Robert Hargraves - Thorium Energy Cheaper than Coal @ ThEC12
 

This is a 40 minute video discussing energy economics, specifically WRT Thorium. I started to hijack the recent solar power thread, but decided against it.

Robert Hargraves - Thorium Energy Cheaper than Coal @ ThEC12 - YouTube

A fine bit of hijacking it was, too! OD offers opportunities for free education with remarkable frequency. I didn't know about the thorium reactor and I learned a lot from the links and further searching.

Good good. IMO molten salt reactor tech is more likely to positively influence the world's energy (and political) problems than anything else that I am aware of. Not many people like to talk about it though. I'm also glad to hear of Chinese progress on it, for a couple of reasons.

1. They must use nuclear. No other energy source comes close to meeting their projected growth in demand.
2. LWR's (current tech) are finicky, and need a lot of well trained baby-sitters. That kind of thing can't scale well.
3. We're down-wind of any probable nuclear accidents.
4. If they used coal, we'd be worse off pollution-wise than with periodic Chinese nuclear accidents.

5. Burning coal releases a fair quantity of radio-isotopes into the environment.

Coal is a thor loser?

Nice one!

Yeth. That theem to be the cathe.

CO2 remains a great plant growth accelerant.

That's true. I'm aware of a series of greenhouse experiments in which Spartina (a saltmarsh grass) grows more vigorously with elevated CO2 & temp.

A downside of CO2 & temp increase is lower O2/CO2 ratio in the ocean. This is bad for life. In the Triassic (IIRC) this shift led to a few million years of anoxic oceans and low O2/CO2 atmosphere in which most living creatures could not live above sea level due to lack of oxygen.

There is more that we don't know about climate than we know. Today is a good predictor of tomorrow, but not perfect.

On the a closely related topic, following is a long video of an informal presentation on so-called moving wave technology. Both this and Thorium based reactors as shown in the previous video are being investigated by B. Gates and developed in China. This video goes into far more detail than the other.
http://www.viddler.com/v/6d865d05

:laughing:

But of course, this technology has ZERO chance of attaining maturity without government interference and funding.:rolleyes:

If the market place is left as the motivation to innovate, things like this will INDEED obtain maturity.

Great response!
Of course it does open the question of what is in your mind that you made that connection. It must be a strange place, indeed. ( Not a criticism--I still suffer from some form of attention deficient disorder--As I told my similarly affected son--its a 2-edged sword--sometimes you will lose people as you make what seem to you to be normal transitions in a conversation but others don't can't follow them., OTOH, those same sorts of leaps enable you to seem very creative.) Was that an example of what happens?

Here is the solution to our energy needs:

Rats--can't post the picture--look at yesterday, and today's "Pearls before swine" comics.

I've read the opinion that uranium has been generally favored over thorium because of the desire to portray nuclear bomb tech as something positive for the world. Harnessing the atom and all that. That would still have to be somewhat true with thorium but apparently it doesn't offer the same propo score.

A buddy on another site is a booster for life of the integral fast reactor (IFR) for which there is apparently no other available suitable coolant/energy transfer medium than liquid sodium. I'll admit it's an attractive solution in many ways - it could consume much of waste nuclear materials currently in haphazard storage and is allegedly meltdown-proof. The downside from what I can gather is that so far practically all of them have suffered debilitating sodium fires. What could go wrong? Liquid sodium separated from water by a thin metal membrane? Oh boy. Maybe if the sodium could heat another medium which is then transferred to the water/steam component - sort of a buffer step - might be more reliable.

Integral Fast Reactor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Damned if I know what was in my mind. I rarely know why thoughts pop in and out. Sometimes on reflection I might rationalize cause and effect, but that is perilously circular. Sometimes I get things in dreams, too. It's all okay with me as life would be incalculably boring without it.

Yep. Navy tried a liquid sodium cooled reactor on the original USS Seawolf (attack sub) back in the late 50's. Decided it wasn't a good idea for pretty much the same reasons.

No reason why it couldn't -- the Soviets used molten lead/bismuth (basically solder) as a high-temp coolant in some reactors.

Plenty of cooling water available in the immediate area.

Ummm, using seawater to directly cool a reactor is probably the worst idea ever.

Is that what he wrote?

No its not, but I didn't know any better, anyway. I was just musing about the vast quantities of water just outside the hull---well hopefully outside the hull.

Most vessels use seawater as a heat exchanger coolant. A nuke is just a fancy boiler. I imagine it has the equivalent of a steam exhaust condenser.