If you haven't voted in this DU poll on nuclear power or renewables please take a moment

[kristopher]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=7617357&mesg_id=7617357

There is also an interesting discussion if you'd like some perspective on the matter.

[NightWatcher]

1. let me think... free, clean energy from the sun versus nasty harmful waste......

hang on, I'm almost there

[phantom power]

2. Oooh, K+R!

:popcorn:

[Warpy]

3. Read up on thorium reactors

They have few of the long term liabilities of uranium based reactors.

They would have been the dominant type of reactor coming out of the cold war but paranoid militaries around the world insisted on uranium reactors to produce weapons grade material. Funding was simply discontinued and only now is the technology being pursued, most notably by India.

The Wiki article is fairly decent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle

[kristopher]

4. You think that is a good way to go?

From the World Nuclear Association website:
Longer term, the AEC envisages its fast reactor program being 30 to 40 times bigger than the PHWR program, and initially at least, largely in the military sphere until its "synchronised working" with the reprocessing plant is proven on an 18-24 month cycle. This will be linked with up to 40,000 MWe of light water reactor capacity, the used fuel feeding ten times that fast breeder capacity, thus "deriving much larger benefit out of the external acquisition in terms of light water reactors and their associated fuel". This 40 GWe of imported LWR multiplied to 400 GWe via FBR would complement 200-250 GWe based on the indigenous program of PHWR-FBR-AHWR (see Thorium cycle section below). Thus AEC is "talking about 500 to 600 GWe nuclear over the next 50 years or so" in India, plus export opportunities.

In 2002 the regulatory authority issued approval to start construction of a 500 MWe prototype fast breeder reactor (PFBR) at Kalpakkam and this is now under construction by BHAVINI. It is expected to be operating in 2011, fuelled with uranium-plutonium oxide (the reactor-grade Pu being from its existing PHWRs). It will have a blanket with thorium and uranium to breed fissile U-233 and plutonium respectively, taking the thorium program to stage two, and setting the scene for eventual full utilisation of the country's abundant thorium to fuel reactors. Six more such 500 MWe fast reactors have been announced for construction, four of them by 2020. Two will be at Kalpakkam.

Initial FBRs will have mixed oxide fuel or carbide fuel, but these will be followed by metallic fuelled ones to enable shorter doubling time. One of the last of the above six is to have the flexibility to convert from MOX to metallic fuel (ie a dual fuel unit), and it is planned to convert the small FBTR to metallic fuel about 2013 (se R&D section below).

Following these will be a 1000 MWe fast reactor using metallic fuel, and construction of this is expected to start about 2020...

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html

As goes the US so goes much of the rest of the world, and you suggest that "to breed fissile U-233 and plutonium" isn't a matter for extreme concern?

Is there something I'm missing?

[Warpy]

5. Yes, it breeds far less of this than conventional uranium reactors do

and eventually even this degrades fully within the reactor. These things are designed to run much longer than uranium reactors.

I don't think it's a good step as much as it might be a necessary step and a distinct improvement over having dirty uranium technology crammed down our throats in the name of energy independence.

While it would be nice to be 100% renewable, I don't see how that is going to happen soon enough to eliminate the necessity for power from other sources. Thorium reactors are definitely preferable to uranium reactors and probably preferable to coal fired electrical plants.

[kristopher]

6. But renewables scale up faster and deliver cheaper power ...

"You wrote, While it would be nice to be 100% renewable, I don't see how that is going to happen soon enough to eliminate the necessity for power from other sources"

ETA:
I didn't want to bring the discussion to this thread, so please feel free to post your response and I'll leave the topic at that.

[bananas]

8. I've been reading up on them, and what I'm seeing is a lot of hype

Most of what's being written is hype by advocates. We saw similar hype about the Pebble Bed reactor, it was only last year that South Africa realized they were too expensive for electricity generation and effectively zeroed out their funding. We also saw similar hype about the new Generation III reactors, the EPR and AP-1000, France is just now realizing that the EPR is too expensive and they are considering going back to the old Generation II reactors.

Thorium reactors are still a erious proliferation risk, they still generate waste that has to be contained for a million years, and just like the PBMR and EPR they are likely to be much more expensive and difficult to build than the true believers expect. MIT's report "The Future of Nuclear Power" concluded that LWR's would be much more cost-effective than any of the advanced fuel cycles through 2050.

[timeforpeace]

7. Thanks for the heads up. Support, and if we had done it in the 70's maybe AGW wouldn't have been so

bad. Plus all that time to actually deal with the problems and solve them. Decades wasted, the oil industry predominant, it's been a disaster.

[kristopher]

9. Kick