/sci/ - Science & Math

They're irrational; scared of any form of power generation that isn't immediately graspable like coal, wind or hydroelectric

I think you mean liberals OP

>>4775585

why should i hate thorium reactors?

it takes away from the military industrial complex's stranglehold over nuclear power, by making a safe, comparably cheap power source that can't be used to make weapons.


You have rustled my jimmies, but in a really confusing way,

>>4775604
I was thinking that OP means the greenies.
Since I'm ultra-librulz and support LFTR.

>>4775643
This. Environmentalists are irrational as hell. Stupid too. They feel close to nature, AKA, they're ape like retards.
It's fine though, as long as you can get them to think, or if you brainwash them a bit.

Regardless of political party, it's been proven time and time again that people, as a whole, fear what they don't understand.

>>4775653
The thing is that mostly they're so removed from nature(and reality) that they don't know or realize the kind of havoc their actions and wishes have/would have.

Why does the green party hate it so much?
If this suppose to be safer than uranium then why do they dissaprove a a safer and more eco-friendly alternative?

>>4775609
I don't know why your party hates it, they just do. I mean, it makes sense that the hippies hate it, they're against anything nuclear, and regular conservatives think technology is the devil's work. I just don't get why libertarians act like liquid fluoride thorium reactors are so dangerous.

>>4775701
Fear. Pure fear.

They're stupid, and so they care for the earth, yet that is what we care about too. They think everyone is against them, when it's only two types of people in the world. Dumbass idiots and US. Scientists who move society forward. They reject us, yet we're the only ones who can save them! Muhahahah!!

I'm a libertarian and I don't have a problem with Liquid fluoride thorium reactors?

I mean, I prefer the smaller models of thorium reactors capable of powering a small town, but that is beside the point, I don't have a problem with nuclear energy in general albeit I wish governments won't regulate and subsidize the industry as much as they do. But that's an organizational problem, not a technological one.

I mean, bonds fund are more than capable of providing billions of dollars for nuclear energy production by clever use of derivatives.

So is there a catch for LFTR? I want to believe but there has got to be a flaw with it

>>4775958
There are some catches, mostly technological, infrastructure-related or economic. The price and the infrastructure necessary to make it cost-effective might in some cases overcome the benefits. That's how it is for several of the new technologies out there.

Those greenies already hate Uranium power plants enough as it is.
I guess by introducing a new source that hasn't been "romanticized" as much as Uranium/plutonium they are worried about its "unfamiliar" effects.
I don't know, they're just stupid people who think the Earth can be saved. Just like they believe global warming is mankind's fault.

Fear of the possibility of a nuclear meltdown scenario, even though LFTR has been claimed as much safer. People are scared shitless when they feel they don't have control/knowledge over something.

For example, people see trains as riskier than cars even though the likelihood of dying in a car related accident is magnitudes higher than in a train.

do these even exist and work as claimed?

don't particularly care about nuclear power just put a shit tonne of reactors in the southern states of the u.s. no one of use will give a fuck even if they do fail.

>>4776495
A LFTR cannot suffer a meltdown any more than a bicycle can explode. It lacks the necessary moving parts.

>>4775701
Why?
1- Because it has the words "nuclear" and "fission" in it.
2- Because it detracts from their feel-good (but ultimately impractical) "green" solutions of solar, wind, etc.
3- A large portion of green funding comes from the oil companies, coal companies, etc.

>>4775958
No one's done it before, and it might not work as advertised. Note that most of the core pieces have been well demonstrated. Someone just needs to take the next step and build a damned test prototype, test it for a while, then build a full-ish scale commercial prototype.

>>4776514

China's going forward with building some, so I guess we'll see.

Though with that much energy on tap we can kiss any sort of competitiveness on our part goodbye, so them succeeding isn't necessarily a good thing.

>>4775779
>regular conservatives think technology is the devil's work
Good point. Not just them, but some of the greenies too. It's "unnatural". Case in point: GMOs.

>>4775585
Liberal here, I love nuclear power and I can't wait for thorium reactors. Environmentalists are irrational most of the time.

>>4776527
so what you're saying is it's not feasible because it would have been done by now if it were.

>>4776543
>If it's feasible it would have been done by now.
/sigh
This tired old strawman.
It's not being done because it's a risky investment with very long ROI. In the US, we're talking about spending billions of dollars easy, with a small but sizeable risk of losing it all, in an incredibly hostile regulatory environment that wouldn't allow it anyway, with an incredibly hostile populace that might legislate it away, and so on.

Hell, with the new natural gas estimates, we might have enough natural gas for a century or more in the US.

No sane self-interested investor would touch this with a 10 ft pole. The 30~ plus year ROI is enough on its own. Add in the rest and only someone stupid would invest their personal money in this. It's not a way to make personal profit. It's an investment for the future and for our children.

>>4776543

You're conflating feasibility with opposing industry and decades of regulatory policy.

But you already knew that.

>>4776523

>solar
>impractical

Solar capacity basically doubles each year and has done so for the last 4 years. Solar efficiency has gone up 12% in the last 6 years with no signs that we're hitting a theoretical materials limit. The trick to making home solar really work in the here and now simply lies with using less energy. I don't mean having a lower quality of life, I mean having the same or higher quality of life while still using less energy.

Building retrofits and integrative design for efficient use of home electricity both benefit from localized energy production, and it's not impossible that in the near future, solar paneling companies will install a panel on your roof basically at cost and simply ping your electric company for selling electricity back into the grid, bypassing the middleman in much the same way that cell phones did for land-line phone companies.

If you count subsidy to oil companies and automakers, gas prices in the US are being suppressed by like $1.50 per gallon, and the USA spends roughly 23 billion dollars daily in opportunity cost to maintain the oil economy.

>>4776547
>strawman

>>4776550
>>4776547
lolled

you're on a science board so i assume you can science, go out and make it happen to prove me wrong.

>>4776547

Got to agree.

It's like Zeno's Paradox, where an arrow can never travel half the distance, because it would have to travel half the distance before reaching that point and so on...

No idea is feasible at all if we all have to wait until somebody else takes the first step.

Nonetheless, yeah, there are problems with long term risk taking. Mainly getting enough investors for it.

That's why I mentioned using the pension and bond funds. They are the only organizations outside of national governments that can commit to that.

Also, using governments to build things is a rotten idea, not merely because of inefficiencies, but because a different political party might come in within that long time horizon and then the entire project gets fucked. That's a pretty decent risk.

>>4776560
Yes, you're right. Strawman is the wrong word. "Bullshit" would have been better.

>>4776551
>The trick to making home solar really work in the here and now simply lies with using less energy. I don't mean having a lower quality of life, I mean having the same or higher quality of life while still using less energy.
The trick to making solar work is not that. You need to do two things.

1- Reduce energy consumption by a factor of 100 or more for more northern climes and/or increase cost efficiency by about 100 times. (Seems highly unlikely.

And 2- Figure out a way to store the energy for the night, for cloudy days, and so on. This is even a harder problem to solve than 1.
See:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

>>4776574
>better not be expecting solar to be pv's

could just cover deserts in solar farms, and ship it across countries

fuck nature.

>>4776569
You realize you're committing several fallacies and dishonest arguments, yes?

>>4776583
>Ship it across countries
How do you propose to ship the solar from Europe to America, or something similar, because that is what would be required. You do know when it's night in America, it stays night for /all/ of America at the same time for an extended period of time, right? Also transmission costs, etc.

>>4776584
you realise that i give no fucks and you're replying on a board instead of sciencing to create my reactor right?

>>4776551
a lightbulb costs 1 dollar. and lasts for 750 hours
a led lightbulb costs 20 dollars and lasts for 50000 hours

Just purely based upon bulb cost everyone should switch over. But they also use so much less energy. Why doesn't everyone use led?

>>4776589
Actually, I am creating the reactor. The main obstacle to getting one build is lack of government funding, and an activity like this is the perfect one (or at least a good one) to obtain government funding.

i know nothing about this.

waste?

>>4776551
>Solar capacity basically doubles each year and has done so for the last 4 years. Solar efficiency has gone up 12% in the last 6 years with no signs that we're hitting a theoretical materials limit.

The fundamental problem isn't panel efficiency. It's the fact that daily insolation at Earth's surface is less than 300 watts per square meter averaged over the day even under ideal conditions. No matter how efficient the PVs get, they cannot get more energy than the sun actually provides.

That is an utterly pitiful amount of energy, requiring massive amounts of land to produce anything approaching what nuclear power stations provide. This means massive ecological damage and a hell of a lot of land unusable for other purposes.

Nevermind the fact that solar cell production is some of the dirtiest manufacturing in the world in terms of waste product.

>>4776597
It [LFTR] has radioactive waste like all fission processes, but due to the much higher "burn up" efficiency of a LFTR compared to a conventional reactor, we're talking about 100x or better less waste. Also, because of the reprocessing inherent to the system, the waste will only be above background levels for about 300 years instead of 10,000+ years.

>>4776574

>I talk about small-scale solar for the individual home
>you start up about national solar storage and nonsense that completely ignores the strengths of solar
>your first article admits that small-scale solar can completely power a home and that the storage for it already exists and can be bought economically

And the guy in your article isn't even trying to have an energy-efficient household. He just has the panels to save on utility bills. Solar's strength doesn't lie in making gigantic power plants of 2+ Gigawatts, it lies in the local generation and distribution of electricity on the 1-2 MW level. The upshot of this is that when a panel goes down, it isn't a big deal and using an electric grid that's run by smart IT the electricity can be redirected on a local scale so that brownouts and blackouts are a thing of the past.

Solar's true strength lies in the ability to create a power grid not predicated on creating and selling more electricity but by selling less, and by creating a local grid that can disengage when damaged but reintegrate fractally.

Seems to me like you haven't thought out the implications of a home that has massively reduced energy usage in terms of what becomes viable.

>>4776587

Because LED is *awful* for interior decorating.

>>4776597
never mind i just read up on it quick and this seems like the fucking ballz -- it can actually be used to get rid of old-style nuclear reactor waste.

the only possible reason to oppose this is that it still involves radioactive materials, and since humans are mostly fuckwits someone somewhere is going to fuck up and release radioactive material into the environment. most likely some truck tipping over, etc. also provides a target for terrorists. not the best arguments.

>>4776612
Then you will not have power during the night, or cloudy days, no at higher latitudes. This is borderline acceptable for crazy greens for their residential, but this is utterly unacceptable for industry use.

Do you like aluminum smelting, /the internet/, refrigeration, and various other modern amenities?

Your local power generation bonus is laughable. It doesn't overcome its weakness which is reliable cheap power 24 7 in all locations independent of the weather.

>>4776593

I told you before and I'll tell you again, that the government is more of a problem than it is worth to you. You'll have to bribe it anyway regulation-wise, but you shouldn't get the moolah from them.

You need to research the bond funds. Some bond funds, hold hundreds of billions in capital. They literally have no good places to put their money for the long term except in government bonds/corporation bonds. Many of them diversify into alternative investments, and this is exactly the kind of investment a good finance whizz could create some neat derivatives for to get investors to stump up capital for.

Just because the road is not in front of you, doesn't mean you shouldn't make one.

>>4776620
Note that due to the lack of a pressurized core in the LFTR, the potential for explosion is so much less.

Also, a conventional reactor where water is in close proximity to the fission products, which creates the potential for it to react with the water and get airborn. For a LFTR, most of the fission products and transuranics are pefectly happy staying in solution, so much less opportunity for it to get airborn and into the environment.

Also, consider the alternative. Coal kills more people every day from such trivial things like mining accidents than the number of people killed by nuclear power plants in the recorded history of mankind, which is less than 10.

>>4776588
ZOMG HOW DO WE TRANSPORT ELECTRICITIES YOU GUISE

near infinite source, who cares about losses through transmission.

>>4776625
>Bribe US officials to break the regulations /in favor/ of a new kind of nuclear plant.

>>4776629

Er... just about everybody cares?

Go do some economics kid.

>>4776629
>Near infinite resource
Last I checked solar panels and long distance transmission lines aren't free.

Going to answer the main complaints: nighttime, clouds, high latitudes?

>>4776633

No Mr Bond. I expect you to Lie.

>>4776639

Seriously, regulators the world over, do not have advanced knowledge of the subjects they seek to regulate and their main instincts are very conservative.

If you lie big enough, and are in control, nobody will find out, esp. if their self interest is aligned with yours. It always amazes me how intelligent people refuse to use deception because of conditioning, despite the fact they are marvellously better placed to make it fly.

>>4776637
>>4776635

>dumb enough to not read an email field in reverse

srs bsnss

>>4776527
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isnt that what Flibe plans to do?

>>4776646
AFAIK, correct. Kirk doesn't talk about his business plans on the forums though, so I don't know.

>>4776637

Anyway, what about those (hypothetical) tiny thorium reactors for little towns? You know the ones, I don't know the name of them.

>>4776623

>Then you will not have power during the night

Evidenced by your articles there already exist batteries cheap enough to maintain energy storage for a household.

>but this is utterly unacceptable for industry use

I didn't say this was for industry use but that same energy usage reduction I mentioned for homes will extend to industry as well. This energy productivity can and will give expanding returns, instead of diminishing ones, because as you start to use less energy, new opportunity opens up that allow you to shed old, inefficient methods with new, efficient ones, therefore allowing to use even less energy. Example: The Empire State Building

The Empire State Building underwent a retrofit in 2011, replacing old lighting with new lighting and old windows with new heat reflecting kinds. This, combined with an upgraded internal electrical control system cut the cooling load in the building by 33%, at a cost 23.4 million dollars USD. These retrofits allowed the retrofitters to renovate smaller, newer chilling systems instead of replacing older, less efficient ones. This opportunity saved the building 17 million dollars, paying for the majority of the retrofit alone. The energy savings totaled 4.4 million dollars annually, which means the breakeven point was less than 2 years.

This sort of savings is not an outlier nor is it a special case study. Indeed this sort of savings can happen in almost every office building and industrial park in America.

>>4776653
>Evidenced by your articles there already exist batteries cheap enough to maintain energy storage for a household.
>[Article claims that there is no (cheap) solution for a national grid.]
>[You somehow conclude this shows there is a cheap solution for everyone individually.]

Were you born retarded, or were you dropped on your head as a baby? Usually economies of scale go in the direction of making the thing for more people cheaper per person, instead of your deluded fantasies.

When he talks about his own home setup, that's not extendable to everyone. There's insufficient lead, and it actually is pretty costly.

>>4776653
Also, the saving you cite are 33%, not the ~10,000% that would be needed. You would know that if you ever bothered to do the math.

>>4776656

>0.02$ per 100g in bulk
>costly

>>4776657

You don't give a reason why energy consumption has to decline by a factor of 100 other than that you say so.

>>4776659
Did you read the part in the article where it details how much lead this would require for everyone, and how that's more than the estimated amounts accessible at current prices? Did you miss the part where this would result in far higher prices?

The conclusion of the article is exactly opposite of your position, so it's quite odd that you claim it in support. Perhaps you have a reading problem.

>>4776662

>accessible at present
>what is time preference

>>4776662

quit arguing with that retard and answer some serious questions:

>>4776648

>>4776639

At least I'm interested in the subject, that other guy is just yanking your chain ffs.

>>4776660

Citing do-the-math:
>This battery would demand 5 trillion kg (5 billion tons) of lead.
>A USGS report from 2011 reports 80 million tons (Mt) of lead in known reserves worldwide, with 7 Mt in the U.S. A note in the report indicates that the recent demonstration of lead associated with zinc, silver, and copper deposits places the estimated (undiscovered) lead resources of the world at 1.5 billion tons.

>5 billion tons for US battery
>1.5 billion tons estimated acccessible lead worldwide.

Yea... about that.

How are you going to keep residential homes light during the night? There's not enough accessible lead in the ground for the US, let alone the whole world. Your 33% efficiency savings are irrelevant.

>>4776648
There is a limit to how small the reactor can get and stay cost efficient. There's a smaller limit to how small it can get and stay safe.

You need a large enough blanket salt around the core (or equivalently a large enough salt pool for a 1 fluid design) to absorb enough neutrons for breakeven. Any smaller and too many neutrons are lost.

I want to say this is around 100 MW reactor, but I don't recall. In that neighborhood at least.

>>4776669

Ok, how physically large is one of these mini-reactors and what is the minimum safe distance from one? i.e. total land space taken up by a project for a 100MW reactor (which I assume can power about 10,000 homes of average power consumption per year).

And the big question: what would be the total cost of building reactor (ignoring the issues of regulations, land purchasing etc, just the reactor being manufactured).

>>4776697

Ima doing this to get a handle on the basic numbers, I don't need accuracy to ten decimal places.

Knowing the proportions, relationships between basic numbers, is important to me. Then I can tell when I'm hearing bullshit or good sense from somebody else talking about energy production etc.

>>4776697
>Ok, how physically large is one of these mini-reactors and what is the minimum safe distance from one?
How much of a worst-case scenario are we talking? People do work in such places, and are almost always quite fine.

>And the big question: what would be the total cost of building reactor (ignoring the issues of regulations, land purchasing etc, just the reactor being manufactured).
Isn't it? I won't quote estimates because I don't know enough, and there's enough disagreement and uncertainty. The possibility of being cheaper than conventional coal remains a possibility, especially if the regulations are asinine.

>>4776697

Minimum safe distance for a molten salt reactor doesn't exist. Ice plug being constantly cooled by a hydrogen spray at the bottom leading into a dump tank. Power shuts off, hydrogen stops, ice plug melts, molten salt flows into dump tank where it hardens. It'd be a pain in the ass to get the salt back out but it probably wouldn't end up being more mess than having to fix a septic tank for a small-scale reactor. The reactor would be ugly though, best to keep it out of sight.

>>4776704

Let's say I'm the mayor of the village, and want to assure my fellow mammals that the nuclear reactor (in Alaska say, because power is a problem in those kinds of places I think) that it's totally safe, because even if a zombie Osama came back and 'rigged it to blow' i.e. a meltdown, it would be contained within X metres/miles.

When you live what is practically a desert, you're fine with nuclear power so long as it's far enough away that it wouldn't matter if it did go wrong. (same reason why energy production may eventually be mostly done in space and piped down to earth (it's not as far as people think up there)).

>>4776704

Well, if it's cheaper than coal, then it'd be unethical not to use it. Conventional coal, if I remember, is the cheapest energy source we have available, esp. in india/china.

But crap, as you well know, for other reasons.

Educated liberals/libertarians tend to support nuclear. We are talking about goddamn hippies here. They are the creationists of the left, thats how stupid they are, or maybe even worse. Just read naturalnews.com and weep:

http://www.naturalnews.com/

NUCULAR IS EVUL

I remember reading something which exposed this panacea after I initially heard of it from the tinfoil hat crowd, which is generally Libertarian-friendly. I haven't wasted my time with it since. I'm checking out of this thread. Good night.

>>4776711
Nuclear reactors (ESPECIALLY Thorium based ones) will not "blow". A meltdown of Chernobyl/Fukushima proportions involves the waste storage melting through the tank and spreading fallout. This rarely happens, though.
A thorium reactor averts the chance of such a meltdown because it uses a frozen salt "plug" above the storage tank. If the reactor heats up accidentally, the plug will eventually melt and the waste will drop into the storage tank. Because of the materials used (correct me if I'm wrong), the waste gardens quickly, and greatly reduces the chance of the tank walls melting.
So you could place the reactor much closer to the town than a uranium reactor, reducing transportation costs and allowing easy accessibility for new jobs.

>>4776712
RADIATIOACTIVE TOCXICS FOR BILLIUNS OF YAARS

>>4776724
Well, if you can't raise complaints, or even remember the article, then you're just borderline trolling by coming in here and saying that.

>>4776593
>Actually, I am creating the reactor.

do tell! what part are you working on?

just to throw a spanner in the works; the actual way to store power (done now in the uk) is to power a cryogenic air plant with excess power. you store cryogenic liquid air, very easy and safe, and when you need to provide power back to the grid the power is generated in a traditional manner with turbines from liquid air rapidly expanding into gaseous air. it's about as efficient as batteries, but it's very low-tech and has no real upper size limits for feasibility.

>>4777827
Cost estimates?

So when are the first ones going to be built?

>>4778795
When humanity stops being a pussy for things that aren't so hard to comprehend or we get the media to spread the word that they are good.

Unapologetic extreme leftist here.
I love nuclear power. If it's done right.

>>4778263

full info here:
http://www.highview-power.com/wordpress/?page_id=1320