron velocity).

He'd be risking his career and some jail-time for leaking classified information just by posting his "fact".
No that's a troll, and I maintain my position: It's bullshit until I see concrete evidence that is is not.


Makes sense, but not that the reaction could be slowed down enough by such a effect in order to prevent a completely broken reactor from melting down. If anything the effect could go in the other direction.

This isn't PhD material nor classified. I said that my particular textbook was classified but the same information is available on Wikipedia or any college textbook.

The reason I keep mentioning college physics textbooks is because I assume that anyone who declares that a fundemental property of reactor design is "bullshit" has at least some educational background in the subject to be able to make such a definitive claim.

Or maybe not. I could have been right the first time and the person in question has no understanding of physics or engineering and is just displaying his emotional baggage on the Internet.

Not if you're willing to do it in your garage.  I'm not, because I'm not willing to die or kill my neighbors, but if you were willing, you could build a prototype energy-amp for about $50K.  Look up "thorium energy amp reactor" on Google, and then take that new knowledge here > http://www.unitednuclear.com/

Just link to anything be it a textbook, a article, or your mums website and if it seems valid I'd shut up.

What he's said is consistent with my vague recollection from when I had access to those same hypothetical naval manuals.  So I have little trouble believing the theory he was in the US Navy.  ET perhaps?

I don't believe he's leaked any classified information.  The manuals themselves are classified, but except for specifics everything I saw in there was well known to the outside world.

What he has actually said or implied, is that non-classified material of a general scientific nature is in a classified document.  Hence, he can't point you to his source, even though he knows there are bound to be non-classified sources.  If that's considering leaking classified material, I've yet to meet the sailor who isn't guilty.  Evidence of trolling, I don't see.

No, not necessarily.  There exist self-regulating reactor core designs that will tend towards a sub-critical reaction above a certain design tempeture, making a cascading reaction (i.e. meltdown) very unlikley.  A few such reactor designs have been around for some time.  I used to have a nuclear reactor training simulator around here somewhere, if I can find it I might post a link (can't remember if the simulator is classified).  One such reactor design, that does not claim that feature as a safety feature due to some other very bad effects, is the Candu reactor designed in Canada.  It's a great design that was stolen by the Chinese for their domestic designs after they bailed on Russian designs following Chernobyl.  That's actually probably for the best, but even they don't use it for their power reactors because it's not a presurized design, but an open top, deap pool design.  If it were to boil off about ten feet of it's water, the reduction in water pressure at the core would reduce the ability of the water to slow down the neutrons to capture range until after they had left the core, thus going subcritical.  Of course, those ten extra feet of water are also necessary for human safety as the water itself is the shielding.  Lose ten feet of cover water, and spectators start dying within a couple dozen feet of the pool's surface, so it's not exactly a good thing to advertise.

Evidence, where is the evidence?

Come on nuclear-power proponents, that can't be that hard! Academics in this field already big-mouth about every single tidbit they discover so it should be in your face if it is around.
Yes I would like to have one of these thorium-reactor powered cars too!  :o

But I am a realist, if there isn't research about it it's bullshit. Use Occam's razor for once.

There's plenty of research concerning thorium fuel cycle reactors, but I'm not willing to provide any for you because I'm not sure how much is still classified.  It shouldn't be because it's so old and not particularly useful for making a weapon, but I don't have the time or desire to check.  So no, not from me.  Google is all knowing, however, so use your google-fu and do some of your own research.  Just because it's publicly available information, doesn't necessarily mean it's not still classifed.  I know that doesn't make any sense, but in my experience there are few government rules that do not outlast their usefulness.

I have no problem with any of the arguments of why thorium reactors would be better than uranium ones. Including that they can be safer.

I even recognize that they could be built self regulating. (But again see my ramblings about Carnot efficiency of why this is not practical for steam generating designs)

I just maintain that the claim that they can not melt down because the reaction itself is temperature limited is bullshit.

Okay, yes.  That's hyperbole.  Any reactor design can melt down, but some have inherently designed features that resist a cascading reaction that would lead to a 'meltdown' as in Chernobyl.  Those features make such an event very unlikely, but never impossible. 

Correct about the ET part. The training manuals the Navy uses aren't classified for the science in them; they are classified because they talk about specific design features of naval reactors, and sometimes classified details of other military experiments/prototypes. The basic science of how fission works and now reactors are designed in general is public knowledge and has been for decades.
Any solid object can melt under the right conditions. It is, however, possible to design a nuclear reactor in such a way that the fission that takes place inside it is incapable of producing those conditions.

If "meltdown" is understood to include the effects that are associated with traditional reactor failures such as explosions, fire, plumes of radioactive material being injected into the atmosphere, and a molten blob of radioactive material melting its way into the ground then it is entirely accuate to say that "meltdown" is impossible in a LFTR design because the elements which produce those outcomes in a solid-fueled reactor do not exit.

Please don't discard the context of that sentence.
To make that clear, I say the claim that it cannot melt down is bullshit because the claim that the reaction itself is temperature limited is bullshit.

As of design, it can be very meltdown proof, but any design can fail.
Again: Thorium Reactors instead of Uranium Reactors, I'm all for it, do it. But I hate exaggerated claims which have no basis in reality.

An exaggerated claim, yes; but to say that there is no basis in reality is not quite true.  In a 'meltdown' (the kind that laymen think of, anyway) the core melts due to excessive heat buildup as a direct result of a runaway, super-critical reaction; thus a 'cascade'.  If the cascade is almost impossible, to say that they are temp limited is a fair claim for a basic understanding of the science, even if it's not technically true.

Good, I'm glad we got that settled.

But that brings me to my next nagging point:

In order to archive a better Carnot Efficiency the reactor design has to be built as hot as possible. Quite simple the hotter the reactor can run the more economical it is. So the engineers are pushed towards going to the limits of material safety.
So even if the reactor is safe, the attached machinery is most likely constructed with little operating margin.
So in order to get rid of this issue we need a heat machine which can operate on the same operating margin as the reactor itself.

Steam Cycles will always have higher material safety requirements because of moving parts (turbines, valves) and they are prone to corrosion.
I suggested thermo-accustic generators which can be built out of the same heat-resistant materials as the reactor giving engineers a uniform material safety requirement.
Plus they are as down-scalable as the reactor design (even more so) while maintaining peak efficiency across the board. So this would make it possible to engineer small power modules which can be switched on/off on demand and transported as a whole unit.

Make from metal coated (on the outside) Aerogel?

Should work.

Ideally such a unit should be small enough to be transported in a standard shipping container, which contains a torus shaped resonator in which the reactor is contained on one end and the other end some piezoelectric material which directly converts the vibration into electicity. Then there should be enough space left for the transformer, power electronics and maintenance equipment.

 
like this:
http://www.aster-thermoacoustics.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/tap-wordpress1.png
Just attach the cooling cycle instead of the air convector and your done.

I read could be pint glass sized earler, here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/7970619/Obama-could-kill-fossil-fuels-overnight-with-a-nuclear-dash-for-thorium.html

The hole in the middle of the torus seems like a good place for the rest of the stuff.

Cooling cycle, wish we didn't need that, I thought we wanted hot, is the arogel not going to cut it, how about that metal jet engines are made of?

Wouldn't water in a hot machine not stay ambient in temperature for long?

Yes placing the reactor inside the resonator would be more efficient. But how do you dismantle the thing once it is no longer operational?

Also I am not sure if there is a piezoelectric material which is suited for the purpose. Attaching linear actuators directly seems kind of dangerous.

As I understand it your saying there are two parts that should be seperate because it makes things simpler.

Can we not have them separate, even to the point of interconnecting pipes and the such, all without cooling? What part needs to be cool?


Are we including converting the heat to electric as well, other industries can do this as they see fit, lets stick to the hard part.

Rather than trying to use kickstarter for what is probably a multi-billion dollar effort, one might consider looking into what is happening with LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction).  While it is really a renaming of the much maligned "Cold Fusion", it is becoming increasingly evident that it is real. Three companies have announced the immanent release of products or licenses, Leonardo Corporation (Italian / US), Defkalion (Greek) and Brillouin (US).

The most promising work appears to be with fusing Nickel and light Hydrogen to produce copper. Its advantages include the ability to do it inexpensively on  a very small scale (table top), results in a very small amount of radiation which is easily shielded, and is fail safe because if it overheats it apparently disturbs the Nickel lattice to the extent that the reaction cannot continue.

Leonardo corporation has announced three products, a 1MW unit which fits in a shipping container of which at least one has been delivered, a 10KW E-Cat (400 C) and the most recently "leaked" Hot Cat which can generate heat in the 1000C to 1200C range, i.e. hot enough for fairly efficient generation of electricity. Early indications on the pricing for the 10KW E-Cat is that it will be under $1000 US.

Additionally, there are several open source efforts already under way, including a high school in Italy which has published a laboratory design which claims a COP (Coefficient of Power, or power in to power out) of 4. There is also an open source project at:

http://www.fusioncatalyst.org

And lots of information on LENR in general at these blogs:
http://www.ecatnews.net
http://www.e-catworld.com

I made a conceptual drawing of my idea:

https://i.imgur.com/BhUfs.png  8)

The US is not going to spend billions developing Thorium reactors.  All the research money has gone into solar and it has paid off now that the price of solar has dropped 75% in the last 3 years.  Global energy production from solar went up 193% last year.  Solar is the future.  Here's a relevant post I made in the gas prices thread:

The price of solar panels could drop to zero and they still will not generate energy competitive, short of through subsidies, with chemical much less nuclear forms of energy. The cost of the panels is irrelevant, what matters is energy density. Nuclear fission is 1-2 million times more energy dense than any chemical reaction, fusion is about 8 million times more dense, and chemical reactions are several orders of magnitude more dense than solar. I seem to recall someone calculating that it would take covering an area the size of Connecticut with solar panels just to meet the energy needs of NY City.

So even if the panels were both free and 100% efficient, the amount of land required makes it prohibitively inefficient up against an 8+ order of magnitude disadvantage in energy density.

You have no idea of what you are talking about. There is simply no need for higher energy density than the sun already provides. The amount of energy received on the roof of the typical family home is enough to power it. And yes they will become almost 100% efficient. Lookup nantennas and weep.

Besides bitcoin mining, heavy industry, things like that...

The energy density of the sun is irrelevant, what matters is how much of it reaches the Earth's surface. The day time peak is roughly 1000
watts per square meter at the average latitude of the US, or approximately 100 watts per square foot in old currency. The best solar panels currently are only about 20%  efficient and it will be very difficult to get past 30% or so.  For the reason why, you need to understand the Carnot limit, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot's_theorem_(thermodynamics)

These numbers adjust downwards for time of day, time of year, percentage of cloud cover, etc., not to mention the problem of storing the energy when the sun does not shine. Every time energy is converted to another form there are conversion losses which do not occur in forms of energy production which can dynamically adjust to the immediate demand as is the case with nuclear and fossil fuels.

Solar energy is so inefficient it would take covering an area the size of Texas to supply the energy needs of the US even discounting the storage and conversion losses mentioned above. Thus, because fossil and nuclear power generation has relatively small foot prints they can easily be put near where the power is needed. Solar would have to be put significantly farther away (assuming the land is available at all), which means greater line losses to transport it, at least until someone manages room temperature super conductivity.

I resisted giving you a LMGTFY link...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_coefficient#Temperature_coefficient_of_reactivity

I did not argue that solar is infinitely scalable on the land mass of the US.  It certainly has huge room to grow though.  The main thing is that at this price point, solar will save you money to convert to if you are going to live in your house for a long time.  Government resources are going into this through 30% solar tax credits because this is the thing that will reduce energy dependence, and energy dependence is very bad for the. US

We are not trying to scale land-based solar to 100% of US electric energy consumption.  As soon as private industry lowers the cost of space launch, panels will be put into orbit where the sun never sets and the sunlight is 5.5x stronger.  We have recently had a private space launch, and private industry is very good at reducing the cost of things that the government pioneers.  Also, are you aware that nuclear energy is about equal with fossil fuels in overall cost per KWH?  Once they are built they can make energy very cheap, but the initial startup cost is insane.

Here is a rough calculation:
Residential electric energy consumption is 35% in the US
There are 80 million single family homes in America out of 130 million housing units.  So presumably, somewhere around 62% of the housing units can have solar panels on the roof which power them. So 22% of total US electric energy could be done on single family home roofs.  The true number would be adjusted up as I would think houses use more electricity than apartments.  It would also adjust down by the percentage of cloudy days.

Most things can explode and catch fire if sabotarged enthusiastically enough.

Don't get me wrong, I fully support forms of micro energy production utilizing conventional sources including solar and wind, and less conventional sources such as motion, vibration, etc. There are even a few people claiming to have successfully harnessed energy from the Tesla effect (Earth's magnetic field). But those forms will be used largely for mobile devices where the most important feature is decoupling from the cord, not efficient energy production.

For residential use your numbers are way high for a number of reasons. First even single homes are not all conducive to the use of solar panels. They may be too far north, too much cloud cover, too much shade from trees and other foliage, etc. For example, many people are already getting energy benefits from trees and other foliage because they provide shade in the warmest times of year but let the sun in during the colder times. All of that would have to be cut down in order to use solar panels, and not to mention the negative aesthetics in doing so.

Secondly, even where these problems do not occur the homes are not self sufficient unless they can sell excess energy back to the power company to balance out times when they are not producing enough energy to be self sufficient. The conversion losses are still too great to balance production with demand on an individual basis. The only reason people can do this is because the energy companies are both required to by law and because it is subsidized. It would never exist in a free market and simply evil to impose it by force, not that governments won't try.

I know what Carnot efficiency is an that only applies to thermal processes. A antenna is not.


I guess you could do a tongue in cheek estimation with the color temperature of the sunlight (6500K) and the temperature of the solar cell lets say 300K for gods sake. Now you do the math...


So what any concrete number for a thorium reactor?

No, for that I'd need a degree in nuclear physics, or at least a lot more data than I am able to get with a 5 minute Google search. However, consider that liquids expand when heated, and that how close together the various reactants are to one another is a factor in the speed of a nuclear reaction. A fuel that expanded when heated would have a self limiting tendency to avoid overheating from the reactions.

Metal coated aerogel would be unable to dissipate heat and would thus overheat and melt - at least the metal surface that is...


I am sure safe and responsible nuclear IS possible, but I KNOW that corporations and governments will fuck it up. What happens with the fuel pools and the nuclear plants once they aren't profitable to EvilCorp CO. anymore?

We get to pay OR walk around in it. Thorium might solve some issues, but its also less economical and it doesn't exist yet :s


Solar and wind please, keep the radiation.

Take a look at this (I have seen modern wind turbines with numbers at 70!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested

The nantenna efficiency is both theoretical and specious in its calculation. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nantenna#Advantages_of_nantennas


However the efficiency of energy conversion is not the problem, the problem is the energy density one starts with. That amount is a maximum of about 100 watts per square foot. No matter what you do with it, you will not get any more due to an even more basic law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy, otherwise known as the no free lunch law.

Averaged out to 24 hours per day, 365 days per year actual yield would be no better than 25 watts per sq. ft. Cloud cover knocks it down even more. Every time its form is changed conversion inefficiencies knock it down still more.

In the end it will be energy density and convenience which determine the winners and losers, and solar in most cases performs poorly by both measures.

I dare you of actually doing the math of your electrical energy consumption vs the amount of energy actually received for a full stack of solar panels.

You won't be able to run a large bitcoin mining operation or grow lots of pot but it will let you drive things like lights, your pc, tv. hifi. dishwasher, washing machine and even a AC if your house is insulated enough.
All that for effective zero space requirement. Or do you have a rooftop garden or something.

Granted not everybody lives in an owned home may people live in apartments that's why we still need other forms of generating electricity. But claiming that you can't power a house with rooftop solar is nonsense. The reason this is so ridiculous is that the sun is earths sole power source.

Gamma rays do not 'induce' radioactivity, only neutron capture does that.  And no, you don't need uranium or plutonium.  One can make a primary neutron source with a spalation excelerator, such as in an energy amp reactor design; or from an Alpha emitter and a sheet of aluminum, as the 'nuclear boy scout' did in the 90's.

Where do you guys come up with this stuff?  Thorium fuel cycles are much more economical than a uranium fuel cycle, the only advantage that uranium had in the start was the desire of the DOD to create weapons fuel, and now because all of the nuclear industry is setup to process and handle uranium.  And yes, the tech has been known for decades, so it does "exist" even if it's not used.

If you'd take the time to browse the Wikipedia page on LFTR you might discover that some of your assumptions about it may not be accurate.

Yes, that's a pebble bed reactor.  But his complaint about generation of consumer electricity is valid, the goal of making a inherently safe pebble bed core and one of efficiently producing power are at odds with each other.  However, a pebble bed style reactor, with each pebble encased into steel & corrosion resistant casings, would be ideal for lower level process heating or centralized apartment block heating.  Israel could make the desert bloom with a pebble bed reactor intended to de-salinate & pump seawater.  Russia & Canada could diverte many tons of natural gas and heat oil to other productive uses, even power generation.  This is the primary design use of the CANDU reactors that I mentioned, and the USSR had been using smaller (and notablely safer) reactors as downtown municipal heating systems in many of their more northern cities for a long time.

Correct, the greater issue with the spent fuel in uranium fueled civilian reactors is that the fuel isn't permitted to be concetrated greater than 20%, and the reactions are unsustainable once U235 drops below 3-5% depending upon the reactor design.  The rest of the core is mostly U238, and some is transmutted into plutonium.  It's the plutonium that has the long & hot half life, not the actinide wastes, and a thorium reactor doesn't produce plutonium.  A thorium reactor does produce U233, but it's 'burned' in the normal running process of the reactor so there is never much buildup there.  Also, since nearly 100% of the core is breedable fuel, a given core can stay in the reactor for much longer.  Therefore, not only are the actinide hazards reduced simply because of the time they spend safely sequestered in the reactor itself (and their much shorter half lives) but they also tend to be reduced due to ongoing neutron capture transmuttation.

That's not exactly true. There will be some plutonium produced but it won't accumulate in large quantities.

Everything the online reprocessing doesn't remove stays in the fuel salt until it either fissions, decays or get transmuted into something that either fissions or decays. Transuranics will be present in small quantities but once the removal rate matches the production rate they will stay at that equilibrium concentration until the reactor is shut down. Presumably the fuel salt would be reused in the replacement reactor so there is never a need to put transuranics in long term storage.

Oh, I see.  You're talking about a molten salt reactor.  While I agree that a 'meltdown' is meaningless in this context, I'm not sure that I would agree that a molten salt reactor is a good idea.  Deliberately keeping a neutron emmittor in a liquid state is just asking for problems, in my opinion.

Granted, I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I have it on good authority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flibe_Energy#Kirk_Sorensen) that it actually solves several problems.

vv like those vv

Right, because surrounding the neutron emitters by flammable metals and a convienient source of hydrogen gas is a much better idea than storing it in chemically and radiologically stable salts.

I was told that.

So clarify for me:
1. Thorium reactors could be built TODAY using the old 50ies blueprints (no research needed).
2. These thorium reactors would generate MORE J/$ compared to uranium reactors.

Yes?

See otherwise wind turbines already fulfill both of these requirements - competitive with coal, no radioactive waste, killing fewer birds than our windows and doesn't take up farm land like solar.

During the Fukushima meltdown only one wind turbine out of ALL the thousands they had fell down - hurting absolutely no one.

Maybe its because you are american and GE has been blocking progress with stolen patents over there, but a real wind turbine is huge, advanced and effective.

... at slicing birds to bits while applying a braking force to the earth. Also really poor at generating power where there are chaotic winds, such as inside the city, where power generation is most efficient, because that's where it's needed.

Tiny little thorium reactor in your back yard, powers the whole building.

Were you guys exposed to 50s futurist brochures or something?  ;D


Hello is this HomeThorium support? yes!

During this nights storm my Plum-tree fell over and hit my power module. After I let my dog out this morning it came back with the eyes bleeding!!!
Is the neutron source exposed? What do you mean that can't happen? No I won't leave the house....
You gonna help me!!!

You understand that thorium is safe to hold in your hand, right? An accident such as you describe will be quite dangerous... for a few hours, while the fast stuff burns off, but then will be relatively easy to clean up. Imagine a similar situation with a traditional nuclear plant. Dude wouldn't be there to make the phone call, nor would his neighbors, or theirs...

Do a little reading on the thorium fuel cycle. Most of that "other stuff" that gets created is gone quick. Don't get me wrong, while it's there, it's hideously dangerous, but because of that, it's gone quickly. Perhaps hours was hyperbole, but so was the plum tree. In even a tiny reactor, there's going to (need to) be significant amounts of shielding. Plum tree wouldn't do jack but crack the plastic cover. But in the event that (something) does crack the shielding, I'd rather it be a LFTR than a BWR. A radioactive puddle of goo that quickly solidifies is much easier to handle than a (formerly highly pressurized) radioactive cloud of steam. (and let's not forget all that hydrogen)

Well my point is i don't think it's wise to have lots of tiny reactors everywhere. There is just so much that can go wrong and no matter what eventually some accident will happen when they are cracked open.
Yes eventually thorium reactors could be as safe as batteries but it will be a long time till that happens, and somehow I doubt it.

And lets say that does happen what after a decade? What to do with em? They gonna be everywhere some of them will end up in a landfill and don't tell me that won't rise the average dosage of ionizing radiation and inhaled active particles.

Like this?: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/photogalleries/100708-radioactive-nuclear-waste-science-salt-mine-dump-pictures-asse-ii-germany/

Yeah, no. Look up what the thorium fuel cycle's end states are.

The thorium cycle could use the stuff in that mine (well, most of it) as fuel.

I think I haven't made that clear enough: With nuclear power in hands of the general public there will be some people who do not obey the necessary steps to implement clean waste disposal.

The scenario we are talking about are reactors small enough you can carry around, like the size of a coffee machine with the corresponding additional machinery in the range of a refrigerator to a shipping container. While that would be very cool in terms of decentralized power it will also mean that there are new kinds of environmental threats associated with it.
The critique is not about the principal versatility of such a system but of how the current society would deal with it.

Even with very rigorous fines some people would still dispose their spent reactor in the woods, some lake, etc... And that can have dire consequences.
I realize that such a reactor would have less impact that lets say a spent fuel rod, you don't see those in the hands of people with complete disregard of consequences.

Well, here's wikipedia right back at you!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multijunction_solar_cell
This type of cells have a theoretical maximum efficiency around 90%..
So the only real limit now is economics.
Thing is, even with your calculated lower yield you still have enough roofspace on a house to cover a family.
But with time these high yield PVs will be widely available for a low enough price.
And like with bitcoin people will be 'mining' electricity.

Everyone could dump their old reactor - hell, their spent fuel - in the woods out back, and it would still probably have less long-term impact than the kinds of dumps the current nuclear industry is creating.

(And I only say probably because I'm not certain of the hard numbers.)

Theoretical is not actual, and unlikely ever to be. The maximum theoretical efficiency of an internal combustion engine is about 39%. In actuality the most efficient have trouble breaking 20%. Further the efficiency of the panels isn't the end of the story. Now you have to do something with it because the sun does not shine 24/7/365. It can be sold back to the power company and credited for later, but there are line losses and other losses involved. You can store it locally through any number of means, but every time its form is changed there are additional losses.

However that is all beside the point, the real point is that solar could be 100% efficient end to end and it still would be 9-10 orders of magnitude less dense than either fission or fusion. Which, as I said back in post 58, isn't to say that solar is of no use, only that without subsidies its applications will be very limited and that no level of subsidies can overcome a 9 order of magnitude disadvantage in the long run.

anyone who's actually interested in thorium energy, check out gordon mcdowell on youtube - http://www.youtube.com/user/gordonmcdowell  

he is doing a great job of documenting various speakers/experts on the subject.

my personal favorite one to start with is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

2 hours long, and it's a couple years old, but it does cover most of the basics.

enjoy ;D

Well that sounds hard to believe... mind to share those numbers? What exactly are we talking about? What kind of dumps is the nuclear energy doing?
How do you think fission byproducts are so fundamentally different?

I don't have the numbers to share. That's the point of the parenthetical statement, and the "probably". But if you had done any research on the thorium cycle, you would know that spent fuel from it is actually spent. It's hardly more radioactive than thorium itself. "Spent" fuel rods from traditional nuclear reactors still have most of their fuel still active, and are chock-full of transuranics.

I stopped at "uranium is breeded out of thorium". If there is uranium involved at any point there will be uranium fission byproducts.
What did I miss?

Everything after that. Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#Fission_product_wastes

I stopped at...
What did I miss?
...
Everything after that

Oh lol

Well, you ask a silly question, you're gonna get a silly answer.

Well doesn't that refer to the reprocessing part of spent fuel?

In a LFTR, there's no reprocessing. It all just stays in there until it comes out as ²³⁷Np. Or whatever the actual end product is. I'm not a nuclear engineer.

Reprocessing is for solid fuels.

I'm going to say it again: not a nuclear engineer. Quizzing me on the specifics will get, at best, educated guesses.
Here is where I got my info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

That video there starts with a 5 minute summary, and then goes into more depth. Watch at least that first five minutes, and if you can, hang around for the whole two hours. Great info in there.

Thanks that is a fascinating video. It however does rise the question what those guys think they are doing, like beating a dead horse.

From the looks of it a proof of concept reactor could be built on a shoestring budget in a garage. Why hasn't it been done yet?
It does clarify some things but there still is the point of nuclear waste, how accurate is the claim of no transuranic waste? Is it really none? A few atoms would be negligible but even a few milligram is not.
The next thing is the actual fission byproducts, I doubt they are all as valuable as it is claimed to be, but like to be proven wrong :)

If there really is no catch, I'd say:
brb overtaking civilization.

That's not quite true.  The transuratics are less involved in a thorium cycle, but there are more in a liquid reactor design, and since transuratics are a neutron 'poison' they would have to be delt with on an ongoing basis.  While the processing of a liquid core is technically easier than a spent solid core, it's still very real.

Probably because for most anyone with any training in the field capable of doing it without killing themselves, the construction of a reactor without the consent of the NRC is a federal felony.

Excluding the "Nuclear Boy Scout" of course, but all he did was build a breader reactor in his mom's tool shed, and probably shorten his lifespan by about 20 years.


It's not accurate.


Negligible, a few grams per ton of fuel consumed, less after it's had more exposure to the neutrons and some has transmutated to other elements with shorter half lives.  The majority of them has half lives in the 4 and 12 year ranges, and can reasonablely be sequestered into leaded glass in a safe manner for 100 years or more.


I don't understand this question. I haven't seen the video, are the talking about medical radioisotopes?  They are valuable, but they are not created in any useful quantity unless the reactor is designed to do it deliberately.  Most such radioisotopes are created by one of a few tiny research reactors that produce negible amounts of electrical power, usually less than the facilty they are housed in consumes.  It's hard to have it both ways, wither the reactor is designed for research or it's designed for power production.


On a side note, there is more radioactive materals put into the atmostphere each year by coal plants, mostly due to the thorium in the coal in trace amounts, than that what was released by Three Mile Island.  Thorium is, literally, found everywhere on earth.

A molten salt reactor requires ongoing reprocessing to remove fission product poisions. This form of reprocessing is very different from solid fuel reprocessing because it's just a matter of adding a fractional distillation column to the existing piping. There is no requirement to transport or manually handle the waste and the isotopes which can be burned get inserted directly back into the fuel salt instead of manufactured into new solid fuel elements.

Actinides can remain in the fuel salt indefinately until they are consumed. Any negative reactivity they add can be easily compensated for by increasing fuel concentration. This is something trivial to accomplish when the fuel is liquid but impossible when the fuel is solid.

LFTR does not produce transuranic waste because all the transuranics are consumed internally. That's why the waste that is removed from a LFTR will only require 300 years of storage instead of 10000.

Wouldn't any PHD in nuclear physics be able to get a permit or do they require one to be part of the cartel?

This is what I meant. There's no taking out the intermediate wastes, reprocessing them into fuel, and putting them back in. they're just left in there until they burn up, and then are removed as the final product.

Many people strongly object to molten salt reactors when they hear about online reprocessing because they hear the word "reprocessing" and immediately think "dirty, dangerous and expensive" without realizing how little liquid fuel reprocessing resembles solid fuel reprocessing.

It's different enough that I almost wouldn't call it the same thing. It's more of a chemical filtration process, if anything.

The important thing is can it be safely and economically scaled down and how far...

Now that, you're gonna have to ask Kirk Sorensen about. I am pretty sure we could get it down small enough to power large-scale vehicles, like submarines and the like. A thorium powered car is probably out of the realm of feasibility. A neighborhood power plant is certainly within feasibility.

There have been both nuclear powered commercial ship prototypes and aircraft.  Ocean ship are fine, but anything that can crash into a residential zone (as opposed to sink into a ocean of radioation shielding) is a bad idea.  That goes double for actual street vehicles.  I'd much rather see a hydrogen powered bus in a city with a nuke powered hydrogen plant than actual nuke busses no matter what kind of fuel cycle it uses.


Yes, easily.

No, a permit is required regardless of what you are doing.  In the case of small research reactors, the licensing process is often as expensive as the construction of the entire reactor.  One reason that no one makes small, neighborhood sized reactors even though they certainly could.  A town in Alaska has been asked by some manufactuer from Japan to field test a prototype reactor that supposedly needs no attention nor refuling for 30 years at a time.  I forget what that type was called but it resembled a pencil stuck eraser first into a concrete hole in the ground.  The eraser being the actual reactor and the shaft of the pencil being a set of molten salt lines to function as a heat transport loop to the surface where the generators would be housed.  Last I heard the town was all about it, considering that they were so remote that everything ran on deisal gensets, but the NRC wan't giving the idea the time of day.  That would have been ten years ago, I think.

A nuclear bus would be a scary concept. Not just because they'd be driven by public employees, either. A cracked reactor vessel, in the presence of even city street-level speeds could splatter molten radioactive salt all over the place. While it would be a heck of a lot easier to clean up than a cloud of radioactive steam, that's still a mess I would rather not deal with. I think it would be safer, radiologically, than a BWR, but short term, that salt would still be crazy radioactive. A hydrogen explosion could do some serious damage, but at least once the boom is over, it's over.

Alright, what about n_TOF (https://ntof-exp.web.cern.ch/ntof-exp/) at CERN? I mean that is at least inside the academic world, and from some poking around at the nuclear physics institute website in my city about everybody in the field knows about thorium reactors. They write about it as means of nuclear waste disposal but I think the potential for energy production is well known.

I have no affiliation with the field but if it is possible to leverage existing infrastructure that could even be a Bachelor or Master Thesis project for somebody...

It is for many, particularly in India.  That's beside the point. n_TOF has a research license under CERN.  None of these guys could do any such thing without the explicit support of CERN.  It is a highly regulated field of research, with good reasons.  India has been deep into research regarding the thorium fuel cycle for many years, but mixed fuel reactors are probably the best way to breed uranium from thorium in the near future, and any such breeder design can also transmutate nuke waste from LWR or BWR designs.  However, as I mentioned before, such designs are not safely efficient for power production as well, and work best as municipal heat.

we would have had thorium many years ago i we hadnt needed fissionable materials or weapons

but.. how is this economics?

It's economics, mixed with politics, as always on that scale.

And energy is the most important resource so anything related to energy has the highest economical impact.

Finally used google to look this up, and it does seem that the argument is nonsense.  You are right that the day time peak is about 1kw per sq meter, but the US has 9 billion sq meters of land!  Half an hour of sun energy hitting the US is enough to power the whole country for a year.

I went into studying engineering physics in 1998, mostly because I was hopeful that the US would get its act together and invest in building real, safe nuclear energy, soon.  Unfortunately, I learned very quickly that Americans are far, far too stupid to do that.  Furthermore, we are far too stupid to let someone competent, like the French or Japanese, do it for us.

I've kept a pretty close eye on the energy situation since then.  It seems obvious that the decision was made, decades ago, to choose recession, austerity and warfare in a gambit to jump directly to renewables, and to skip nuclear entirely.

Photovoltaics are getting cheaper.  But the total power produced is insignificant.  They are still too efficient, and too expensive.  To really capture solar energy effectively, you need something more like wind turbines, with a large capture area, and a small capital cost.

We have lots of land.  But covering that land with anything that doesn't self-replicate is hugely expensive.  Consider roads.  They are just oil, and rocks;  the cheapest materials possible.  And they only cover a tiny fraction of the country.  Yet they cost billions of dollars a year, just to maintain.

All of the photovoltaics produced in all of human history cover something like a few hundred square miles, total.

And there is no viable storage mechanism.  So they only compete for peak power, in sunny areas, during the hot months.

Photovoltaics are getting cheaper.  But the cheaper technologies use more precious metals.  They will be limited.  And they will come from places like Afghanistan.

So, yes, I agree that the US will never produce a nuclear renaissance.  It has nothing to do with the feasibility of nuclear energy.  It has to do with the idiots in charge of the US.

Facts are irrelevant (to bureaucrats who will punish you violently if you attempt to do stuff without their permission).  Thorium reactors could be safer than a kitten, but the bureaucrat (with his natural petty tyrant tendency) won't give a shit about that -- and the average moron will support the bureaucrat because he doesn't understand that thorium reactors are safe.

So, we don't have Thorium reactors today, because sociopathic closeted mass murderers saw no ability to use them to terrorize hundreds of millions of people with the threat of genocide.

Typical statist-religious bullshit.

Excellent response.

I second this.  A quick Googling of what JustusRanvier said confirms what he said about temperatures and fission rates.  ElectricMucus is becoming more destructive and assholeish -- unnecessarily so -- as the thread develops, which leads me to agree with others in this thread who have pointed out that ElectricMucus has some sort of anxiety problem related to being exposed to facts he dislikes.

Waiwaiwait... WE HAVE FUSION REACTORS ALREADY?

HOLY FUCKING SHIT.  I want a Mr. Fusion for my black Trans Am, NOW!!!  I won't be able to go to the future with it, but I would most definitely achieve Super Pursuit forrealz.

I think, you are speaking of Toshiba 4S reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S


Little offtopic guys, but there is something bugging me - since nuclear power plants are producing strontium-90 as one of fission products, wouldnt it be a good idea to use it to produce electricty? According to wikipedia strontium-90 produces around 0.46 kilowatts of heat per kilogram, due to radioactive decay with half life of about 30 years. Wouldnt it be a good idea to turn it into power source? I mean something like Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG) or just hot steam production for traditional turbines?

It's hard to accumulate enough of it in a small place to produce usable amounts of energy.

Just due to thermodynamics thermal energy is difficult to convert into a usable, concentrated form like electricity unless the temperature of your heat source exceeds 250C, and even that isn't particularly efficient.

The timely invention of the atomic bomb saved over 4 million lives:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1708051/posts (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1708051/posts)

Again, solar is going to get all the money now because it has had such a radical breakthrough in the last 3 years.

Settle down, the current state of fusion research is nowhere near as advanced as you hope.

Yes, fusion reactors exist, and you can even build one for only a few thousand dollars if you know what you're doing. But there are a couple of problems. First of all, most fusion reactions (including all of the most practical ones) produce a huge amount of neutron radiation, which (unlike most other forms of radiation) causes anything exposed to it to become radioactive. When the reactor components wear out and need replacing, they will be highly radioactive and need to be disposed of as such. Anyone claiming that fusion reactors produce no radioactive waste is lying.

The second problem is even more serious. To get nuclear fusion, you need to produce and confine an extremely high temperature plasma, and no current designs* have been able to achieve this without consuming more energy than the fusion reaction produces. (Note that a loss of plasma confinement is not particularly dangerous, as although the plasma is at a very high temperature and pressure, the density is so low that it's virtually a vacuum, with a correspondingly low heat content. Instead of the reactor heating up and melting, the plasma cools. Cool plasma is no good for fusion though, so confinement is still extremely important, but losing confinement isn't the catastrophe that one might imagine it to be.) No currently operating fusion reactors are capable of producing net power, and all are used either for research purposes or as a controllable source of neutron radiation.

*Nitpickers will be quick to point out that fission bombs are capable of producing high temperature plasma and confining it just long enough to get a good fusion reaction out of it without consuming much energy, but this has an obvious drawback.

Except for the once-a decade cold fusion hoaxes. Can't go without mentioning them  :D

But look on the bright side, if the trend holds you can buy thorium reactors from China by 2022.

Hydrogen-nickel fusion without big accelerator? Bullshit. I won't belive it until I'll se a working power plant with my own eyes.

The question is how far do you go to call something a 'fact'. A blackbox demonstration done in a obscure lab by some company taking money from investors?
For me definitely not.

I think without some serious scientific breakthrough remains in the realm of sci-fi.

If you insist:
Stright from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer

"theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel and nuclear physicist Peter Thieberger argue that the claims for the E-Cat are incompatible with the fundamentals of nuclear physics.[31] In particular, the Coulomb barrier for the claimed fusion reaction is so high that it is unsurpassable anywhere in the known universe, including the interior of stars. The reaction also would create gamma radiation that would penetrate the few inches of shielding apparently provided by the E-Cat, leading to acute radiation syndrome in persons involved in the demonstrations.[31] Given numerous other scientific inconsistencies – such as the ratio of isotopes in the supposed copper "fusion product" being identical to that in natural copper[32] – the authors argue that it is now time "for the e-Cat's proponents to provide the provable, testable, reproducible science that can answer these straightforward physics objections."


A little lesson of physics:
When comes to shooting proton into nuclei problem is that protons repell eachother. When you reduce distance by half, repelling force gets 4 times stronger. It obviously doesent scale to infinity, but at some point the forces between protons inside nuclei and one that you are trying to infuse are getting EXTREME.

Additionally there is another problem - the atoms nuclei is so small, that hitting it even without repelling force is extremally unlikely. When comes to neutrons there is no repelling, and low hit probability is solved by breeding huge amounts of them - thanks to this nuclear powerplants can work.

As I said: Show me working commercial E-cat, or it didnt happen.

It's not just that, but the whole academic establishment is locked into some belief about physics which ultimately stops any real innovation.
On the other the fringe is full of people who engage in the same kind of thought process.

Both rely on long abandoned mathematical concepts. Quaternions have been around for over a century but still they use tensors and even build a sum in a way it is not permitted outside "special" relativity.
Of course you cannot come to those false conclusions with Quaternions but since the establishment religiously believes in them it is not permitted to use them at all.

If everyone had that kind of attitude (I won't believe it's possible until it is fully commercialized) we would still be riding horses to work.

The inability distinguish between magic and science displayed in your comment is why we haven't seen as much technological advancement as we otherwise could have.

Um, wtf are you talking about.  I made no such comment as far as I can see.

The Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project is an open source replication effort whose leads are currently attempting to replicate the Francesco Celani excess heat experiment while making their research and apparatus public and building kits to farm out to scientists who want to try it out.

http://www.quantumheat.org/

Yeah, but the paint on them will contain lead.

I lold.  :D

'ts okay, what's a little melamine on the milk among friends, rite?  :-)

Related: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=no&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aftenposten.no%2Fokonomi%2FGigantisk-energikilde-i-Telemark-7055485.html

Thanks for the article.

I thought Thorium was a common material.

That's the best part. It is, relative to other nuclear fuels.

From what I've heard it's not the commonness that counts but it's efficiency you can basically fission almost all of it. If thorium were as rare as uranium we would be fine too, in terms of ppm it's almost as rare as uranium except in the case of uranium there is only a rare isotope suitable.

Yup, common as dirt, completely "burn"able, even allows us to use old "waste" as fuel (providing some very interesting byproducts in the process).

Screwed, because you can't make a bomb out of it. ::)

Thorium is almost three times more abundant than uranium, approximately as common as lead.

That's actually a lot of thorium.

We won't run out of it any time soon. The earth's crust is estimated to contain over a trillion tons of thorium, where each ton is capable of producing a gigawatt-year of energy when burned in a LFTR. Compare this to the number of tons of coal a 1 GW power plant needs to consume in a year.
In fact, if you collected the ashes from a 1 GW coal power plant produced in the course of a year you'd find 13 tons of thorium.

In other words the usable energy content of coal is 93% nuclear and 7% chemical and right now we're completely ignoring the nuclear energy.

WAAAAAT.

He's not just blowing smoke:
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colside1.html

 :o

FU psychopath politicians and the military industrial complex!

GIIIGAAA-WAAAAAT

It get's even better, those mines who get rare earths for the newest electronics produce alot of thorium "waste".
I dunno what's done with it...

In the US, piled up and left. In China, barreled up and sent to storage facilities for their future fuel needs. They're building thorium reactors.

MEGA GYGA TERA WAAT!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDVORKo8rYs

Fuck this, when I get money I'm getting a Thorium power company set up >_<

Beyond that; only Uranium 235 is usable as fuel without first transmutating it into plutonium.  U235 is only about 2% of all uranium by weight, or less.  Which is why uranium must be 'refined' in a complex and hazardous process.  Conversely, none of natural thorium is fissile, but 99.9% of it is readily transmutable into uranium 233, which is fissile.  So while natural uranium must be refined in order to extract that 2% of U235, pretty much every ounce of thorium can be treated and used in the same manner, without worrying about it's isotope concentrations.

Correct.  In the US, it mostly just sits in piles of yellow ore near where the mining has occured, and never moves unless the EPA makes them.  Thorium has a near zero market value, due to the fact that it's 1) a heavy metal so it's chemically toxic to humans in the same way lead is and 2) it's mildly radioactive, and thus is banned from being used as an input for any manufacturing that doesn't specificly require it.

Except you can't make a bomb from U233.

This isn't true. You can make a bomb from U233 (the US detonated one once) but it's far more difficult, expensive and unreliable than making it from U-235 or plutonium.

The problem is U232 contamination, which causes it to be highly radioactive. You can machine plutonium in relative safety as long as you're careful to collect the dust so nobody inhales it. You need several inches of lead between you and a mass of U233. The hard gamma radiation a critical mass of U233 emits also isn't very good for sensitive electronics, especially the kinds that you need in aircraft or missiles. It's this difficulty in handling that makes U233 impractical for weapons.

In a LFTR the radiation isn't a problem. Nobody ever has to handle the U233 - it just gets pumped from between several stationary tanks which are easily shielded.

OK, so you can make a bomb from it, just not a practical one.

All joking aside, at a minimum it needs to be safe enough that the people building it don't die of radiation poisoning prior to completing it.Yes. Anyone who has the ability to overcome the technical challenges involved in making a U233 weapon would never do it - if they are that advanced there's no reason for them to bother with U233 when far easier materials exist.

You can, it's just much more difficult than doing the same thing with plutonium, for several technical reasons.  Not the least of which is that U233 has a quantum "delay" from the time it absorbs an energetic free neutron to the time it actually splits, and that delay can vary within a known time period.  It's very short, but it adds a variable that 'traditional' nuclear fuels do not.  This delay is not an issue in a reactor, because the goal is to not produce a cascading reaction that expands at a logarithimic rate, power reactors just need to keep the reaction between the navigational beacons.  The difficulty in making a weapon, combined with it's relative ease of making it into fuel components, plus it's relative abundance all make it an ideal nuclear fuel for peaceful power.  Add to that, the gamma signature of U233 can be detected & triangulated from orbit, and a U233 weapon is extremely impractical.