Fusion, Maybe

On a sunny day (Wed, 23 Feb 2022 19:02:27 -0800) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

That is complete bollox, France just annouced more nuclear plants

70% of 'trickety there is already nuclear. Only Germany closed some nuclear plants because of fear and US pressure ( fear of Germany making a bomb?) and used Fuckupshima fear to get the masses to vote for it.

Now with US sabotaging northstream 2 gas to Europe and poisoning their own people by fracking and selling it to Europe it (US) self-destructs automatically. Add a nutcase president who now blames US inflation on Russia and his low IQ followers buying that and look at the 'size' of the land they stole from the native Americans you can expect a coordinated preemtive nuclear attack from the rest of the world. I am not sure such a scenario can now be excluded. If you do the maaz that is. Us neural nets .. AI deployed.. Maybe that vulcano in that national park wants a word to say too. Yea man,

Reply to
Jan Panteltje
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Jan Panteltje snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in news:sv7782$ar6$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

You're a goddamned idiot.

You are also a fool. Conquest was the order of the day at that time. The current situation is about invasion of sovereign nations. The US was not a soveriegn nation then, and the native American tribes which were here are not different than the African tribes and lands conquested back when they were. But nuking? Yeah, you are as stupid as it gets, chump.

If only retards like you could eat some fast moving lead as the nuke you bark about.

You are almost as retarded as Trump is. Somebody over there should come grab you up and put you in a rubber room, away from all technology and media. Bet that would ruffle your retarded feathers.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

Really? Are they building them theirselves? The other nukes they've tried to build have been a total disaster with schedule delays of a decade and many billions over budget. I guess if they keep building plants like those they will end up a third world country and we will have to send them aid.

How does Northstream 2 have anything to do with the US. I thought that was the Germans who are killing the deal because of the invasion of the Ukraine?

Which nutcase President are you referring to exactly? Saying "nutcase" doesn't narrow it down so much.

You truly are strange, dude!

Reply to
Rick C

I have no idea who builds/built the nuclear power stations in France, but they get over 70% of their electricity from nuclear power, and are a big exporter of electricity. They must be doing /something/ right.

The US has been against Northstream 2 since its inception. Russia's export of gas to Europe is a significant source of income for Russia - of course the USA has always been against it. Germany has resisted this American pressure, however - since they stupidly closed their nuclear power plants they have had little choice but to buy Russian gas. They are now pausing (but not irrevocably killing) the Northstream 2 project because of Russia's actions in Ukraine.

:-)

Indeed!

Reply to
David Brown

The big fusion research facilities (Tokamak and others) are not commercial. There are no stocks and no profits. There is pressure to get results to help keep the funding, but it is not remotely "pump and dump". Negative results - finding out what doesn't work, and where the problems lie - is part of the goals of the projects.

Yes, there are many advantages of this kind of design. They also don't produce plutonium or bomb-grade uranium, they get about two orders of magnitude more electricity out of the fuel than current uranium reactors. The waste is not only correspondingly smaller in quantity, it is not nearly as unpleasant.

Yes.

And if you have enough electricity from clearer sources, there are better uses of natural gas than burning it.

Reply to
David Brown

Fukushima failed because the circulating coolant was necessary to avoid a meltdown and the following hydrogen explosions. If you have a design that can't melt, you don't have the same kind of problem. With a TMSR, even the worst combination of failures does not result in an explosion or the release of radioactive elements.

There are some other technical challenges with TMSR's - no one is claiming they are /easy/ to make. And no doubt more complications will be found as the current batch of experimental and research work continues. But they are inherently vastly safer than current uranium reactors (which are themselves much safer than older plants, such as Fukushima).

No, it is not. The waste from a molten salt thorium reactor is far less problematic than the waste from a conventional uranium reactor. (That doesn't mean that getting useful metals out of it is necessarily easy or cost-effective.) And you only have about 1% of the waste compared to conventional reactors.

Yes, that's the point - that's what makes it safe.

What a silly thing to say.

It would be a strange kind of earthquake that resulted in the plug remaining frozen but broke everything else! That's the point of this design it is "fail safe" - lots of things must be actively running in order for the fusion to continue. That is not the case with uranium.

And I would hope that people have learned from Fukushima not to put the critical safety equipment in the spot most likely to get flooded.

Reply to
David Brown

EDF, who are partially owned by the French government.

They are currently building a nuclear power station in the UK (Hinkley C; it will have two reactors), and will probably build another here - Sizewell C, which will also have two reactors. Each is planned to provide power for 6 million homes.

Reply to
Jeff Layman

On a sunny day (Wed, 23 Feb 2022 22:40:09 -0800 (PST)) it happened Rick C snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

France has nukes and tested those and has nuclear submarines. Look up Euratom too:

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'merricans have fallen so far behind, I have read the launch codes for the ICBMs are all zeros as in a stress situation the poor soldiers cannot remember more complex numbers. And with a commander like that .. maybe he byethen cannot even read that.

Remember that Pakistani guy who worked there and took the centrifuge knowledge with him to Pakistan and was a hero there as he gave them the bomb?

Man in my highschool physics classes I had to calculate one! Teacher was into it. Any kid can do it, given the hardware and Euros, (not dooolaars, those are worth nothing now anymore)..

It has been sabotaged by the US for years, US sanctioned the companies working on it used extensive lobbying against it, used silly arguments like 'it made Europe depend on Russia'

True, I mean the one that appeared on teefee lately and tried the religious clown thing 'how in the name of Christ can they do that sort of thing' trying to get an 'Uncle Sam Needs You' of the ground to get rid of all the blacks and whites in a war he cannot win like Vietnam.. To unite... Old trick: create a common enemy... History and Hysteria repeats itself Biden is a dangerous nutcase and so are his puppeteers

As I have pointed out before, you humming beans are brought here by storks, I was likely dropped by a flying cup and saucer, that was obvious from the beginning

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

When gas prices are low, the USA fracking operations are uneconomic. No gas through Nordstream 2 will increase the gas price in Europe and encourage them to look for other supplies - and you can guess the rest.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

There are others.

It might not result in an explosion, but if the molten salt get hot enough to melt it's container, the radioactive elements will escape.

And there really isn't an upper limit to the temperatures you can get get if a nuclear reactor runs away - volatilise the molten salts and it could look very like an explosion.

They may be safer, but they aren't all that safe.The worst case nuclear accident is somebody dropping an atomic bomb on a reactor, and a thorium reactor would offer much the same mass of radioactive matrerial to be dispersed.

In fact it is equally problematic, but there is less of it. We still haven't got any kind of longer term repository for radioactive waste and we've been generating it for about eighty years now. It may be a small problem, but like the very small baby, it isn't one that you can ignore.

But what you end up with is just as dangerous as the products of splitting U-235. You don't transmute loads of U-238 in the process, so it may be somewhat less dangerous, but it isn't remotely safe.

Everybody says that stuff is "walk-away safe" until some unanticipated problem comes up

If it blocked the drain path, melting the plug wouldn't serve any useful purpose.

Since it depends on splitting U-233 rather than U-235, this isn't entirely obvious.

That's one lesson. Each new disaster teaches us another.

Reply to
Anthony William Sloman

NG is wonderful and fracking is great. What a gift.

We might sell some LNG to Germany now and then, when they are freezing in the dark and we don't have any better offers.

France might make them a deal on leftover electricity too.

We need to form OFEG, the Organization For Extorting Germans.

I was just reading about the tribal behavior of the Plains natives. They didn't exactly live in harmony.

That lead to a conjecture: wars are started over access to high-quality protein, namely meat.

Reply to
jlarkin

Thorium itself cannot sustain a fission reaction. As you noted yourself, it needs a slow neutron to turn it into uranium, which can then decay. If it is spread out enough, there is no way that enough neutrons from decaying uranium can activate enough thorium to end up sustaining a reaction. Drop the molten thorium salt into a container (it's /not/ hard to make a container that will withstand far higher temperatures than those in the reactor, and also withstand an earthquake

- re-enforced concrete will be fine). Gravity will spread the splat, and the reaction stops.

You have a bit of cleaning up to do, scraping up the solidified and somewhat radioactive mess. But it is all contained and safe, and you can probably just melt it again and put it back in once you are running again.

You are /really/ scraping the barrel here. You think that if you drop an atomic bomb on the reactor, it's the reactor that's the problem? Seriously?

Most of what is in the reactor is /thorium/. It's a safe metal - it's found all over the place in rocks. Scattering thorium around the site of a nuclear bomb detonation is not going to make the slightest difference.

Sure, TMSR are not /completely/ safe. Nor is anything else in this world. But are you going to tell us how dangerous hydroelectric power is, since a big enough bomb will burst the damn?

No, it is not. Please read up about this. Vastly more of the potential nuclear energy is used in TMSR reactors than conventional uranium reactors (perhaps because they are designed for that purpose, whereas conventional reactors were designed to make bomb-grade uranium and plutonium with electricity as a bonus side-effect). The waste isotopes do not have anything like the dangerous lifespans of the uranium reactor waste - we are talking 100 years rather than 10,000 years.

The world has done so quite happily so far. And it's a far more tractable problem than dealing with all the environmental poison and damage that comes from the fossil fuel industry. A typical coal-fired power station leaks more radioactive waste than a conventional nuclear power station, including its waste storage.

You need to read up on how this all works.

(Note that you can also make uranium-powered facilities safer and more efficient than they are today, by using higher temperatures and molten salts to get much more of the power out of the same fuel. But thorium is better still.)

This isn't rocket science. (There are other aspects that are technically and scientifically challenging, but this is not.) We know how powerful earthquakes can get. making a fundament and catch bowl that will survive the biggest feasible earthquake is simply a matter of spending enough money on the problem - and it's not a lot of money in the total budget.

Of course, now you are going to tell us that it won't survive a dinosaur-killing meteor strike.

We are in the middle of a disaster. Wind and solar power is reducing it a little, but not enough.

Reply to
David Brown

I know some bomb boys. That's preposterous.

Harry said "There are so many safeguards, it's surprising that they can go off at all."

Reply to
jlarkin

I believe we have more reactors in the US than France has. Here we find new reactors are horribly expensive and impossible to build in anything remotely like a schedule. France has the same problems. The fact that you are ignorant of this after having been discussed here many times speaks volumes. How many reactors were built in the 70s and 80s is irrelevant at this point. Surely you must understand that, n'est-ce pas?

Yes, this is not about the US.

Are you impersonating Teal'c of Chulak?

Reply to
Rick C

Excellent. We need more.

Reply to
jlarkin

TMSRs may not have the problem of meltdown, but that has never been the biggest problem with nuclear power. The real problem, the one that so seldom gets adequately addressed is the waste. A TMSR produces less waste, but as Bill is quick to point out, that is not really a solution, there's still significant waste.

I find it amusing that one of the selling points of the small, modular reactors is that they are designed to not be refueled. Rather they run for 30 years and then are left, buried in the ground where they were installed. Yeah, like that's not going to raise any objections from the neighborhood.

Nuclear is a problem that simply doesn't have good solutions. None. We are better off just facing up to that fact and moving on.

Renewables are still new. We have lots and lots of room for improvement with them. I think that solution space should be adequately explored.

Living in Puerto Rico, I've seen a number of wind turbines. The island has a breeze nearly all the time, so wind power is a pretty good solution. Some of the wind turbines were disabled by Maria. Now, four years later, few of them have been fixed. There are some very large machines along the southern coast near Ponce that are working, not sure if they were there during Maria or not. Clearly, there is less faith in wind power, or less money for investment. It's a shame as they need new, inexpensive sources of energy on the island.

Reply to
Rick C

The Hinkley facility and a couple of others EDF is building are horribly late and very over budget. The same problem that drove Westinghouse nuclear into bankruptcy.

If a contractor had screwed up so badly on the last several jobs they did in your neighborhood, would you give them a deposit on an addition to your home? Instead of two months, they took two years? Instead of costing $10,000 they ended up costing $100,000? These are only slight exaggerations.

In the UK, the investors were on the hook for the bill at Hinkley. They passed a new law that allows them to pass the overruns to the rate payers on all future nuclear projects. Otherwise the investors won't invest. That's the real death blow to nuclear. It's just too damn expensive with renewables coming down in price so much. You can expect your electric rates to go up in the UK if they build another nuclear plant.

Reply to
Rick C

LOL! Yes, you won't have a run away reactor, but you won't have a reactor anymore. The solidified salt will still be very radioactive and there's no way you are going to recover that reactor. The safety valve is a one time thing, like ejecting from a fighter jet. You won't be recovering the facility. Don't try to fool me even if you can fool yourself.

Most, other than the various radionuclides.

This is a side issue. The real problem is the radioactive waste... and the cost. So far, no one has operated a TMSR and so we don't know the cost of construction or operation.

That seems a specious argument. The radioactive waste statement is meaningless. The hazard in radioactive waste is in the potential for accidents or use as weapons and the cost of the long term storage.

Being stabbed in the gut is better than being shot in the head. Not a meaningful statement.

No, we don't. The earthquake that shut down the two reactors at North Anna was twice as powerful as the plant was designed to handle. Of course, even the design goal was higher than the largest quake expected. The result was the diesel generators firing up to power the circulating pumps, but one of the generators failed. When they researched why, the found the procedure for head gasket installation was incorrect. This was a single point of failure because this procedure was used on all the generators and they all could have failed.

The tsunami that killed Fukushima was larger than anything they expected and the additional buffer.

These are such obvious failures in the concept of "safe" nuclear power that it is surprising everyone didn't respond like Germany did.

So we can't use more wind, solar and hydro? Last time I checked that was the plan.

Reply to
Rick C

On a sunny day (Thu, 24 Feb 2022 07:17:29 -0800) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

My boss back a long time ago told me he knew one of those guys working on the US bomb here, the guy told him he dropped a PCB board or something in it while doing maintenance and never understood why it did not go off...

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

It's very complex to set off an implosion bomb. Nanoseconds matter.

The neutron initiators are independently interlocked. If they don't work, you get a fizzle.

I don't think a nuke has ever detonated accidentally. Lots of gadgets have failed to go.

Ted Taylor designed a bomb that absolutely failed to work.

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Reply to
jlarkin

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