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Thorium reactors: Asgard’s fire
- politician 13y agoAh, Thorium articles. Guaranteed views from nerds, a great way to discover a cohort in your audience, and an easy template to follow (e.g. "it'd be so great, but adoption is 10 years away"). (Don't vote me up for this either. Dismissive first posts are another HN trope, so in this regard I'm as guilty as The Economist.)
- Kroem3r 13y agoPff. If 'molten salt' reactors are an inch closer in 10 years, I will eat my hat. The idea is only slightly more appealing than having the reactor fly around under it's own power. What makes you think The Economist is interested in probing the nerdosphere? Would Tesla, Apple, etc., be more effective? For sure, the '... adoption is 10 years away' thing is funny. Makes me reminisce for Popular Science. If I were to guess; they are advertising where their technological sympathies lie. It is more about managing their brand than probing an audience.
- colechristensen 13y agoAhem... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_NB-36H http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_NB-36H ... speaking of flying nuclear reactors
- MrBuddyCasino 13y agoOh wow, basically its Chernobyl with wings. Don't miss this, its pure gold: http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html Quote: "Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Pluto's sponsors were having second thoughts about the project. Since the missile would be launched from U.S. territory and had to fly low over America's allies in order to avoid detection on its way to the Soviet Union, some military planners began to wonder if it might not be almost as much a threat to the allies. Even before it began dropping bombs on our enemies Pluto would have deafened, flattened, and irradiated our friends. (The noise level on the ground as Pluto went by overhead was expected to be about 150 decibels; by comparison, the Saturn V rocket, which sent astronauts to the moon, produced 200 decibels at full thrust.) Ruptured eardrums, of course, would have been the least of your problems if you were unlucky enough to be underneath the unshielded reactor when it went by, literally roasting chickens in the barnyard."
- jff 13y ago> The idea is only slightly more appealing than having the reactor fly around under it's own power. That was a pretty fun one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
- Turing_Machine 13y agoThis was better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA If we hadn't canceled it we'd be colonizing the Solar System by now.
- politician 13y agoI was suggesting that The Economist knows how to write link bait articles that generate views, and that this article which offers nothing new is an application of that skill. Of course I was down-voted: HN's readership doesn't like to be told that it's a trivially exploitable source of clicks.
- interesting_guy 13y agoyou may be right but you are wrong
- apendleton 13y agoThis article deserves a bunch of credit for reasonably clearly articulating the distinction between thorium-powered molten salt reactors (the kind the Chinese program eventually aims for, and that groups like Flibe in the states want to build) and thorium-powered pressurized water reactors (like what India is going for). Lots of the amateur enthusiasm for thorium power glosses over the distinction, and while some of the benefits of thorium apply equally to both (like proliferation resistance), others (like many of the purported safety benefits) apply only to the MSR configuration, largely because it runs at atmospheric pressure. The downside of the MSR configuration is that it's way harder to build, and involves some maybe-not-entirely-solved problems around corrosion resistance, since the salts in question tend to be pretty reactive.
- archgoon 13y agoCoincidentally, ASGARD is also a horrible backronym for another nuclear related project. Advanced fuelS for Generation IV reActors: Reprocessing and Dissolution http://asgardproject.eu/publications http://asgardproject.eu/publications
- twic 13y agoThe new thorium design should be the Mega-Joule Operationally Limited Nuclear Incident Reactor.
- Consultant32452 13y agoMJOLNIR?
- ColinCochrane 13y agoThor's Hammer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mj%C3%B6lnir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mj%C3%B6lnir
- Consultant32452 13y agolol, nice.
- crusso 13y agoYou, my friend, have not had a proper nethack addiction if you don't have the desire to wish for a blessed +3 warhammer named Mjollnir. http://www.nethack.org/ http://www.nethack.org/
- stratos13 13y agoI think thorium MSRs are the most promising of the GenIV designs. However, the biggest engineering challenge with them is with the U-232 being produced. U-232 decays into Thalium-208 and gives off very high energy radiation which would kill anyone near it, as well as damage any electronics in the vicinity (this is also why making bombs out of thorium are not as big a threat). But if this can be overcome I think it'd be a great source of power.
- einrealist 13y agoWhat about the radioactive waste? All nuclear reactors produce waste (finally when disassembled after the reactors' end of life). I find it strange to search for more efficient reactor styles, while the waste problem is not solved.
- robbiep 13y agothe article talks about waste, namely how thorium reactors burn longer lived radioactive elements into shorter lived elements so tens of thousands of years of waste turns into hundreds of years of waste
- dragonshed 13y agoMost of the waste from traditional reactors is actually unspent fuel. Solid fuel rods only allow for about 1-2% energy conversion before the amount of transuranics and other contaminants built up and prevent safe operation. The idea of the liquid fueled reactors is that you can easily change the fuel composition, ideally constantly reprocessing the fuel of contaminates, while letting the unburned fuel stay in place. This would drastically reduce the amount of waste generated (by orders of magnitude), and the 'unburnable' waste left over actually has some uses of its own (molybdenum 99 and bismuth 213).
- einrealist 13y agoMost of the waste is actually not the fission product itself, but everything else that is required to maintain the reactor aswell as the reactor itself.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoThorium molten salt reactors make waste reprocessing vastly easier and they produce significantly less "potent" waste products than Uranium solid fueled reactors do. This is important because MSRs could be used to vastly reduce the amount of waste built up so far, easing the storage problem enormously.
- ajuc 13y agoIt is solved - store it somewhere, or use it as a fuel for other reactors. And the currently used alternatives (coal) produces way more waste (whole mountains of slightly radioactive, and slightly toxic dust leftovers from coal extraction build up near coal mines).
- zebulom 13y agoThe buzz for thorium reactors is made by people who want to sell thorium reactors.
- TeMPOraL 13y agoAnd repeated by those who don't want this civilization to end when we either run out of fuel or break the ecosystem.
- CWuestefeld 13y agoPerhaps the folks wanting to sell such reactors feel that way because they honestly believe that it's a superior alternative?
- willvarfar 13y agoAm I the only one who can't actually read the article? All I get is a "sign-up" floater :(
- kissickas 13y agoThat happens after you reach a monthly limit of economist.com articles, I believe. Easily bypassed by most on HN...
- barrkel 13y agoI got it without (to my knowledge) overflowing any limits for any reasonable time period. Do a Google search for the headline and click on the article that way. Or forge the 'Referer' header.
- tim333 13y agoTry incognito mode
- wazoox 13y agoClear the site cookies and reload the page.
- ColdHawaiian 13y agoThere's a really interesting Ted Talk by Taylor Wilson (perhaps the world's youngest nuclear scientist, and definitely a child prodigy) on thorium reactors as a safer alternative to uranium and plutonium reactors[1]. Apparently there's also this talk[2] by Kirk Sorensen, but I haven't seen that one yet. [1]: http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_small_nuclear_fission_reactors http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_s... [2]: http://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternative_nuclear_fuel http://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternativ...
- nnq 13y agoI see this as the main takeaway from the article instead: > One or two 233U bombs were tested in the Nevada desert during the 1950s and, perhaps ominously, another was detonated by India in the late 1990s. [...] intense gamma radiation 233U produces fries the triggering circuitry ...this only shows that military use is possible! For someone less concerned about safety and more concerned about having a nuclear weapon at all costs, it might be even easier. That triggering circuitry is definitely a solvable problem... brrrrrr
- eleitl 13y agoNot just the proliferation resistance is a myth, but there are several others making the round: http://www.whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium_myths.html http://www.whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium_myths.html
- hga 13y agoYeah, chemical separation + gun assembly warheads is a particularly bad path to allow, side steps the two hardest current things required (non-chemical uranium enrichment and implosion based warheads).
- apendleton 13y agoCertainly it's possible, but it's much harder to do without frying either the triggers or the engineers (gamma rays and people don't play well together), so the conventional wisdom is that non-thorium fuel sources would be lower-hanging fruit, and the pool of actors who could potentially make a bomb with it (or the U233 from further down the fuel cycle) is smaller than with plutonium or enriched uranium. "Proliferation-resistant" is the claim, not "proliferation-proof."
- eleitl 13y agoA few myths found: http://www.whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium_myths.html http://www.whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium_myths.html
- everyone 13y agoBrilliant fairly technical presentation on Thorium. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8 This more or less sold me on the idea years ago.
- spenrose 13y agoTwo articles on why nuclear will never* scale up: http://www.carbontax.org/blogarchives/2013/11/21/why-official-nuke-plant-cost-estimates-are-like-campaign-promises/ http://www.carbontax.org/blogarchives/2013/11/21/why-officia... http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2014/02/20/why-the-economics-dont-favor-nuclear-power-in-america/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2014/02/20/why-the-... * (again. It did reach real scale in post-WWII France among other places)
- jonnydark 13y agoIn the USA
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoKomanoff doesn't know it but he is helping make the Thorium MSR case. Proponents of the MSR are also critical of LWR economics.