Thorium, the Next Nuclear Fuel? 710
mrshermanoaks writes "When the choices for developing nuclear energy were being made, we went with uranium because it had the byproduct of producing plutonium that could be weaponized. But thorium is safer and easier to work with, and may cause a lot fewer headaches. 'It's abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn't require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind. Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab's finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.' So why are we not building these reactors?"
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because a number of groups with rather different goals have one thing in common.
Sustainable nuclear power is a threat to their pocketbooks.
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...an oxymoron. There's only so much Thorium in the world.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey! Guess what? Everything is finite. What do you think you build solar panels and wind turbines from, pot smoke?
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
> The carbon footprint of making one 60m high wind turbine is approximately the same as the carbon footprint said wind turbine will save in fossil fuel in its lifetime.
No. Not even close. Orders of magnitude wrong.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
The "uses more carbon to produce than it saves in its lifetime" charge is a persistent myth. It seems just "shocking" enough to be true, and happens to coincide with what many rich interests would like to be true. As a result, it comes up quite often in non-fact-centric talk shows and as a result is something that a lot of people just "know". Unfortunately, it's just not true.
I have researched this and haven't been able to find a time when it was EVER true, but it certainly isn't true of either modern solar cells (even in small-scale deployments) or wind turbines. Moreover, as the general power supply becomes "greener", the carbon footprint for manufacturing (a huge portion of which comes from the energy needed to produce, not raw materials) also declines.
Example calculation for mid-size (office building) solar deployment: http://greenestofthegreen.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/solar-panels-the-smallest-footprint/ [wordpress.com]
- Calculates a carbon break-even point of 15 months, for a product expected to last for 25 years on the inside.
- Obviously comes from the company making these, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's not likely to be off by the order of magnitude or more needed to make your statement true.
I can't find similar calculations for wind turbines fro a quick Google search, but the return on carbon "investment" there is shorter-term (assuming a windy area and fairly large-scale deployment of multiple wind turbines in a pass). If you have a citable reference stating otherwise, please share it with the class.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
The carbon footprint of making one 60m high wind turbine is approximately the same as the carbon footprint said wind turbine will save in fossil fuel in its lifetime.
Source?
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There's only so much carbon fibre in the world to make windmills too.
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Sorry to break it to you, but there are only so many years that the sun will be burning and the wind will be blowing. So these aren't sustainable either, right? The truth is, there is a practical method for extracting Uranium and Thorium from sea water. Japanese research shows we could do this for about $120/kg of Uranium - which, if burned completely in a reactor produces a great deal of energy. Since Thorium is more abundant, it should be cheaper.
And the nice thing is that even if we used seawater Urani
Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
- 1/2 the country doesn't believe what scientists tell them: evolution, global warming, birth control/STDs. Why believe them now?
- No new nuclear plants have been built in 30-ish years.
- uranium was thought to be pretty much endless, so why do more research into thorium? (yes, U is getting in short supply now)
- nuclear power still has the stigma of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl attached to it. It'll be tough to get public opinion on that changed, especially with advances in fuel cell and solar technologies
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Informative)
Not true [world-nuclear.org].
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice selective reading.
That's actually amazingly good. Consider 1) we're likely to explore for more reserves as we deplete current ones (and that we've done very little exploration so far), 2) nuclear fuel is such a small part of a reactor's operating budget that its price can increase tenfold with no impact on price of electricity at the meter, we're in good shape.
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Informative)
Read more, type less.
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Funny)
This is good news especially now that the unobtainium supplies have been cut off from Pandora.
We should have just nuked that planet from orbit, then swooped down and picked up the unobtainium from their hot, smurfy ashes.
But no, they had to send in some hot-shot Colonel who had to prove how tough he was by taking them on in hand-to-hand combat, and in the process showing all the greenies just how cute and cuddly the smurfs were. Idiot. Now we can't touch their planet at all because of the outcries from the eco-nuts.
Gimmick (Score:5, Insightful)
On the one hand, modern uranium reactors (pebble bed, or even well-made light water reactors) are perfectly safe. Using thorium instead is at best a minor improvement.
On the other hand, if using a different fuel convinces members of the general public that nuclear power is safe, and allows the construction of new facilities in less than a decade, that's great, and worth it even if thorium is slightly inferior as a fuel. In short, it can be a PR win.
Re:Gimmick (Score:5, Insightful)
and worth it even if thorium is slightly inferior as a fuel. In short, it can be a PR win.
Based on the article, I'm not sure that thorium is an inferior fuel. At the very least, it seems more efficient and more abundant, as well as less dangerous than uranium. To me, that's more important than raw power output, especially given that thorium cannot be weaponized.
Re:Gimmick (Score:5, Informative)
Thorium is a significant efficiency improvement over Uranium or Plutonium reactors, and this is disregarding the safety improvements inherent to a salt-based reactor. I'm not sure how you could possibly conclude it's a minor improvement.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Molten fluoride salts are not known for safe handling.
Experience suggests otherwise [wikipedia.org]. Any dangers due to fluoride salts are more than compensated by the fact that the reactor does not suffer from steam explosions or regulation complexities of a light water reactor. Furthermore, several molten salt reactors have been built and run for extended periods of time. This technology is proven.
And fusion is at least 30 years out, I guarantee you. The only promising fusion possibility is Brussard's Polywell, and if th
Problems (Score:5, Interesting)
I am working on the very periphery of the problem, designing equipment to measure the properties of hot radioactive molten fluorides - in the region between 900-1700 C, for European nuclear researchers. Clearly one of the problems which should be obvious is that we are looking at cutting edge material technology to work at these temperatures and neutron fluxes !
Re:Problems (Score:5, Funny)
Well, duh. We didn't mention it because it was so obvious! Most slashdotters have known that crap from, like, CS 201.
Why move to Thorium? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thorium looks good and should be researched, but with nuclear fuel we're spoiled for choice. The idea that we need to find a new nuclear fuel for safety or cost reasons only damages the chance of people getting behind the fine technology we have/are-developing now.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because we're scheduled to run out of easily mined Uranium within the next 10 years [technologyreview.com], unless the US's military stockpiles are released. Thorium is far more abundant, is safer since it can't be weaponized and it's meltdown-proof in liquid salt reactors, and more importantly, is much, much more efficient as a nuclear fuel. So I disagree with all of your points, save one: Uranium is not abundant or safe, but I grant you that Uranium is more well known; it's infamy can also be considered a problem however.
Only a bridge ore (Score:5, Funny)
These days, people only mine Thorium while they're working on getting their skill up to the Fel Iron and outlands level. One thing worth noting is that somewhere in the past few patches, they've made it so you can mine Fel Iron at 275, which is pretty nice. No more running around the Eastern Plaguelands looking for Rich Thorium Nodes for those last few points when you'd rather be in Hellfire Peninsula.
Because nuclear is still "scary" (Score:5, Interesting)
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yeah, but science has a much longer half-life.
Because... (Score:4, Interesting)
The debate has been ranging here in Norway lately, since we hold a lot of the world's known reserves of the stuff (as opposed to many wild guesswork assumptions about possible reserves around the world). The reason why not more reactors are built is quite simply because the technology is not there yet. By most accounts, a functional prototype reactor is 20 years away. It is a very complicated technology, and more difficult to engineer safely than uranium reactors that we currently know a lot about. Several studies, for instance from MIT, cast doubt on whether thorium reactors will even be cost effective. Extracting thorium from the ground is harder than for uranium, and the enrichment process is more difficult and costly. Thorium will also produce dangerous, radioactive by products, and if you have enrichment capabilities for thorium, it is not a far step further to produce weaponized plutonium.
So it may be the future, but apparently no silver bullet.
All this is IANANP (I Am Not a Nuclear Physicist) so I guess someone reading ./ can answer this better than me.
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That's a lot of claims. Do you have any cites for any of them?
The article say thorium does NOT have to be enriched. A quick look at the the isotopes of thorium [wikipedia.org] wikipedia article confirms that Th-232 is the only isotope of any real abundance. That's a bit of a major error on your part, and casts doubt on the reliability of the rest of your post.
Re:Because... (Score:5, Informative)
By most accounts, a functional prototype reactor is 20 years away.
The designer of the molten salt Thorium reactors ran his reactor non-stop for over 10 years IIRC. This was in the 1960s. What is unproven exactly?
Extracting thorium from the ground is harder than for uranium,
Which we will run out of in 10 years [technologyreview.com].
Thorium will also produce dangerous, radioactive by products,
And Uranium produces candy canes and puppies? If Thorium really is harder to refine or weaponize than Uranium, we'd be better off switching to Thorium, so you contradict yourself.
Also, Thorium reactions do not produce plutonium. The fact that Thorium reactions do not produce weaponized by products is one of its huge advantages, above and beyond its abundance and higher efficiency as nuclear fuel when compared to Uranium.
Re:Because... (Score:5, Informative)
The U-233 generated in a Thorium reactor is consumed in the Thorium reaction itself to sustain the reaction [wikipedia.org]. It would take significant effort to extract it in a usable form. The proliferation danger is significantly lower when compared to our existing nuclear infrastructure.
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In India, construction is expected to start early in the next decade on the first 300 MW(e) advanced heavy water reactor, which has been developed for co-generation applications. The reactor is designed to operate with 233U-Pu-Th fuel; it uses boiling light water as a coolant and heavy water as the moderator.
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AFAIK the problem is not that thorium energy production is unfeasible, rather that it is poorly researched.
Surprise! Business model problems... (Score:5, Insightful)
According to this [wikipedia.org] (see the section called "Fuel cycle concerns"), because there is no need to refine the Thorium fuel, which is the stage where the nuclear power companies currently make their money, they would need to change their business model to cope. We all know how much companies like to do that.
So, you combine the politicians' lack of desire to risk being associated with nuclear power, and the entrenched industry's lack of interest in the business model, and it's suddenly easy to explain.
Thorium's Better But Also Harder To Work With (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, if we're going to tackle the problems of the 21st Century, we have to be willing to solve hard engineering problems, but it makes perfect sense to tackle the easier ones first. Especially when it takes years to build and test a reactor, so developing anything really new is apt to take a decade or two before it can actually make money. So far, it has always seemed easier to tweak the existing, mature Uranium technology to deal with its remaining problems.
Personally, I'd love to see a sustained government effort to develop commercially viable Thorium power plants. (I have thought this since the 1970s.) But the reason that hasn't happened yet is Thorium just has too many unsolved problems -- it's not because of some industry conspiracy.
--Greg
Re:Thorium's Better But Also Harder To Work With (Score:5, Interesting)
India [rediff.com] seems to have come to the complete opposite conclusion with their thorium reactor.
It makes sense too, given that thorium requires no pre-processing and produces reactor-grade Uranium as its primary byproduct. By using the Uranium as well (which they have found difficult to import) they extend the life of the cores out to two years, which is practically unheard of.
Canadian CANDU reactors can use Thorium (Score:4, Informative)
As the subject says, there is already a proven and safe reactor design that can use the thorium fuel cycle.
Re:Canadian CANDU reactors can use Thorium (Score:5, Funny)
Why not build a "not that bad"-technology? (Score:3, Insightful)
Such reactors may be less dangerous and the may produce less radioactive waste. But even though. They still produce radioactive waste, which we cannot handle. And it uses still a extremely limited resource. We will eat up the reserves in no time. And it would be again a centralized energy production. We want a decentralized energy production to become independent from big energy companies and to produce the energy more safely. And a large number of small generators are much less vulnerable to a total loss than one big one. Big technology is bad technology.
Re:Why not build a "not that bad"-technology? (Score:5, Interesting)
Without realizing it, you've stuck upon the real psychological motivation behind the "decentralized everything" movement: it's political. It's a reflective reaction against the complexity of modern society, and against globalization.
Every honest intellectual person knows that sometimes centralization is desirable. Centralization is cheaper, more efficient, and often cleaner and safer as well. It's a lot cheaper for one building on campus to generate steam than for shack to have its own heater. It's easier to scrub the output of 100 coal plants than that of 10,000 automobiles.
Yet there are otherwise-intelligent people arguing for community-run, small, decentralized infrastructure even where it's batshit insane, like for nuclear power plants. This is not the product of honest reasoning, but an expression to live out the fantasy of living in a commune in the woods.
You want to stem the power of large corporations? I'm with you. Regulate them. But sometimes scaling up an operation is a no-brainer.
The attitude that small is always beautiful is the product of a small mind.
Specialization leads to centralization (Score:3, Interesting)
Centralization is to some extent the direct result of specialization within society. Nuclear power is extremely complex and to work in it, one needs highly specialized training. The direct result is that only a small subset of the population will ever be able to build and operate nuclear power plants, and thus nuclear power generation will always be highly centralized. The same is true of coal power or natural gas power generation, or, for that matter, food and clothing production. The less time I spend man
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wired Article Errors and Omissions (Score:5, Informative)
This is part of why the whole quasi-conspiratorial story of "why we didn't go with thorium in the first place" is utter nonsense. It was not because "we wanted bombs instead" and were prejudiced against "superior thorium", it is because only if you have an established nuclear industry cranking out materials usable in bombs by the thousands can you build these reactors in the first place. Either you must have natural/low enriched uranium reactors to produce plutonium, or you need large amounts of highly enriched uranium (prime bomb material) to load into thorium breeders.
Also unacknowledged is that the particular type of reactor being promoted, the molten fluoride salt reactor, was and is a complex technology that requires substantial additional development. Only one single reactor of this kind was ever built, and it was an 8 megawatt (thermal) materials test reactor, not a power reactor. We are looking at many years of additional development before construction can start on a prototype full scale power reactor. I agree that this technology should be further pursued, and it may turn out more successful that plutonium breeders (no successful power plants have been built, just several failures) but it is by no means guaranteed.
Hyman Rickover, by the way, was interested in light water uranium fueled reactors because they are a good technology for powering submarines, not because they produce plutonium (they are lousy plutonium producers, the yield is low and the material produced has terrible properties for bombs).
Check out the 2005 IAEA survey document (http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/IAEA-TECDOC-1450.pdf) for a good summary of the thorium technology options and prospects.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, just load it up with some waste from the current reactors. Poison it with U-238 so that it is too noisy to use in any nuclear weapon and off you go, it is self-sustainable from that point and does not need any more Uranium.
More like the next Nuclear Fail (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=3126 [corporatewatch.org.uk]
According to this report, only wind and solar come out as having the potential to be both socially desirable and effective in combatting climate change. Hypothetical 4th generation nuclear reactors, even if decided upon, would be too little too late because it takes long to deploy at great up-front cost, and the waste problems remain unsolved (despite what you may hear about the magic of breeder reactors etc.)
declining oil production (Score:3, Interesting)
Even Iran wants nuclear power for this reason.
You sure it isn't because their oil production has peaked and is now declining alarmingly quickly?
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While you have a good point, the situation now is that one country has an established capability and the other is building that capability and engaging in hostile rhetoric at the same time. That seems suicidal to me. I fully expect that one day, Israel will get scared and make a first strike on Iran, and since they will only get one shot (due to the public outcry from the rest of the world), it will be a definitive attack. It would be hard for any thinking person to say that Iran didn't bring that on themse
Re:declining oil production (Score:4, Insightful)
How exactly did Israel suffer and how exactly are they accountable, any more than Iran? They weren't accountable when they got nukes, and once they did, they became even less so. They ensure Palestine is essentially a ghetto without real blowback. Nukes gave them the same non-accountability and irresponsibility than Pakistan got with their nukes.
I'm no fan of the Iranian govt, but neither am I of the Israeli one. Instead of teetering on edge all the time about when Israel is going to attack Iran's wannabe nuke facilities with rockets, I'd rather they have MAD. Actually I'd rather there were a regulated peace, but no one (and I mean the US govt here) wants that, apparently.
By the way, it's irrelevant how many allies it has "in that part" of the world. They have the only ally that counts.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
and nobody who wants to die rises through a power structure to lead a nation.
Only people who like, and want, power get there. they do not want their power base to evaporate, nor do they want to die.
You are never going to have to worry about a national suicide bombing.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Iranians are not suicidal virgin seekers.
You don't become the leader of a theocracy by being moderate.
The real reason is that Israel is at odds with middle east
Being a tiny sliver of a nation, surrounded by enemies (do you not remember how many times Israel has been invaded?) who vastly outnumber you and hate your guts does tend to generate well-justified paranoia.
and cannot see another rising power.
Sure they see another rising power. With missile to reach Israel and "soon" nukes to attach to them.
From wha
Re:declining oil production (Score:4, Informative)
How can you say these things with a clear conscience? You're either misinformed or attempting to pull off one helluva a bald faced lie!
"Last I checked Iranians weren't training terrorists."
http://www.iranfocus.com/en/terrorism/exclusive-terrorist-training-camps-in-iran-05956.html [iranfocus.com] - London, Feb. 27 – Iran Focus has obtained a list of 20 terrorist camps and centres run by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
"And it is well known that Iran has actually not supported Hezbollah, contrary to popular American rhetoric."
Oh really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah_of_Iran [wikipedia.org] - "The Hezbollah, or Party of God, (also HizbAllah or Hizbullah) is an Iranian movement formed at the time of the Iranian Revolution to assist the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his forces in consolidating power."
Or
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/world/africa/18iht-iran.2232363.html [nytimes.com] - "On Tuesday, Iran's rhetorical threats against Israel and its unswerving embrace of Hezbollah continued."
I'm trying to not be offensive but your viewpoint has left me incredulous! How do you say the things you do, which are in direct contradiction to well known and cited information, WITHOUT CITATION and then get modded to +5 insightful?
Help me out here.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm trying to not be offensive but your viewpoint has left me incredulous! How do you say the things you do, which are in direct contradiction to well known and cited information, WITHOUT CITATION and then get modded to +5 insightful?
Because on slashdot, anything critical of Israel automatically gets modded up. It doesn't matter if it's sourced, or if it's accurate, or even if it's internally consistent. As long as you complain about Israel, you're guaranteed mod points.
Re:declining oil production (Score:4, Funny)
. And it is well known that Iran has actually not supported Hezbollah, contrary to popular American rhetoric.
Absolutely. For some reason, however, some local Lebanese paramilitary groups were so pissed off about this non-existent Iranian presence in Lebanon (and their support for Hezbollah), that they've declared war on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards - specifically, Kataeb (Falange) did so. Weird people...
Also, Hezbollah are armed with such products of Iranian military complex as Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rocket artillery, and Ra'ad and Toophan AT missiles. Clearly those must be gifted to them by Allah's divine intervention, since we know that Hezbollah is not supported by Iran at all.
Iranians are not suicidal virgin seekers.
Indeed, and using volunteer militia to create passages through mine fields by means of human waves [newyorker.com] is a very good testament to that!
'heat'? (Score:3, Insightful)
What 'heat' other than strongly worded letters did the State of Isreal take in response to their Gaza attacks?
They're not even part of the Non-proliferation treaty. Your assertations need citations.
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I believe that Hamas and their buddies have much more responsibility for civilian deaths than does Israel.
When you launch attacks from occupied civilian dwellings, you have to expect to be hit back. They deliberately put their civilian population in jeopardy and then whine about civilian casualties.
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War is not a game. You can't launch attacks from civilian buildings and then complain about "fairness" or "proportionality" when those buildings get bombed.
In my opinion, the methods the Palestinians are employing are all wrong. As long as they continue armed struggle, they cannot win against the overwhelming military advantage that Israel enjoys. However, if they leverage their advantage in birthrate, and simply stage lots of sit-ins, eventually they will break the Israeli civilian population's will. A
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It's overwhelmingly Israel that's doing the killing. It's over 100:1.
It's a very well known technique of dealing with casualties in Arab-Israeli conflicts: do not differentiate them into military and civilians. Because if you do, turns out that vast majority of Arab casualties are armed militants.
At that point, the proportion actually makes sense: you have a ragtag, badly armed and badly trained army with virtually no strategic command going against one of the best-trained and best-equipped armies in the world. Of course the casualty rate is going to be insane!
But guess what
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You are under the misguided impression Iran's biggest enemy in the region is israel. It is not. It has yankee troops on two borders, and has the Saudi's to contend with for leadership as the per-eminent Muslim state. The rhetoric against israel is just that, rhetoric with some token proxies causing a fuss to make it look like they're doing something. The real prize is to destabilize saudi, who regularly publicly toy with the idea of being nuclear armed.
Who do you think the saudi's are buying all the F1
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hen why worry about creating the fuel, even though it is easy to get, prior to building your first reactor?
National security? If you rely on someone else, you are left at their mercy. They can just turn off your economy. This is actually a problem which Europe is facing with respect to Russian gas.
Even if their oil has peaked, it will be many decades before a real impact is made.
Declining revenues happen immediately, how would you fancy a 30 year recession? How long would it take to build a Nuclear based infrastructure? It'll take decades.
Instead, they should be worried about building up other industries
Without energy, how would they run these other industries? Everything is based on energy, our primary energy source just now is oil.
Iran may well be after th
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National security? If you rely on someone else, you are left at their mercy. They can just turn off your economy.
Bingo. Iran doesn't want another country to do to them what they did to the West in the 70s.
Re:declining oil production (Score:4, Insightful)
Oil is the primary energy source, mostly due to cars and trucks and such, but coal and natural gas (combined) power just as much, and the US has lots of both. In a bad enough oil crisis, the US could ramp up coal production and convert cars (and furnaces) to run off of compressed natural gas (which is common enough in niche markets, mostly big fleets).
Re:declining oil production (Score:5, Insightful)
They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets. The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of the Jews, even more significant than God, religion, and the prophets, (it) deals very severely with those who deny this myth but does not do anything to those who deny God, religion, and the prophet.
Basically, he denies that the holocaust happened. And attacks those who have tolerance of religion or the lack of.
Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism? You should know that this slogan, this goal, can certainly be achieved.
Basically, not only does he think Israel doesn't have the right to exist, but apparently neither does America.
In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country. [...] In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this.
And he not only denies gay rights, but denies that there were even homosexuals in Iran. Even America didn't deny the fact there were black people who were being oppressed. Some might have said that they weren't being oppressed but no one would be as stupid as to say that there is no such thing as black people.
So in light of a politically unstable region, a leader who has made stupid and dangerous comments, how can we say letting them have nuclear power/weapons is a good thing? If Iran wants nuclear power, how about they let the developed nations build and supervise the infrastructure until Iran becomes stable?
Re:declining oil production (Score:4, Insightful)
While I can see the validity of your main point about Iran being "unstable" and not democratic, the way you present your argument has at least two deep flaws.
You have to also see it from the side of everyone else who isn't Iran.
Like every other country in the region that is not Israel? Are they as concerned as the west about Iran's nuclear program? What about their opinion on the fact that Israel secretly produced nuclear weapons and still has them?
And he not only denies gay rights, but denies that there were even homosexuals in Iran. Even America didn't deny the fact there were black people who were being oppressed. Some might have said that they weren't being oppressed but no one would be as stupid as to say that there is no such thing as black people.
Denying human rights to anyone is unacceptable. And of course denying the existence of people with different sexual orientations, when it is a well know fact of life, is stupid. But your analogy is simply wrong. One of the reasons why no one who practiced slavery (or oppressed black people) would deny their existence was simply because they treated black people as less than people. In their view, they were not equals.
Ah, BTW, a country leader making stupid and dangerous comments is in no way an Iranian privilege.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And I think I remember a report from a few weeks back on BBC saying how we have been consuming more Uranium in existing nuclear plants than we have been producing... if it hadn't been for stockpiles we wouldn't have been able to run currently existing nuclear plants. It is very coincidental that we not speak of this "alternative fuel".
It is also a very bad news when people talk about the "boom in tar sands" as a good thing. Tar sands are expensive (energy wise) to exploit, and wouldn't be put into product
Re:declining oil production (Score:5, Insightful)
North Korea has nukes, and we leave them alone.
Nah. It's because Seoul (with 25% of ROK's population) is 30km from the DMZ, which means that it's within reach of large artillery and MLRS/Katyusha rockets.
Peak Oil is Not a Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
Posting anonymously because it's bull. 200 years to peak oil there? Maybe if they don't sell any.
This isn't flamebait at all. None other than Dick Cheney was running around telling everyone who would listen that there was a huge production problem in the middle east. He had a great quote to sum it, something like, "If the Saudi's have so much more oil, they would have to be finding other fields like Gawar, and they haven't been". In fact, he calculated out how many Gawar size mega fields anybody would have to find, simply to meet existing demand, and they aren't out there.
Suddenly we find the USA sitting in Iraq, for what reason? The whole Bush administration's energy policy was essentially to get the dibs on the last remaining oil taps in the world, its own coastlines, interior, and in Iraq, essentially to buy time for its other plan of shoveling money at alternative energy projects would kick in.
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Go and watch The History of Oil - Robert Newman. Its both hilarious and informative.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5267640865741878159# [google.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You dont seriously believe we spent billions invading Iraq to bring democracy to the Middle East?
Especially since the other countries who are our "friends" in the region aren't exactly democracies (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, etc). Of course, when they are our friends, we call them Monarchies and when they are our enemies we call them dictatorships.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, yes, the old "war for oil" idiocy again. Only in the mind of a blithering moron would it make more sense to spend trillions invading a foreign nation instead
It's not just about getting oil for ourselves, its being able to control it for everyone else. It's also about using up someone else's oil before taking desperation measures for our own.
Re:Peak Oil is Not a Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if we didn't invade Iraq for its oil, what, exactly, did we invade it for? I mean, if you scoff at the "war for oil", argument, surely you'll scoff at the "they had Weapons of Mass Destruction", argument, which is even more patently false than the first one.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
At the time, we had some reason to believe that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. Iraq was deliberately and obviously preventing the inspections that they had agreed to in their surrender in the Kuwait war. All Iraq had to do to prevent the new war was allow inspections. I even remember hearing claims that some Iraqi scientists were feeding Hussein stories that they were developing nuclear weapons, even when they weren't. They feared for their lives if they didn't tell him they were developing weapons. S
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not just about getting oil for ourselves, its being able to control it for everyone else. It's also about using up someone else's oil before taking desperation measures for our own.
Ah, yes, invading other nations "to take their oil" isn't a "desperation measure", but investing in domestic industry is. What world are you living in?
I think the expectation was that everyone was surprised about the apparent "ease" of Afghanistan, and assumed that it would translate to Iraq
Nobody with any understanding of the situation was at all surprised about the ease with which the US took Afghanistan. We were a bit surprised by how quickly Iraq folded, though, and were quite surprised that they didn't use any gas or chemical warfare.
That's all irrelevant, though. By the time of the Iraq invasion, the US had already been involved in the
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Posting anonymously because it's bull. 200 years to peak oil there? Maybe if they don't sell any.
IIRC, there is an embargo on Iran selling oil. In other words: yes, they do not sell any.
Re:Cost (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
A heavy water reactor is the anti-thesis of the salt-based Thorium reactors.
Re:Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Japan, Canada, South Korea
Those certainly use their own tech in nuclear reactors, they actually build them instead of contracting out. But don't have any bombs.
Ukraine is also an interesting example. Not sure how much of a nuclear power plant they can build domestically, but certainly quite a bit...and they had 5000 warheads when the USSR dissolved. Got rid of all of them.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
'Because everyone that has nuclear reactors also builds bombs...'
In this case, one can't blame Canada!
Re:Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Because everyone that has nuclear reactors also builds bombs, so they go hand in hand, and cost less in the short run.
No. South Korea, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, have nuclear reactors and do not have nuclear weapons. This is not by any means an exhaustive list either.
You do not need nuclear reactors to make nuclear weapons. You can make nuclear fission weapons by using U-235 or Plutonium. If you have a centrifuge cascade like Iran does, or some other means to separate fuel, you can make U-235 weapons without owning a single nuclear reactor. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Little Boy) was of this type.
Re:Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
So still no explanation as to why no common use of Thorium reactors.
Same reason we don't use hemp paper [rense.com], and why anyone thinking we'll move away from oil based cars before the famine starts is fooling themselves.
The existing corporate status quo makes money doing it this way, and they won't change unless made to (by, say, running out of uranium or oil or what have you).
Re:Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
What type of nuclear reactor to use it completely unrelated to what fuel to use to power cars.
You aren't going to stick a nuclear reactor in the trunk, and how the grid gets its electricity has no impact on electric cars either.
My point is there is an existing system that involves large amounts of profit in doing it the old way, and the people making said profit have no reason to foster change just because science said so. In fact, given the dismal state of the US education and patent systems, companies often can actively push back by simply hiring, destroying, or buying out people with new ideas.
Look at digital music, for example -- we had to drag the music industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and they only came along after they had time to get their lawyers and executives to put down their clay tablets and abacuses long enough to think up some admittedly pretty innovative ways of screwing the rest of us over.
I guess a more succinct way to put it is that corporations have used profit to make science and progress their bitch this past century, and I see no reason why this won't continue going forward.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But that would take large capital investment of hundreds of millions if not billions in R&D, production of new facilities, etc., which would decrease short-term profit statements--and executives want to avoid decreases in profit statements at all costs so they can keep stock prices as inflated as possible, and milk their yearly bonuses. The current corporate structure punishes good long-term planning and rewards short-term profitability, so it's not surprising that no one's interested in innovating if
Re:zero-risk? (Score:5, Insightful)
And how many genuinely foolproof and fail-safe machines do you use every day without noticing, because they work so well?
We can build nuclear reactors that are safe, and we don't need thorium to do it. We can build inherently safe [wikipedia.org] nuclear reactors today using a variety of techniques. (See "void coefficient [wikipedia.org]".)
But like I said above, if using thorium leads to new public acceptance of nuclear power, it's a win regardless of its technical merits.
Re:zero-risk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, there's a chance of failure in every system, but good design can reduce it to an acceptable level. There's chance in everything: you could walk outside and be struck dead my a freak meteor.
As for the Titantic: how many passenger liner disasters have there been since her sinking?
Re:zero-risk? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Fail-safe" does not mean "free from failure". Fail-safe means that when said machine fails, it always fails in such a way that minimizes harm to equipment and operators.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Gee, if you're so easy to scare, try this out: Building industrial-scale photovoltaic installations might raise the albedo of the Earth so much that it will disrupt climate patterns and kill you with lightning. That's totally possible. I'm sure you can come up with your own nightmare scenarios for any reasonable technology.
But you know what scares me? The fossil-fuel-burning status quo, which is what your dumb fears are (perhaps unintentionally) perpetuating.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's called a pebble-bed reactor, and the reaction is automatically limited in the mixture of uranium as the reactor heats up through a mechanism called neutron cross section broadening.
It is failproof.
Re:zero-risk? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:zero-risk? (Score:5, Insightful)
I prefer small chance of it leaking out (which happened only once) more than the routine of "leaking" it out into biosphere on a daily basis, in the amounts no nuclear power plant will match. As do coal-fired plants.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How many times have we designed things that are supposed to be unsinkable or infallible and then had them sink or fail? If there is a radioactive material being used in the plant, then there is a chance that some of it will leak out.
See, it's fucking dimwits like you that talk about 7-sigma [wikipedia.org] events as if they're 3-sigma events that keep us using fucking coal, with its 100% probability of continuously releasing radioactive materials into the atmosphere. Get a fucking education, or failing that, go die in a fucking fire, you goddamn Luddite.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, I'm no mathematician, but there have been several hundred reactors built (maybe even a few thousand), and at least 2 have failed to some extent (TMI & Chernoble), which seems to put it right around 3 sigma... a 7-sigma event would only happen once for every 390,600,000,000 reactors.
I'm with you on the problems of coal, and I think nuclear is much better, but let's get real here - it's nowhere near 7 sigma.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Radioactivity is a concentration problem. Radioactivity, just like chemical pollution, is dangerous only beyond a certain threshold: we are right now exposed to cosmic rays, but that is not a cause of cancer, because our bodies can handle that level of radioactivity: they evolved for millions of years in this environment.
That's not the generally accepted view, which is that any dose of radiation could cause cancer, with probability proportional to dose (up to a point). Your "dangerous beyond a threshold" ar
Re:zero-risk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Reduced waste is one of the reasons for using Thorium: Not as much, and it decays to safe levels in decades, not centuries.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There are tons of reasons why "fuel based technologies", which is really an odd statement as even most of renewable energy sources are fuel based on some level, primary among them is we still have a fairly large shortfall between the world energy demands and its energy producing capacity. A situation that will only get worse as we increase our capacity for creating energy ironically enough. It would be irresponsible to not work the problem from every angle possible. This means working on solar, wind, nuclea
India's thorium reactors. (Score:3, Interesting)
India has Thorium reactors today.
Really? Can you show me a photo of a commercially operating (today) Thorium reactor?
There are certainly designs and plans and prototypes and test reactors.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm hugely in favour of solar and wind power, but evidently you need to understand "intermittency" and "storage" a little better. Like what keeps the lights on after 5 cold still cloudy mid-winter days...
Rgds
Damon
Re:Perhaps the industry doesn't want a new process (Score:4, Informative)
Buffoonery. It's business, pure and simple.
We have an established process and no one wants to buy that system. There is no reason to build a new system, which will still generate wastes which no one wants in their back yard, and small amounts of weapons grade material which no one wants, and basically no energy producer is willing to fund for fear that they will be betting their entire company on a system that will be hindered.
Progress-energy and others have spent a ton of money only to be held up by regulators (NRC) for 24 months! Figure the vig on a 5 Billion dollar loan for 24 months! This hold-up is PARTIALLY because of the political fear that nuclear is BAD. These power producers are borrowing BILLIONS of dollars and paying INTEREST every day on these dollars to build a very long term system, only to be held up by all manner of interests (Federal, State, and local).
You want nuclear of any kind? You need to guarantee some loans. Nuclear simply isn't politically correct. Period.
Simply put, it MAY BE the safest power system that the planet has to offer, and no one wants it because it is "nuclear". NIMBY. Average Joe doesn't want it. Period.
It won't matter if it is plutonium, uranium, thorium, pebble bed, liquid fuel, gaseous fuel, or run by fairy dust! People are scared of nuclear, and it will take a ton of long term education the change that. "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. "
And by the way, I know a couple of aspiring nuclear engineers who would love to work on thorium reactors, but there are no jobs in nuclear right this second. Hiring freezes abound. Also, you can build a perfectly good bomb from Thorium by-products. U-233 Teapot MET 1957 20+kt bomb anyone? And you can build a perfectly safe reactor from highly enriched U-235. Or plutonium. Finally, you can build a suitable explosive device from your water heater! Go watch Mythbusters and scale up according to need.
Pedal your conspiracies elsewhere.
Your humble senior reactor operator.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> Especially when there is no spare money to procure a wholly new reactor type.
Well that is the problem - and it is mainly because of safety regulations - which are a political area. We all know that the conventional nuclear reactor has a lot of safety issues, but it is certified! Getting a Thorium reactor to the same level of documentation and acceptance would be an expensive and lengthy process. As long as most countries have a de facto moratorium on nuclear reactor construction, there is no money in p
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)