Energy From Thorium

> Why would you even invest in anything that looks like that?

You'll have to ask Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and some others why they invested in advanced nuclear. I suspect you'll hear something about how nuclear can produce low-footprint 24/7 carbon-free energy in sites all over the world.

Certainly I wouldn't expect a traditional investor to invest in nuclear to make a buck. It's mostly people who are trying to build a safe and prosperous world and believe nuclear can help us get there.

> you can't assume that a billion dollar industry in decline has no lobby and is "grassroots".

Sure I can. This industry has no pure-nuclear stakeholders. All the owner/operators are utilities, which have vast fossil, wind, solar resources to operate. The utility executives don't give two shoots about nuclear, they only see bottom lines in current markets. Among the vendors, GE is largely divesting from nuclear to make gas and wind turbines. I've seen pro-nuclear advertising, but only in France. I've never seen pro-nuclear advertising in the USA. You see wind and natural gas ads all over the damn place. If there were a functional nuclear lobby, you could probably point me to at least one pro-nuclear advertisement on TV. Can you?

I personally know a lot of grassroots nuclear advocates:

* https://mothersfornuclear.org/ -- a bunch of moms who worked at nuclear plants and wanted to tell people that they were actually good

* Seattle Friends of Fission: https://seattlefof.org/ …

You wanted comments else you wouldn't be here. I gave comments. I certainly gave some of my own peeves. I thought that was obvious.

Look, I'll say this again. You asked which of the two PythonDeveloper thought were desperate. It's pretty obvious that he meant the author of the essay about "the thorium and nuclear advocates." Now you completely agree that you are desperate. Why did you ask the question if you weren't looking for an argument? The non-argumentative one would be "yes, I am desperate; Desperate that we as a civilization won't be able to survive."

You think that desperate implies a sneaky agenda. It doesn't. Here are all the dictionary entries: "1. reckless or dangerous because of despair or urgency: a desperate killer. 2. having an urgent need, desire, etc.: desperate for attention. 3. leaving little or no hope; very serious or dangerous: a desperate illness. 4. extremely bad; intolerable or shocking: clothes in desperate taste. 5. extreme or excessive." Notice how none of those imply a sneaky agenda.

Nor am I against reactors. I'm explaining, the best I can, why anything associated with nuclear power is viewed with deep distrust. Referencing work from the 1960s doesn't help. That's from the same era of researchers which downplayed the negative consequences of Operation Plowshare. The problem is that the public reaction against decades of official optimism, which deliberately deemphasized the actual consequences, cannot be easily overcome just by more…

Actually, that presentation comes from an Areva engineer, not from Stanford. Here's the original (internal?) version:

http://energyfromthorium.com/2011/03/30/areva-fd-presentation/

Some interesting intrigue here. Apparently the version you linked redacts the author's name from the second page (Matthias Braun), and removes the signature with his name and the Areva logo from every following page.

There's a NYT article that confirms this much:

Stanford, where Dr. Hanson is a visiting scholar, posted the slides online after the March presentation. At that time, each of the roughly 30 slides was marked with the Areva symbol or name, and each also gave the name of their author, Matthias Braun.

The posted document was later changed to remove all references to Areva, and Dr. Braun and Areva did not reply to questions about what simulation code or codes the company may have used to arrive at its analysis of the Fukushima disaster.

“We cannot comment on that,” Jarret Adams, a spokesman for Areva, said of the slide presentation. The reason, he added, was “because it was not an officially released document.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/science/03meltdown.html?pagewanted=all

This is project pursued by many[1]. The main hurdles are:

1. political [2], which Kirk mentions (it is no coincidence, that the pellets that the rods contain are as standard as the NATO bullet) -- the industry and power has a very different interest

2. technical: Kirk always mentions, that the fuel is not solid. It is liquid. The latter means, that you do have higher concerns about corrosiveness, hence (useful) reactor lifetime...

Also, the issue of scale, which tends to lie between 1. and 2. Uranium "won", because you got the real stuff with it (weapons as in actual projection of power, or the capability of threat to project power) and because you could make it work on a massive scale (current reactors are an order of magnitude larger than any LFTR design, and capitalism is based on the leverage of and concentration of power).

[1] http://energyfromthorium.com/

http://www.thorenergy.no/

http://thoriumenergy.com.au/

... besides China, India, France and (even) Czechs.

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/03/a_is_for_atom.html -> see Seaborg interview part

My favorite idea for this sort of thing is to put a LFTR on a barge (or, better, in a submarine), using seawater for cooling, and ship them out to any coastal area where they're needed. Build them in factories, assemble them in shipyards where such things are relatively easy, and handle the periodic maintenance and refueling in a centralized location.

Here's where it gets really fun: you can use the waste heat for desalination. There are a lot of places that sit next to a coastline but are short on electricity and fresh water. Russia is trying to make a lot of money from this, using a variant of the reactors they've been using on their nuclear ice-breaker ships.

And if you're using something like a LFTR that's compact enough to fit in a submarine, the water will protect you from hurricanes, earthquakes, aerial attack, and so on. It's a pretty clever scheme. Here's a thread on the Energy From Thorium forums discussing it:

http://energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=55

The government didn't say "give us the one we can make bombs with" or anything like that. In a review [1] they discuss groups working on thorium reactors who find that these reactors are potentially cheaper than water cooled reactors, but there are uncertainties and a demonstration plant is needed. They basically state that thorium reactors might work well, but their potential benefits don't outweigh the existing industrial commitments. Sure, the reason for the existing infrastructure was for the ability to more easily make bombs. But when this was reviewed, it was possible to make bombs with Thorium, too. [2]

There are advantages and disadvantages to thorium over common reactors, but it's definitely not a magic bullet.

[1]: WASH-1222 (p. 49) http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/WASH-1222.pdf

[2]: https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium_myths.html