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Not necessarily disagreeing with your main thrust, but this sentence: "So maybe thorium power generation is a technical solution looking for a problem." goes a
by apendleton 14y ago
Not necessarily disagreeing with your main thrust, but this sentence: "So maybe thorium power generation is a technical solution looking for a problem." goes a bit too far. Certainly, there are it might be a political solution in search of a problem, but there are technical problems around waste, proliferation, and safety that MSRs at least attempt to address, and they also don't produce greenhouse gases the way fossil-fuel-driven generators do, and have fewer outstanding technical question-marks than renewables (at least as baseload power, a role for which huge technical challenges will need to be solved before they can be considered viable). That still may not be good enough, but there are clearly problems in current energy production that will need to be solved somehow.
Also, aside: that guardian article isn't terrible, but the author gets half-lives backwards the way lots of authors seem to, implying that elements with long half-lives are bad, I suppose because we'll need to bury them for longer. It's the elements with short half-lives that are scary; they decay really fast and give people radiation poisoning/cancer/whatever. An element with a 16-million-year half-life is barely emitting anything at all; that's the category of waste that can, as the author of this post says, be buried in a shallow pit in the desert.
- hmc 14y agoThe main problem I see nuclear having is its image, it is for that which MSRs could potentially provide a solution.
- yk 14y agoI would argue that for the purpose of nuclear waste disposal the relation between half life and problem is a bit more complicated than "getting it backwards." The short half life isotopes are easily disposed of, because we know how to build an organizational structure, that oversees the disposal. For example, to securely store nuclear waste with an half life of a decade on can simply coat it in some plastic and put it in a mine with a warning nailed to the entrance. With very large half life times on the other hand there is no big problem to begin with, as you stated. But the intermediate timescale poses problems, since there the nuclear waste is radioactive enough to be dangerous and we do not have a good idea how a facility looks like, that can survive one hundred thousand years.
- apendleton 14y agoYes, I was mostly just pointing out that the "Ooh! 16 million years! Scary!" attitude is bothersome, but you're right that I'm over-simplifying. My recollection was that the thorium cycle produces a mix of very-short-lived, deadly, gamma-emitting isotopes (U-232, I think? and possibly others) and very-long-lived, low-risk stuff, with less intermediate-half-life transuranic material left over, which made it rather preferable to the uranium fuel cycle as far as waste disposal was concerned, but I may be misremembering. Either way, the Guardian article doesn't deal with the issue in much depth or in a way that makes it sound like they know what they're talking about, so I don't trust their assessment of the relative merits of LFTRs vs. conventional uranium LWRs.