Fusion, Maybe

I think the key part of that is "didn't understand".

torsdag den 24. februar 2022 kl. 18.30.51 UTC+1 skrev snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com:

But, that's not true; nuclear sub contracts all include new reactors, and haven't had years-long holdups at all. The problems might be soluble, with newer-than-1980 designs, but the entrenched idea that 'impossible to build' applies to anything nuclear, is a killer for anything that requires a long-term bond issue.

Until someone builds and operates a few modern reactors for electricity production, we don't KNOW how expensive they are, or how well they work.

France is second only to the USA in nuclear power generated - as a proportion of its power, it has more than any other country.

I agree that new reactors always seem to cost far more and take far longer to build than planned - I have no idea how it is possible to get things wrong so often. But it does not mean building new plants is the wrong thing to do.

Electricity prices in Europe have gone through the roof in recent times. They have doubled in the last year - with peak prices getting several times that. Europe simply doesn't make enough electricity, and wind farms will not cover the needs. There isn't enough space for big enough wind parks or solar power generation. Europe is going to have to build nuclear power stations, and with the price of electricity, they will be cost-effective.

Well, no - but that won't stop the US having an opinion and trying to influence it! (I'm not condemning the US for that - politics is a global game.)

No, at least not intentionally. I haven't followed Stargate much. (It's probably a series I would watch, if it happens to turn up on our TV or Netflix. But there isn't time to watch everything.)

That is a pointless comparison. I don't concede that Naval contracts don't overrun or come in late. It's simply a false comparison.

WTF are you talking about? How about the vastly over budget and schedules so bungled, they can't even predict if it will be compete in three months or six? Vogtle's two reactors are six years late and $16 billion OVER the original number of $14 billion. A similar project in South Carolina failed, ending up with numerous entities in bankruptcy or suffering massive losses. Lather, rinse, repeat for the various projects EDF is behind.

Unless by "modern" you mean a reactor design that has never been built or approved. Yeah, there are lots of those. Too many to count. Why don't we build one of each, just as a test?

...

It WASN'T a spot likely to get flooded; a magnitude-9 quake and tens of thousands of folk dead by the tsunami were the major effects of that disaster, the nuclear cleanup was a tiny little blip on the total. A simple design feature allows standard fire-truck pumps to be pressed into service in emergency, nowadays; that fault has been engineered away.

Which means nothing.

It means exactly that! This is why no one will attempt a nuclear construction project without government loan guarantees. If the people making money on the projects don't believe it can be pulled off, why should we?

The idea of there not being enough space for renewable power generation is pretty much BS. Sorry, but you are just making up stuff now.

Everyone has opinions. Whatever.

That was his catch phrase. He was the strong silent type, so his universal reply was a deep, resonating, "Indeed." I use it myself a lot when I want to reply without saying anything.

This is progressing in the UK with small modular reactors (SMRs). From:

Kwarteng announced £210m in government funding for SMR development in November. This is to be backed by £250m in private investment from a consortium led by experienced reactor builder Rolls-Royce.

As the name suggests, SMRs are factory-built and then transported to and assembled on existing sites or others that can be made suitable without massive civil engineering. The goal is to require foundations that are only 20-30 per cent of those for a Hinkley-like build, with much of the work going into creating an aseismic bearing for safety and so that the reactor does not require design changes.

Another important difference with SMRs is capacity. Hinkley C and Sizewell C are

3,200MWe-capacity projects. The SMRs proposed by Rolls-Royce are in the 220-440MWe range, equivalent to 150 wind turbines or an older coal-fired station.

Rolls-Royce’s SMR concept is based on process innovation. Its SMRs will use existing PWR technology with progressive cost savings achieved through replication. The consortium is then looking to make deployments much more quickly by telescoping a historically linear set of approvals processes for technology, safety, and location into one that conducts all three simultaneously.

Yes, the biggest problem (and by far the biggest cause of death) at the Fukushima nuclear plant was the panic and overreaction. And even that was small compared to the "conventional" damage of the earthquake and tsunami.

But it was silly to put the diesel generators so low down that they were flooded. Supporting external fire engine pumps as a backup sounds like a good idea.

On a sunny day (Thu, 24 Feb 2022 09:30:36 -0800) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I have not read that book, but for example making a dirty nuclear bomb is not that hard. You can pollute a large area with a few dollars worth..

My uncle had a jewel store, and was also repairing and selling watches with radium covered hands. One day all those watches had to be taken out and could no longer be sold due to the radioactivity of those watch-hands. I had one as a present... Once I found a lot of green glassware in the attic at my parents home, mother told me I used to drink from it as a small kid, until somebody told her that uranium glass was dangerous. had light switches with radium knobs that lighted green. Radiation.. we had Chernobyl fallout here too. The air filters from the aircos where I worked had to be replaced because those were hot on the Geiger counter.

Apparently SAC had that worry too.

From

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.

After leaving the Air Force in 1974, I pressed the service, initially by letters addressed to it and then through congressional intermediaries, to consider a range of terrorist scenarios in which these locks could serve as crucial barriers against the unauthorized seizure of launch control over Minuteman missiles. In 1977, I co-authored (with Garry Brewer) an article (click here to view) entitled “The Terrorist Threat to World Nuclear Programs” in which I laid out the case for taking this threat more seriously and suggesting remedial measures including, first and foremost, activating those McNamara locks that apparently he and presidents presumed had already been activated.

The locks were activated in 1977.

On a sunny day (Thu, 24 Feb 2022 18:36:54 +0000) it happened Tom Gardner snipped-for-privacy@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in <sv8j86$he$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

The Russians have ships with smsll nuclear reactors that they send to cites along the coast to power and heat those:

Ted says that he hated and was morally repulsed by nuclear weapons, except that they were so much fun to design.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for this excellent summary of the issues regarding fusion energy. Contrary to what that idiot SNIPPERMAN says, duplicating the Sun in a fusion reactor is a fool's errand. Thorium molten salt reactors should get ALL of the R&D money that is being wasted on fusion.

The air filters in a large hospital in London were quite active a few days after Chernobyl. I knew the radiation protection physicist who decided to check them. It was mostly iodine adsorbed onto fine soil particles. The activity was such that the filters had to be disposed of as radioactive waste. John

They can make quite a mess though:

John

John Larkin is a gullible sucker for fossil carbon extraction industry propaganda. Poisoned aquifers aren't the kind of gifts most people want.

How generous. Curiously, Germany doesn't seem to be freezing in the dark at the moment, and probably will be able to do deals with less capricious suppliers if it needs to.

Europe has a lot of electricity flowing across national borders. The UK has links across the Channel and the North Sea and I think that here is now one over to to Norway.

Good luck with that. When the US government has to keep Trump-loving Republicans on-side their capacity to manage anything requiring even minimal competence is severely compromised.

America does have a history of nut-case presidents. Dubbya's invasion of Irak is probably the silliest move. Trump would have done worse if he'd been less incompetent. Biden might not be wonderful, but he's not quite so far around the bend.

World War 2 was mostly about access to oil. John Larkin hasn't heard about solar cells and wind farms either - his thinking is decidedly primitive.

The obits for PJ O'Rourke, who definitely isn't a Democrat, have noted that [O'Rourke's] libertarian conservatism reached its apotheosis with Donald Trump’s taking over the Republican party, reflected in his 2016 book of election coverage How the Hell Did This Happen? He endorsed Hillary Clinton, because “she’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters”.

But you have to have enough U-233 in your thorium fuel to generate the heat and the neutrons to keep the process running. Normally you take out the heat that you need - that's what the reactor is there to generate. Stopping it generating that heat when you can't take it out is the problem.

Sounds fine. Now think of all the ways that it might not work, and remember that mother nature has a more or less infinite capacity to come up with more.

If it all works as you expected.

It's a possible scenario. I didn't invent it.

A nuclear reactor works by splitting the uranium nucleus into two or more lighter nuclei.

There are lots of possible products and quite a few of them are radioactive. They aren't safe. If a thorium reactor had a mechanism for electroplating them out of the molten salt on a continuous basis there might not be all that much nasty stuff there at any one time, but I haven't heard of any such scheme.

There was a film about it, called "The Dambusters".

This is regularly claimed by proponents of thorium reactors. It doesn't seem to be true.

can be expected to be one of the fission products. Technetium, with atomic number Z = 43, is the lowest-numbered element in the periodic table for which all isotopes are radioactive, so it is the easy one to point to.It's most stable radioactive isotopes are technetium-97 with a half-life of 4.21 million years,technetium-98 with 4.2 million years, and technetium-99 with 211,100 years.

The fission of a gram of uranium-235 in nuclear reactors yields 27 mg of technetium-99, Other fissile isotopes produce similar yields of technetium, such as 22mg from one gram of uranium-233.

But unwisely.

We aren't dealing all that well with damage done and still being done by the fossil fuel industry. That problem isn't tractable either.

I have done. You clearly haven't.

But still insanely dangerous.

Of course when you've spent the money, you've got to wait for that earthquake to find out that you didn't spend the money in quite the right way.

Or somebody dropping a nuclear bomb on it.

They are reducing it at a rate determined by our capacity to build more solar cell farms and windfarms. We've got economies of scale on solar cells, and we are starting to get them on windfarms.

It now a matter of keeping on turning the handle (and installing enough grid storage of various sorts to cover nights and windless days).

Deciding to go nuclear with novel thorium reactors isn't going to solve the problem faster - it's just going to divert investment away from an approach which is clearly working and should get us where we need to be before global warming has wrecked our capacity to do anything on that kind of scale.