/sci/ - Science & Math

Since I know there are quite a few thoriumfags on /sci/, you might want to know there is a kickstarter going on right now for a new independent documentary about the LFTR. Looks pretty good IMHO.

http://www.kick---starter.com/projects/1820052608/the-good-reactor-0

>>5810178
There's enough coal to burn several years in advance. Why exploring so early, let's wait until we really need, maybe with luck we don't have to need anymore when we go extinct.

>>5810195

b-but global warming...

>>5810178
thorium shitposting? yes please!

>>5810195
>Mr. A: okay, the coal is gone, let's make those thorium plants!
>Mr. S: we can't
>Mr. A: why not???
>Mr. S: because we needed coal to produce the raw materials to make those plants
>Mr. A: why didn't anyone say that!!??
>Mr. S: we did, ever year, for the last twenty years
>Mr. A: well, it's your fault for not making us listen!
This is how it's gonna go and when it does, I'll kill Mr. A.

>>5810214

>muh thorium

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html

All hail based China, land of Thorium.

obligatory

>>5810187

Seems interesting, donated ;)

>>5810223

awesome.

So have they solved the corrosive salt problems yet?

>>5810220
That does not actually contain any counter-arguments at all - just ad hominem.
I guess that is the best you can do?

>>5810254

its a meme from pol

>>5810223
i don wanna buy a chinamen reactor ;_;

I find it funny that the Thoriumooks acknowledge that Uranium-based nuclear power only came about due to military needs, and yet they continue to support Thorium and expect the government to support it, even though there's zero military need for Thorium.

Where did each of you learn about Thorium? I have only heard about it here.

>>5810368
in a post cold war era i don't think the military can get rid of its plutonium fast enough.
also there's a bit of murmuring among the brass about small modular reactors using thorium; very easy way to power a base or command center out in the middle of nowhere or on the move, don't need to worry as much about supply lines for power (just for vehicle fuel)

>>5810368
With the currently growing military hard-on for EM-accelerated weapons, the need for highly compact and durable power stations is probably going to increase.

Cue LFTR.

>>5810376

http://energyfromthorium.com/

>>5810392

When the military needs power, it resorts to petroleum-fueled generators. The military is first in line for oil. Far ahead of you mooks. Why would you believe it EVER has to economize?

And recall well when we demand it economize, we get this nonsense:

http://joemiller.us/2013/05/so-much-for-sequestration-military-purchases-green-fuel-at-59-per-gallon/

$60/gal for jet fuel. Nobody got fired or went to jail for it. Why do you mooks keep believing the military looks at energy like you commuters do? THEY DON'T.

>>5810377

So you're covering your Thorium hard-on by claiming yet another unsubstantiated rumor about murmurs? The military already tried portable nuclear reactors. They didn't want them. They just burn through as much gasoline, diesel and kerosene (jet fuel) as they need, because they have the guns and you don't dare oppose them when they requisition petroleum. Your Congress is controlled by the Liberal Petroleum Party and the Conservative Petroleum Party. Guess what their common ground is? Hint: It rhymes with OIL.

What about LENR?
http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3913

>>5810427

Probably a scam, but there is always a possibility.

>>5810414
>The military already tried portable nuclear reactors. They didn't want them.
well, yeah, i wouldn't want a portal BWR either, sounds like a shit sandwich

also your post makes you sound like angry simian guy. that's not good

>>5810464

That's Violent Simian guy, and that's fantastic, not just good. You need to learn to accept what is, instead of dreamily dreaming of a better world from your messed-up unsexed-nerd POV.

The leading cause of nerd frustration today is in either not understanding that economics is 99.9% why anything happens, or in understanding it but not accepting it. Which one are you?

>>5810544
wait
are you making the "big buisness will block this" argument? that's a little conspiracy-y and also not realistic.
if something is good enough, it'll be brought to market somehow, probably by a much smaller corporation trying to make a quick buck that isn't thinking long term

plus there are lots of ways to make good return on something like this. make a similar proprietary system to what current fuel manufacturers do, maybe charge for specialized maintenance ect.
you're arguing that this doesn't make economic sense and will never make it to market when it's basically the opposite.
hence china pouring billions into it. which sucks because they'll probably get there first and make a killing

Oh look, lftr thread. Dumping some pics.

>>5812354

>>5812361

>>5810178

>>5810187
>kickstarter
Wait, what Awes...
>for a documentary
Ah, shoot!

That's nice, but no thanks. Call me back when they'll made a KS to build in an actual plant. Even a small experimental one.

Right now the 2011 documentary as already everything that need to be told:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

>>5812387

Well, building a LFTR is slightly beyond the scope of Kickstarter funding.. Altrough after Oculus and Star Citizen showed how effective crowdfunding can be, perhaps its not that of a bad idea.

>>5812391
>all donations $10,000 and up: free electricity for the next three decades
>the $10,000,000 donation: all fuel elements will bear your name carved on them before loading into the reactor. 1/1 available

So, serious question friends: If thorium reactors are so great, why is no one building them? We have no more need for plutonium and if all these pretty infographics are true, these Thorium reactors should be much cheaper ans efficient than Uranium reactors, so energy companies should be bustling to build them.

>>5812395
>If thorium reactors are so great, why is no one building them?
But they are:
>>5810223
>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html

>>5812394

>LFTR
>solid fuel elements

nope.

>>5812412
Interesting, it makes sense the Chinese would grab the initiative here. But what about the western nations?

>>5812417
Western nations are too affected by the idiotic omgevulatumz!!!-bloc of the greenies.

>>5812424
>greenies
It's not the ecological movement that is stopping Thorium from being developed.

I haven't seen a single ecologist ever protest against thorium.

>>5812437

http://pche-sts.blogspot.cz/2012/05/disinformation-and-anti-propaganda.html

Anti-nuclear ecologists dont particularly like it, because its still nucular, and competes with their renewables.

>>5812445
>a relatively small group of people (or is it only one man with nothing better to do?)
No, that's not enough to stop the plant development.

There is moron everywhere. Most ecologist I talk with agree reducing the nuclear waste confinment in quantity and in time like Thorium does would be a great improvement and at least a nice transitional form of enrgy up until Fusion is mastered. This link doe snot reflect on the opinion of ecologists.

The reason the occident doesn't develop Thorium are economical fears. No one want to risk themselves in a new technology of this magnitude in the current situation.

>>5812479
> The reason the occident doesn't develop Thorium are economical fears. No one want to risk themselves in a new technology of this magnitude in the current situation.

Nice tongueplay. You must eat pussy well. The truth is that risk avoidance of that nature today is being done because the rich are cashing out Western society. They are purposefully destroying the middle class while planning their own retreats to South America and the like. Why else did the Bush Family buy 100K acres in Paraguay?

>>5812395
> If thorium reactors are so great, why is no one building them?

Because they're not great, per se. And they don't fulfill the function that civilian nuclear power production fulfilled in the first place: The unholy marriage to the military.

We ONLY have civilian nuclear power as a side effect of a military nuclear establishment. Thorium as ZERO weapon potential. Therefore we have ZERO Thorium commerical power production.

Even if people were willing to break out of the paradigm, they would STILL have to face massive expenditure to transform basic Thorium power theory into 100s, maybe 1000s of Thorium reactors across the world. Even though the investment would be amortized, that's still too much money spent for Westerners.

So that's a double hit. And it explains why the slants and dotheads are trying Thorium. They don't have stupid White mental blocks. They might actually succeed in making commercial Thorium power, while the West becomes Mulatto and consumes itself in civil wars driven by stupidity and hate.

>>5812437
Which is why I specified that the group of idiots that fear nuclear power of the larger group of greenies as being the culprit.

Reading comprehension is not you.

>>5812674
Well, reading comprehension might be the problem indeed, because I have reread 5 times your post already and I still can't get what the fuck you are trying to mean.

aren't flouride salts and their derivatives pretty corrosive? supposedly when you put them in a nuclear reactor they end up making HF, just something to consider

>>5812674
You expect me to comprehend "omgevulatumz" as "idiots who fear nuclear power"?

I took that for a massive typo.

>>5812702

There is no HF production during operation, that happens only if the salts are cooled, over many decades. It can be avoided by correctly defueling the salts.

Fluoride salts are inert in Hastelloy-N, the material proposed or the reactor.

S1: If we were to build Thorium reactors all our energy problems would be solved.

S2: We will never build Thorium reactors.

S1 is not falsified, therefore it is true.

>>5812762
>S1 is not falsified, therefore it is true.
That is a statement no one has ever made.

>>5812395
there are a couple countries dabbling in it right now
china is basically copying the MSRE from oakridge
i think norway is working on it
as well as india

of course i think india and norway are just focusing on solid thorium blanket breeder type designs which are just retrofits to their existing boiling water reactors.

>>5813006
also the diehard greenies tend to be against anything nuclear no matter what, so they're an obstacle
mind you the biggest obstacle is the cultural aversion to nuclear energy.
>nuclear power? you mean like fukushima? no thanks!
that kind of thing

>>5812844

That is incorrect. I just made it.

This is a logic lesson.

>>5812417
Nations with thorium research initiatives:
1) China. Came an raided the ORNL archives, have a five-year plan to build prototype LFTR reactor.
2) India. Massive thorium reserves, but are more comfortable with the CANDU technology, so they are looking at solid-oxides instead. Already have several research thorium reactors.
3) Japan. Had a research initiative, but new nuclear projects are on hold due to Fukushima hysteria.
4) UK. Weinberg Foundation is going to build a prototype LFTR.
5) Czech Republic. One of their universities specializes in LFTR.
6) US. Sorenson's company FliBe wants to design a small LFTR for the military. Sadly it has to compete with a bunch of other emerging nuclear technologies and 4th generation reactors. For example, Bill Gates is backing the traveling wave reactor instead.

The thing that really gets me is that with all the billions we've spent on pie-in-the-sky fusion research we could have developed hundreds of LFTRs by now!

True facts in a bullshit thread:
1) Thorium isn't magic.
2) Thorium reactors are all breeder reactors, and most of the claimed benefits are simply benefits of breeder technology, and are not specific to thorium.
3) Uranium-based breeders are a much better understood and more highly developed technology, based on much cheaper, more available fuel.
4) Any kind of breeder reactor poses a vastly larger weapon proliferation risk than any kind of non-breeder reactor.
5) There are many, many advanced reactor designs which promise higher efficiency, lower cost, greater safety, and less waste. The LFTR does not stand out among them by any standard other than popularity with a cult of ignorant laymen and in a purely negative way by depending on remarkably expensive materials and generally posing extraordinary technical challenges.

>>5813012
Again, no significant amount of ecologists are against it. The one who are are to little to be of any influence whatsoever.

More over, there are several decades old Nuclear plant that need to be put out of work and most populations would be glad to have a safer source of energy.

When it come to LFTR in public opinion, it's either "what's the fuck is LFTR?" or a genuine interest in it and an agreement that this is better that what we currently have. No big groups as ever protested against it.

The blockage is on an higher level of decision, but NOT in the public opinion.

I haven't met IRL an ecologist who is against it.

>>5813025
> The thing that really gets me is that with all the billions we've spent on pie-in-the-sky fusion research we could have developed hundreds of LFTRs by now!

Now you're starting to catch on. None of this is about doing what's right for the majority of people. Fusion is sucking up money because there are 1000s of elites who are living off the proceeds of the money injected into the system. Corporate executives, government admininstrators, research scientists, and academic admininstrators. A friend of mine calls these people the "Praetorian Class". That's exactly what they are. And you're the wad. Just one of the common people, taxed and fee'd by all levels of your government so that 40%-60% of your income (because you're a commoner, you largely subsist on wages and periodic compensation) is summarily confiscated to pay for all these parasites.

>>5813025
>compete with traveling wave reactor
oh lord no. TWRs are not for a long time, mostly because that's a whole other level of bullshit with regards to heat dissipation and efficient heat capture from the reaction (specially since the hot zone actually moves over time), plus some other issues with it.
it's a REALLY cool idea and a neat take on the fast breeder concept, but don't get too excited

>>5813126
you could make your point without coming off like a crazier member of the 99% movement, which kind of invalidates your previous arguments.

>>5813086
all quite true, but
>The LFTR does not stand out among them by any standard
mostly it's the combination of very efficient fuel burn up from continuous th232->u233 breeding as well as the extremely high passive safety.
but yes this could indeed be a weapons breeder, if you're going with the continuous reprocessing and online refueling design....which is very nice but not critical. one-through designs more completely consume things and are much more dangerous to "stick your hand in the pot" to pull out some breeded weapons grade fuel....if you know what i mean.
plus i just like dumb simple safe stuff that doesn't require upkeep

>>5813086
>2) Thorium reactors are all breeder reactors, and most of the claimed benefits are simply benefits of breeder technology, and are not specific to thorium.
>5) There are many, many advanced reactor designs which promise higher efficiency, lower cost, greater safety, and less waste. The LFTR does not stand out among them by any standard other than popularity with a cult of ignorant laymen and in a purely negative way by depending on remarkably expensive materials and generally posing extraordinary technical challenges.
This a billion times.
Also, the main reason why no breeder reactor has ever been developed in significant numbers, is that there's no shortage of either Uranium whatsoever nor any shortage of space to put all the radioactive waste in the end.
You dig some Uranium out of the ground, out it in some Zirconium rods, burn it, then throw it away.
It's cheap, it's efficient, it's safe, it can be centralized, etc, etc. Reprocessing is always associated with risk that are simply not present if you fuel never leaves the solid state and is always associated with huge costs.
There is just no reason for it whatsoever, maybe in a few decades or centuries when Uranium runs dry, but certainly not now.

>>5813169

I can't make my point without saying facts that you won't accept anyway. But I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to all the lurkers who read and don't post. You're just a sounding board who strengthens what I've said. You serve no other purpose.

>>5813200
>the main reason why no breeder reactor has ever been developed in significant numbers, is that there's no shortage of either Uranium whatsoever nor any shortage of space to put all the radioactive waste in the end.
not really
if you're talking about liquid metal fast breeders, those mostly fail because the maintenance and upkeep and safety is a nightmare, especially with pure sodium metal floating around, also a big problem has always been efficiently extracting the heat. it's just a huge engineering headache, much like magnetic confinement fusion sadly.

>>5813213
ok, i'll be here keeping your story straight.

but seriously you sound a lot like violent simian guy. are you SURE you're not him?

>>5813169

At any rate, Thorium isn't going to happen here. We've a petroleum and uranium culture, for reasons which can't change, and when they do change due to depletion, there won't be money to invest in Thorium power production anyway. Capital formation in the USA depends on petroleum. Period. Without the massive petroleum input, you just can't get the massive capital output.

>>5813217

Firstly I don't need you keeping track of my story. I keep saying what's obvious. You don't even have to be very smart to just repeat what's obvious.

Secondly I never said I'm not Violent Simian Guy. Because I am VSG. Why does that even matter?

>>5813239
>Because I am VSG
oh...

>>5813217
While it's true that all high temperature reactors (i.e. cooled by something other than water) have proven high-maintenance and uneconomical to operate (and, by the way, let that be a hint to people who think molten salt reactors are a good idea), it is also true that one of the main reasons breeder reactors for power haven't been seen as worthwhile is that natural uranium is very plentiful and accessible, and enrichment is cheaper and simpler than breeding.

I personally think that the future is in subcritical fission-fragment reactors fuelled by near-pure U235 and which promptly burn up all of their own waste on-site. As we get better at the chemistry and accelerator or fusor neutron sources, this is going to become a no-brainer for its cleanness, safety, reliability, simplicity, efficiency, lack of moving parts or heat-related issues, and highly responsive peaking capability (important with the increasing use of solar and wind power).

>>5813239
>VSG
Of all the old namefags from the dark beginnings of /sci/, YOU had to be the one to stick around.

>>5813513
>I personally think that the future is in subcritical fission-fragment reactors fuelled by near-pure U235 and which promptly burn up all of their own waste on-site.
i've heard about those. similar to "beam fission" reactors right?
doesn't that introduce a lot more energy extraction problems due to heat dissipation within the neutron target and various other materials challenges?

>>5813544
Haven't heard of "beam fission". Is that like the "energy amplifier" designs based on a particle accelerator neutron source?

Look up "dusty plasma fission", or just "fission fragment reactor". I'm talking about a version of this in a subcritical configuration with an accelerator or fusion neutron source (or some combination of both), so you can burn up waste and rapidly throttle it to meet power demands.

One of the nice things that helps make it simple is that nearly all of the delayed neutrons are generated away from the fuel mass, because they come from fission fragments, which in these designs zip off as soon as fission happens. So you can make it quite close to being prompt critical without worrying about it going delayed supercritical, and have very large power outputs for small neutron inputs.

>doesn't that introduce a lot more energy extraction problems
No, most of the energy comes out as free fission fragments, which are charged particles moving at relativistic speeds through a vacuum. It's already almost electricity, so you can convert it easily and with very high efficiency.

You lose around 10% of fission energy to energetic neutrons, fragment decay, and trapped fragments (and can only get standard thermal efficiencies out of these, if you bother, or you'd to get super-clever with some kind of neutron/beta/alpha-voltaic system to do better, though probably neither is worthwhile), but the free fragment energy can be converted very easily with near-100% efficiency, and you can also separate your fragments by mass/charge ratio in the same process, doing nearly all of the work of separating the waste by element and isotope, so you can move them to short-term decay storage, to the burnup area or disposal accelerator, or to the valuable byproduct outlets.

>>5813528
hes not even a namefag, thats the thing, he just has some rather stupid beliefs he holds onto very very strongly and posts the same shit with the same posting pattern so often people usually recognize his posts

>>5813618
He might as well be. But that aspect is beside the point. So many more interesting posters have gone away.

But that guy. He. Is. Still. Here.

>>5813239

Hello friend.

>use fusion reactor as a neutron source (lose energy)
>use neutrons to transmute thorium
>burn the uranium from the thorium
>use those neutrons for energy, use all the energy off burning uranium for fuel

thorium reactors usually don't get enough neutrons being produced for fission to achieve a constant reaction

>>5813672

They get eounggh to be self sufficient.

>>5810178
>2012
>Still using steam for energy
>SHYGDDT

>>5813774
>eounggh

How do you even?

The funny thing is, at the rate Thorium is being developed, we may well get fusion working first!
The polywell is looking pretty good so far based on the milestone reports and the funding they're getting.

>>5813787
Yeah, I want a dusty plasma reactor!
>Bypassing the Carnot limit all day erry day
>90% efficiency
>also can be used as an incredibly efficient nuclear rocket, second in specific impulse only to antimatter rockets

>>5813795

sorry im drunk

>>5813808
Or an orbital reactor!

Or something like a quantum levitation reactor.

Open your minds, this isnt the fucking 30's.

http://www.minds.com/blog/view/101140/quantum-levitation-demonstration-at-north-museum

All you need is the rotation. Skip the fucking middle man!!!!

I want antimatter capture rings in the ionosphere.

>>5813808
>>also can be used as an incredibly efficient nuclear rocket, second in specific impulse only to antimatter rockets
FUND IT!!!

>yeah, we're just making a small experimental reactor
>THAT TAKES US TO THE INFINITY AND BEYOND
>MUHAHAHHAHAHAHAA!!!!!

>>5813774
Only the few, really efficient ones do.
That's pretty much one of the only engineering challenges that are slowing us from thorium energy.

>>5813608
what you're describing is basically what i had come to know as the fission beam design, an external neutron source blasting a target to make localized subcritical fission. it's a neat idea...
but i have very little faith in capturing particles for energy. it's much more efficient yes, the problem is pulling the energy out of it without impacting that efficiency too much. and there's lots of gremlins like how to capture them efficiently from all angles without losses from the fragments just bouncing weirdly around even in a magnetic field ect. you seem to be recreating the polywell efficiency problem.

it has lots of cool elements but i suspect it'd run into similar problems fusion has. namely that age-old enemy TURBULENCE
FUCK TURBULENCE

hail, Thorium!!

>tfw China will get it first

>>5814645

better than noone. They develop it, we steal the design. They do it all the time, we can do it once.

More vaporware like cold fusion.

>>5813845
Just burn coal to get the required energy.

>>5813618

What's so stupid about my beliefs about the documented and proven aspects of nuclear exploitation technology in the Western World? (Including the Nips.) I'm right. That's the core of it. I'm right about nuketech merely being a spinoff of the military. You can't create a Thorium-based nuketech from that, since Thorium has no military application.

I'm right and you just can't stand it. Your red-faced not-standing-it is part of your Violent Simian heritage. You can't get away from it, on average. That what it means to be Human: To prefer to fling poo rather than intelligently discuss things. The Human race is far too stupid on the whole to actually survive. It's going extinct within the next several million years. Guaranteed.

Even if you do see the Thorium Age, the power supplied to these Violent Simians across the world will only last so long. Extinction is coming anyway. So... why even try? Smoke a blunt, drink a 40, and stick your dick in some ho. It's all the same.

>>5813787

We don't use steam for energy in the sense of origination. It's a working fluid. We could use molten salt more directly, if you love killing workers with it, and causing spills.

The issue is direct energy use is often not practical, for entirely sound engineering reasons. That's what makes petroleum such a monstrous winner in the energy game: You can use it directly. And that's what will make the 22nd Century totally blow donkey dicks for the survivors of the Resource Wars... without petroleum, more indirect explotations will become mainstream. Desperate people really WILL have to shovel coal into a firebox in order to get their cobbled-up car down the potholed street. Efforts to gasify and liquify coal will merely make it equally unaffordable.

And still, Thorium will remain an idea. Some Slantcities and Zippervilles will tap into a Thorium power network, but that's really IT for Thorium power exploitation for Humanity in general (at least, those who survive the one-two body slams of the Resource Wars and the Last War).

>>5813086
>3) Uranium-based breeders are ... based on much cheaper, more available fuel.
Whaaaat? All uranium based reactors require the uncommon isotopes of uranium, requiring very expensive refining. And if you are talking about solid fueled designs, then you have the expense of constructing and disposing of the fuel rods.

Thorium is 4x as common as uranium and only has one common isotope, so no refining required. And with LFTR, you simply dissolve it in the fuel salts. Thorium is expected to be a $20k/year expense for a power reactor vs. $50 million/year for uranium fuel rods.

>>5813200
>It's cheap, it's efficient, it's safe,
Solid uranium fuel is none of those things.
1) The uranium requires refinement for the appropriate isotope mix.
2) It is horrifically inefficient. Only a few percent of the uranium in a fuel rod is fissioned before it is put into the waste stream.
3) Far from safe, hence all the drama about waste disposal.

>>5813808
Yeah, but these fission-fragment concepts haven't even reached the prototype stage! They are all paper designs, whose real-world engineering problems have not even been approached. LFTR has the advantage that we are modernizing and developing a successful reactor that was working forty years ago.

>>5814699
We don't even need to steal the design, because they stole it from ORNL! China will be more useful as an example and an opponent. Their working LFTRs will finally prompt our own agencies to get off their butts and fund competing programs, purely for political reasons. Remember, NASA got ten times the funding when we were competing against the Russkies in the Space Race.

was the Oak Ridge liquid salt reactor even using thorium?

>>5815093
> Thorium is 4x as common as uranium and only has one common isotope, so no refining required. And with LFTR, you simply dissolve it in the fuel salts. Thorium is expected to be a $20k/year expense for a power reactor vs. $50 million/year for uranium fuel rods.

And yet, the Western nuclear establishment does absolutely nothing to get into Thorium power production.

That says everything you need to know about what's really going on. When an industry prefers to spend $50 million on a consumable that could be transformed into $20 thousand expense, there's OBVIOUSLY a political reason preventing the change. In the West, the real reason is huge and systemic; the nuclear power industry is merely a spinoff of the military. It's really a means of placating the public for all the money blown on making the fine nuclear navies of the USA and Europe.

Thorium can't do anything for the miltiary, so it will never be adopted in the West. This is so obvious that it hurts to watch people dither around the issue.

>>5815004
>You can't create a Thorium-based nuketech from that, since Thorium has no military application.
But can't you precisely spin that in a selling point. The cold war era is more or less over and the public tendency is to diminish the amount of Nuclear warheads.

This mean we are in an era where an LFTR would be very appropriate.

>>5815238

Typically, you're not listening. Civilian nuclear power never made sense. It was too dangerous, and only spun off the hugely expensive military process of taming the atom. Without the military's need for nuclear weapons, civilian nuclear power would have NEVER happened.

The danger may have mitigated in Thorium's case, but the huge cost of development remains. Westerners are cheaper than Jews. They won't pay that, unless they're scared into doing it. And there's no scare factor here. And there's no Thorium use WITHIN the scare factor anyway.

What will literally happen is that Westerners will enter a stage of banana republic styled brownouts of their electrical networks. They will endure these things while still refusing to invest in Thorium development. Such development will become too expensive in real terms, so the prime time to do it, is passing anyway. To pass the blame, Westerners will just demonize Islam some more.

The entire idea of how to really INVEST is lost in the West. We only do what makes money NOW NOW NOW, screaming incoherently like that media creature Jim Cramer, not what produces sustainable business for decades into the future.

Humans may be the dumbest higher lifeform, ever, but Westerners are the pinnacle of dumbness within Humanity... because they're so well educated that they should know better and act appropriately, YET THEY REFUSE.

>>5815264
So, let me get this straight, to the one who say "hey people, the occident isn't aware/isn't interested int he LFTR plant, let's bring awareness to rise their interest and educate them about it", you basically says "this is useless, it will not work because people aren't interested in the LFTR and aren't educated enough"

>>5815093
>Thorium is 4x as common as uranium and only has one common isotope, so no refining required.
Thorium is 4x as ABUNDANT as uranium, in the Earth's crust. However, due to the chemical differences, thorium is largely dispersed in common soil, where it's nearly impossible to extract. There are relatively few deposits of more concentrated thorium, and it's still relatively dilute, and mixed with other chemically similar elements, making it difficult and expensive to separate.

Even common seawater is a more economical source of uranium than the best thorium deposits, and there are places on the Earth where you can simply pick up a rock off the ground and it's more than half uranium by mass. Uranium has many large, high-quality ore bodies, from which uranium can be extracted easily and cheaply.

As for "no refining required", I'm going to be generous and assume you meant isotopic separation, since good uranium ore is much easier to refine than the terrible thorium-containing minerals, which don't even deserve to be called "ore".

The problem with this "no isotopic separation" claim is that the one isotope of thorium has similar nuclear properties to the LESS desirable isotope of uranium: U238. We do isotopic separation of uranium to get the U235, which is fissile. U238 and Th232 are only FERTILE, only seed material for breeder reactors, they aren't ready to be used as fuel. Even unenriched natural uranium, containing the naturally occurring mix of U238 and U235 can be used as fuel, as long as the moderator has a sufficiently low neutron absorption cross-section, such as carbon (as in B Reactor), beryllium, or heavy water (as in CANDU reactors).

(continued...)

(continued from >>5815347 )
The problem with natural uranium reactors is that their neutron economy is good enough that they can be easily adapted to breeding plutonium for nuclear weapons. This problem is shared with any. Light water moderated reactors, requiring enriched uranium, have the best proliferation resistance due to their poor neutron economy (since light water sucks up neutrons, making heavy water), which is a big part of why they're used, aside from the generally lower costs of the nuclear power plant itself, which can largely be made from common and inexpensive materials.

The "fuel" inputs for an LFTR would be less costly than the production of enriched uranium fuel rods because the LFTR is an extremely complex fuel production and processing plant. You're just packing more of the complexity into one place, not reducing the overall system complexity and expense. This is, again, just part of being a breeder reactor.

>>5813868
Once again, you're simply revealing your ignorance, which you have demonstrated over and over on this board.

Extracting power efficiently from the stream of charged particles is trivial. This isn't like fusion power at all, where you have a contained thermal plasma. The magnetic field only contains energetic charged particles in two dimensions. They fly out the ends of the reaction pipe immediately, generally without colliding with anything.

Then they simply fly against a potential difference, and settle into a local minimum where they can be extracted once their energy is nearly exhausted, effectively charging a very high voltage capacitor while maintaining the very high vacuum of the reaction chamber.

None of this is new or regarded as challenging. Power sources of this type, essentially an inverse electrostatic accelerator, were the first form of nuclear electric power, based on radioisotope decay rather than fission or fusion. They simply haven't been put to use because there was never a good application, since they're not naturally portable and you need a large supply of radioisotopes.

The difficulties of fission fragment reactors are chiefly in producing and handling thin filaments of fuel or fine toxic and radioactive dust, not in power capture, which is trivial. The fuel should also be of very high quality, such as are used in nuclear weapons.

There is also the general political difficulty in that every reactor is, to some degree, a proliferation threat, and improving the state of the art creates awkwardness. If anyone demonstrates a wonderfully cost-effective reactor, which produces revolutionary low energy costs, it would be very difficult to justify denying access to developing or otherwise politically unstable countries, even when they clearly can't be trusted with access to nuclear technology.

>>5815290

You're again, not listening.

I'm saying that your assumption that PEOPLE LIKE YOU are part of the decision making process, is invalid. You're not involved at all; therefore there's no need for your education.

You really have no idea how your own culture functions, do you? Like I said, it should be OBVIOUS that when a system chooses to use some hyperexpensive option, there's a political choice being made. And political choices are based on fear and greed wholly disconnected from the system it affects.

So once again, we get back to what's true: Your civilian nuclear program only comes from the military. It's a pure side effect. That means "not the main reason". So once you understand that, then you observe Thorium has no weapon use. That means the military won't develop it, using the billions of dollars of funding extracted via fear from you commoners. That means Thorium power production in the West will NEVER happen, since you mooks are far too yellow-bellied to put a stop to the militant core of your culture.

At any rate, the abundance nonsense is a good thing to talk about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monazite

That's the primary source ore of Thorium. Placer deposits of monazite. Locations: South Carolina, India, Madagascar, South Africa, Bolivia, Australia.

Another source of much lesser Thorium is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastn%C3%A4site

Locations: Sweden, Pakistan, many places worldwide as tiny deposits.

The Thorium reserve estimates may look promising, but due to the low delivery of its ores, don't let the numbers fool you. It's going to cost a lot of money to extract just 1% of that much.

>>5815411
Really, for any kind of breeder, getting the fertile material is not a big deal. You need so little of it.

I'm one of the people pointing out the lesser availability of thorium, to knock down the nonsense argument that thorium is more "abundant", but really, it doesn't matter either way.

Thorium can be extracted from granite. Common granite is over 10 ppm, and it's not hard to find huge granite bodies with over 100 ppm thorium. Basically, you frack it, then you run a weak acid through it to leach thorium and other metals. Then you have a selective ion exchange, like a water softener or seawater uranium extraction, to get a resin full of thorium that can be washed out to produce fairly pure thorium oxide, and reused.

This is expensive, obviously, but the supply is essentially inexhaustible and you need so little thorium that the cost almost doesn't matter. Similarly, if you're using uranium in a breeder reactor, it doesn't matter if you have no uranium mines, and need to extract it from seawater. Fuel cost just isn't going to be a serious issue, compared to the difficulties of running a breeder reactor.

What *is* a serious issue is that breeding fuel is considerably more expensive than mining and enriching uranium. Chemistry is advancing very quickly, and is much easier to work on than nuclear reactors, so we can expect enrichment (not to mention seawater extraction, which is already only a few times more expensive than uranium mining), already cheap, to get cheaper faster than any sort of breeder technology.

>>5815205

tells me your cost accounting is total bullshit
what is the total cost of the neutron source?

>>5815432

You need to remember two salient points:

1. Cost isn't the point. If it was, the civilian nuclear power industry would be investing in reducing that by using Thorium.

2. "Too cheap to meter" is apparently a catchphrase that you've intentionally flushed from your brain. The nuclear power industry in the USA and now apparently Japan, runs by fooling citizens into accepting it. It's a perversity, hence no use of mere LOGIC will determine the outcome.

>>5815499
You can't seem to get it through your head that there's no reason to expect thorium to be cheaper.

"Too cheap to meter" was naive optimism from the days when they were just looking at the volumes of fuel they needed, not seriously considering the work involved to extract useful power from it, while preventing catastrophic accidents and keeping nuts from getting nuclear weapons.

India is doing well

>>5815205
>And yet, the Western nuclear establishment does absolutely nothing to get into Thorium power production.
i think this is where you're tripping up
i'm certain they'd love to get into this stuff if they had the funding for research, but they're struggling as it is. and liquid salt reactors are very, very different from what they do now. it's apprehension from inexperience, not a conspiracy.

chances are once someone else builds a working prototype, they'll be willing to take the plunge and make their own.

i'd buy a westinghouse brand LFTR, made in the usa

>>5815514

Then we're in agreement in the larger picture and all we're doing is disgreeing loudly on details that don't change the larger picture.

Your comment about "too cheap to meter" glosses over the facts I've been saying: Our civilization doesn't run on facts and logic. It runs on greed and fear. That's what you must expect from poo-flinging Violent Simians who in the geological eyeblink just came down from the trees (itself widely viewed as a bad move on our part).

Thorium power production just isn't going to happen in the West. We agree on that, right? So there's no much else for us to say to each other.

>>5815577

So you're claiming that the power companies don't have funding for research. Shit man, that's what I've been saying all along: Nuclear power happened in the civilian mode purely as a side effect of the massive expense of the miltiary development effort. AND SINCE YOU AGREE BY IMPLICATION, then you must agree that since Thorium has no such development route, therefore it won't become a civilian power source. Period.

So lovely to get one of you BLOWHARDS to finally accept reality.

>>5815602
>since Thorium has no such development route, therefore it won't become a civilian power source. Period.
nah, several other groups are working on making a prototype. and again once there's a working proven prototype, and its success is made well known, you can bet there will be a lot of investor dollars flying around for whoever starts making a commercial grade version

also, you're a faggot

>>5815596
>Thorium power production just isn't going to happen in the West. We agree on that, right?
Not exactly. Thorium is actually a very sensible supplement to advanced, waste-eating U235-based designs.

Thorium can serve as a neutron sink (to control criticality) which also produces useful fuel which is chemically identical to the original fuel, and not of special nastiness (spilling some U233 into the environment isn't nearly as bad as Pu239, since uranium is common and everything is evolved to cope with it to some degree, mostly by passing it from the body in a reasonably prompt manner, whereas plutonium is alien to life and extraordinarily toxic).

Because you're feeding in U235, you don't need to worry about having the ideal neutron economy of a breeder (such as a thorium-only design), so you can use neutrons for purposes such as destroying waste, but because you're getting some U233 from natural thorium, you can cut down on your need for costly (but worthwhile), near-pure U235.

In short, we'll use thorium when it makes sense to, and in the way that makes sense.

India and China are interested in thorium because they don't have great uranium supplies, and, being rather backwards nations, they're not good at sophisticated processes such as separating isotopes or extracting uranium from seawater. Regardless of the economics, thorium technology makes some sense to them now for strategic security: nuclear weapon production capability. That's why they're doing it.

So, how much of this is just smoke and mirrors?