Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium
I've only been aware of that for a year or so...and this overstates the case.
Aretae's Zeroth law: You're wrong a lot
Aretae's 1st law: Feedback FTW.
Thorium will take longer than they think to win. However, with perspective, it's fabulous, could solve almost the whole world's power problems...and is completely unsuitable for making weapons, and Thorium is abundant. High startup costs, though.
Posts
2 comments:
The "Thorium fuel cycle" is just liek toher greenie pie in the sky ideas, unproven, undeveloped, and unfunded by the market.
Oh, and there is no supporting infrastructure. It's a lot like methane hydrates, or shale oil, or solar-thermal, or Fischer-Tropsch. That is, it's very prommising, and it "could" in theory be used for energy in 10-20 years if someone dumped a bunch of money into it.
Meanwhile we have perfectly good, completely engineered and ready to go plans for plants that we know DO work. Let's build those instead. They could be up and running in a fourth of the time as a Thoruim cycle plant.
Marks plan:
1) imediately start construction of 10-12 new ESBWR plants and AP 1000 PWR plants. (5-6 of each design, built identicaly and liscensed under a type certificate scheme)
2) Imediately start construction of the Liquid Sodium Coled FBR reactor. Run the reactor in plutonium depleting mode. (i.e. it destroys weapons grade plutonium). Primary purpose of the reactor is not power genreation but anti-proliferation. Purchase weapons grade material on the open market and burn it in the LSCFBR. Invite international observers. Let the Air Force or Navy have the power gnerated, or sell at cost on open market.
3. Finalise design for next generation helium moderated pebble bed technology which can be used to power small reactors. PBR technology has zero proliferation risk, zero meltdown risk, and low maintenence cost.
Of course, this still won't kill fosile fuels, since nothing can actualy replace gasline in terms of energy storage. And Moore's law doe NOT applie to battery technology. We have been trying to build better bateries for over 100 years.
On the other hand, once you have cheap, ubiquitous, nuclear power you can use it to run the Fishcer-Tropsch process and actually have a use for all that now otherwise worthless coal.
(yeah, physicists think about these things) ;-)
I was going to go on about how people always seem to confuse the two issues of "greenhouse gas reduction" ie. coal substitutes, and "reducing dependence on [rare/peak/foreign] oil".
Mark has largely covered this already, but I'm still astounded at the people who think that wind power (for example) will reduce oil dependence. Outside of home oil heaters, which I believe are common in some parts of North America, there is very little direct substitution of electricity for oil that can happen without a whole bunch of other developments (batteries for eg.)
Oil dependence, and coal dependence are quite different problems that may well be solved completely independently from each other. Indeed the solution of one may increase dependence on the other.
Post a Comment