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Thorcon aims to transform a shipyard into a factory for these things. Their plan is to mass-produce 250MW reactors.
by Beltiras 7y ago
Thorcon aims to transform a shipyard into a factory for these things. Their plan is to mass-produce 250MW reactors.
- adrianN 7y agoThe world need on the order of 100k 250MW (thermal) reactors to replace today's energy consumption. How many are they planning to produce per year.
- spiderfarmer 7y agoIf it only delivers .5% of the worlds energy consumption it's still an enormous (and welcome) feat.
- adrianN 7y agoYeah, sure. Build as much nuclear as you can reasonably integrate into a grid that primarily runs on renewables. But don't trust in Thorium to somehow fix our problem.
- Beltiras 7y agoThorcon is using 20% enriched U-235. Their design can accomodate the Thorium fuel cycle in the future but for now it's mostly repurposed nuclear wastes.
- Beltiras 7y agoI don't remember the figures. There are plenty of videos on Youtube with presentations from the Thorcon team. I think it's 250MW electric, 500MW thermal that the design delivers.
- ryanmercer 7y agoThere are more than 60,000 power plants in the world, the bulk of which are fossil fuels. Replacing them, with a continually growing power demand as newly middle-class individuals begin to consume more, is effectively impossible without radical change on a planetary level. Never mind the concrete production for all of the new plants alone would release a staggering amount of CO2. Even if someone figured out fusion this afternoon, and could start construction of one plant on each continent (sans Antarctica) this year, with the plants going online late next year, we'd still need radical change to hold us over for (likely) the couple of few decades it would take to build enough of the facilities. Also consider ICE vehicles are still something like 90% of the annual sales in the world too. If you outlawed the production of ICE vehicles in every country in the world today, in 30 years you'd still have many millions of those vehicles on the road being used. Concrete, plastics, livestock... there are many facets to this problem.
- Beltiras 7y agoAbsolutely. We need all angles at the problem to find a solution. We also need to mitigate the damage we know can't be prevented. Shipping is 12% of CO2 emissions. It's a little bit harder to nail down (found a staggering figure of 46% of all emissions) how much coal contributes but together with shipping they are more than half of all emissions. If you are tackling a hard problem and a solution to half of it is on your doorstep, please answer the bell.