Alternative Energy

[Lissa]

[quote='Taem' pid='215341' dateline='1525367787']
It seems everyone is so anti-nuclear energy in America, and not without reason, however I've heard very convincing arguments, on this site here as a matter of fact from members here, that nuclear energy can be a safe alternative.

...And then NASA went and created this: Link

The significance of these results is hard to overstate, said Gibson. Research on space-ready fission reactors has been mired by high costs and lengthy time frames from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, which resulted in many canceled projects. "This is the first nuclear-powered operation of a new fission reactor concept in the U.S. in 40 years," Gibson said.

Fission reactors have many practical advantages over RTGs. For instance, RTGs generally produce only a few hundred watts, but the reactor is scalable to 10,000 watts. Four units could provide enough power to establish an extraterrestrial outpost, according to a statement NASA released after the event.

I'd love to see these in every home. You go to the store once a decade-to-twenty years+ and purchase an encased Plutonium pill for your generator. It's too bad humanity cannot be trusted with such things... One can still dream.

The whole reason you haven't see the propensity of further nuclear power plants in the US is because the power industry didn't fight back against a lot of the bad information being spewed out after Three Mile Island. There was a lot of misinformation thrown around, but the power industry did nothing to defuse said misinformation.

As to this reactor design by NASA, NASA has been sitting on a nuclear rocket engine since the early 60s called the NERVA (the test model was called Kiwi and I had a professor in college that worked on it, had some interesting stories as well, especially the destruction test, and no, it didn't detonate, but its power output was so high that it shook itself apart). NERVA has so much trust that we could go to Mars and back within a 6 month period with 3 months of that time spent at Mars.

I've been looking at the renewed interest in thorium reactors.

Does not create fissile bomb making materials. Dirty bombs maybe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSR

Thorium reactors create fissile material that can be used in bombs. People seem to think that using an LFTR you won't have to deal with neither waste nor fissile material that could be used in bombs, but people that believe this are deluding themselves.

LFTR are breeder reactors, the whole point of a breeder reactor is to make additional fissile material to continue the reaction as you convert fissionable material to fissile material and that you typically make more fissile material than you actually burn. Even still, as you create and burn more fissile material, you also start to get waste fission products that build up. Some of these waste fission products can shutdown the reaction. So periodically, you still have to seperate out the fissile and fissionable material from the waste fission products. While it takes much longer for LFTR, you still have to at some point.

When you do actually seperate the fissile and fissionable material back out, you can then gather material that could be used in weapons. The biggest thing I've heard for why someone wouldn't do that is due to the high amount radiation from the fission products, but the US, GB, France, SU/Russia, and China did exactly this in order to create their arsenals. This is why the various Non-Proliferation Treaties went into effect. Prior to the NPTs, the US use to rerprocess spent fuel and what was known then, but no one is willing to mention because of the NPTs, is that 99.5% of what comes out of a reactor each year is still usable in some way (95% as fuel, around 2% for industry, about 2.5% for medicinal) and only 0.5% of the actual material is waste that has a dangerous period of around 700 years (easily storable). But because of NPTs, we effectively toss 100% of what comes out of a reactor.

I've yet to see a single LFTR proponent be able to truly defend LFTR against standard Fission designs now. LFTR proponents seem to think that while the LFTR designs have been further iterated on to become safer and that standard LWR designs have been stuck in the 60s and 70s designs when in fact they too have been iterated upon (there were designs introduced the 90s that took acts of sabotage to have them meltdown due to the passive safety mechanisms built into the designs).