[Rune]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Loki', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'J')ust say resistance continues in the west. China gets this prototype up and in 3 years decides on and begins to implement a massive rollout.

[Surf]

It should be noted that most of the information about thorium reactors is based on one experimental 7.4MW (thermal output) reactor that only operated for 4 years before it was shut down. Almost everything else written about LIFT reactors is based on theoretical studies. While these studies all look good there are still a lot of unknowns.

The corrosion resistant metal held up well during the experiment and lab test look good but often in actual practice the results are not as good. Corrosion could be a much bigger issue than is often assumed.

The LIFT requires continuous salt processing to remove the fission wast products. No one has built a full scale salt processing facility and tested it for reliability and the cost of making it and running it are largely unknown.

During operation a full scale reactor will produce a lot of tritium, helium, krypton, and Xenon gas. Much of this gas is radioactive and produces a lot of heat. This gas cannot be simply vented into the air. it must be stored under pressure in steel bottles for about 100 years. I have not yet seen any proposed gas handling system design or a construction and operating cost estimate for it.

While the LIFT reactors do look good a lot of work and operational experience is needed with smaller reactors is need before we can be sure what the final cost of the utility scale reactor will be. The unknowns could push the cost of making the reactor and operating it much higher than the currently believed. The cost of the electricity produced by it could end up being very expensive. 50 years ago people thought nuclear plants would produce power too cheap to meter. It didn't work out that way.

Currently wind power is producing power at very low cost that can often undercut the cost of fissile fuel power and and in some cases even nuclear power even in countries that that have no renewable energy subsidies. For a home in a remove place not connected to the grid, solar is often the lowest cost source of power. By the time LIFT reactors become available renewable may be well into there exponential growth phase and could be pushing fossil fuels out of the market.

While many renewable energy technologies produce intermittent power, some actually can produce power on demand. geothermal and hydro often do load following and generate poer 24 hours a day. solar thermal with thermal storage in a desert location can also generate power on demand or continuously, and even at night. the Gemasolar plant has an output of 19.9MW, 110GWhr per year today and more are being built. All of north Africa, the middle east, Australia, and the southwest US can meat all of there energy needs using Gemasolar type plants without any nuclear waste or pollution. they could even produce excess electricity for export to neighboring counties or states or use the excess power to make liquid fuel for long term energy storage or use by aircraft or ships. Electricity will be the dominate energy source for road and rail transport because renewable electricity will always cost less than fuel made from renewable electricity.

[url]ww.torresolenergy.com/TORRESOL/gemasolar-plant/en[/url]

[Rune]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Surf', 'I')t should be noted that most of the information about thorium reactors is based on one experimental 7.4MW (thermal output) reactor that only operated for 4 years before it was shut down. Almost everything else written about LIFT reactors is based on theoretical studies. While these studies all look good there are still a lot of unknowns.

The corrosion resistant metal held up well during the experiment and lab test look good but often in actual practice the results are not as good. Corrosion could be a much bigger issue than is often assumed.

The LIFT requires continuous salt processing to remove the fission wast products. No one has built a full scale salt processing facility and tested it for reliability and the cost of making it and running it are largely unknown.

During operation a full scale reactor will produce a lot of tritium, helium, krypton, and Xenon gas. Much of this gas is radioactive and produces a lot of heat. This gas cannot be simply vented into the air. it must be stored under pressure in steel bottles for about 100 years. I have not yet seen any proposed gas handling system design or a construction and operating cost estimate for it.

[Rune]

LFTRs - A Global aternative

Kirk Sorenson's youtube presentation.

[ROCKMAN]

Rune – “I always figured Peak Oil Apocalypse was a crock.” As did I. OTOH given the US consumers have increased their oil bill from $230 billion/yr to $630 billion/yr in the last 10 years it doesn’t appear “renewables - wind, solar, etc.” are saving us at the moment. Maybe if the cost of oil to the American consumer increases 270% again in the next decade the alts will begin to kick in big time…if we have enough capital to pay for them at that time.

[Rune]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ROCKMAN', 'R')une – “I always figured Peak Oil Apocalypse was a crock.” As did I. OTOH given the US consumers have increased their oil bill from $230 billion/yr to $630 billion/yr in the last 10 years it doesn’t appear “renewables - wind, solar, etc.” are saving us at the moment. Maybe if the cost of oil to the American consumer increases 270% again in the next decade the alts will begin to kick in big time…if we have enough capital to pay for them at that time.

[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Rune', '
')I hear you saying that you can't read an excerpt from a book - the length of short article, totally relevant to the OP. I believe you! You seem like the kind of person who would have a lot of trouble reading.

[Rune]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Loki', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Rune', '
')I hear you saying that you can't read an excerpt from a book - the length of short article, totally relevant to the OP. I believe you! You seem like the kind of person who would have a lot of trouble reading.

[Rune]

The Telegraph

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he thorium story is by now well-known. Enthusiasts think it could be the transforming technology needed to drive the industrial revolutions of Asia -- and to avoid an almighty energy crunch as an extra two billion people climb the ladder to western lifestyles.

At the least, it could do for nuclear power what shale fracking has done for natural gas -- but on a bigger scale, for much longer, perhaps more cheaply, and with near zero CO2 emissions.

The Chinese are leading the charge, but they are not alone. Norway's Thor Energy began a four-year test last month with Japan's Toshiba-Westinghouse to see whether they could use thorium at Norway's conventional Halden reactor in Oslo.
The Japanese are keen to go further, knowing they have to come up with something radically new to regain public trust and save their nuclear industry.

Japan's International Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) -- now led by thorium enthusiast Takashi Kamei -- is researching molten salt reactors that use liquid fuel. Is this what Premier Shinzo Abe meant when he revealed before Christmas that he planned to relaunch nuclear power in Japan with "entirely different" technology? We will find out.

The Chinese aim to beat them to it. Technology for the molten salt process already exists. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee built such a reactor in the 1960s. It was shelved by the Nixon Administration. The Pentagon needed plutonium residue from uranium to build nuclear bombs. The imperatives of the Cold War prevailed.

The thorium blueprints gathered dust in the archives until retrieved and published by former Nasa engineer Kirk Sorensen. The US largely ignored him: China did not.

Mr Jiang visited the Oak Ridge labs and obtained the designs after reading an article in the American Scientist two years ago extolling thorium. His team concluded that a molten salt reactor -- if done the right way -- may answer China's prayers.

Mr Jiang says China's energy shortage is becoming "scary" and will soon pose a threat to national security. It is no secret what he means. Escalating disputes with with India, Vietnam, the Philippines, and above all Japan, are quickly becoming the biggest threat to world peace. It is a resource race compounded by a geo-strategic struggle, with echoes of the 1930s.

His mission is to do something about China's Achilles Heel very fast. The Shanghai team plans to build a tiny 2 MW plant using liquid flouride fuel by the end of the decade, before scaling up to commercially viable size over the 2020s. It is also working on a pebble-back reactor.

He estimates that China has enough thorium to power its electricity needs for "20,000 years". So does the world. The radioactive mineral is scattered across Britain. The Americans have buried tonnes of it, a hazardous by-product of rare earth metal mining.

China is already building 26 conventional reactors by 2015, with a further 51 planned, and 120 in the pipeline, but these have all the known drawbacks, and rely on imported uranium.

[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Rune', 'C')ry about it all you want. And you can use your viagra like a suppository.

[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ROCKMAN', 'R')une – “I always figured Peak Oil Apocalypse was a crock.” As did I. OTOH given the US consumers have increased their oil bill from $230 billion/yr to $630 billion/yr in the last 10 years it doesn’t appear “renewables - wind, solar, etc.” are saving us at the moment. Maybe if the cost of oil to the American consumer increases 270% again in the next decade the alts will begin to kick in big time…if we have enough capital to pay for them at that time.

[Rune]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Loki', 'a')nother 20 years...

[ROCKMAN]

Loki – Maybe many are just prejudiced by what the MSM is focused on at the moment and just don’t hear what many other folks are feeling. I deal with folks who live in the “collapsed“ world some speculate about happening in the future. Several months ago I watched a couple of families sell their kids toys and old cloths at a garage sale so they could raise money for their share of car pool expense so they could make it to their min wage jobs. That’s not a Mad Max world but it is very unpleasant.

Driving in this morning I thought about a global metric to make the same point. I just did a rough estimate: in the last 7 years the world’s oil consumers have transferred about $15 TRILLION to the oil producers. Had oil remained at the same price as it was for the 15 years from the late 80’s through the 90’s they would have paid about $5 TRILLION.

Granted the world economy is huge and metrics even in the range of tens of $billions are relatively small. But the increase in oil prices have reduced the amount of monies available for social service programs, home and business loans, salaries, etc. by $10 TRILLION in recent years. And currently the drain continues at a rate $3 TRILLION per year. Just a little more than a decade ago the bill would have been $800 billion/yr. If consumption and prices hold the world’s economies will transfer an additional $20 TRILLION to the oil producers by the end of this decade. That's a lot of capital that won't be available for the alt build out, mitigating the effects of GHG or anything else.

I and the other oil producers obviously have nothing to complain about. But we are a tiny minority of the world’s population. My world is very nice. Many folks on this site live in a rather comfortable world. But many others are already living in that “collapsed” economic world. And it looks as those numbers will be growing.

Essentially a recycling of that old joke: you have a good job…no economic problems. Your neighbor loses his job: a recession. You lose your job: a depression.

[Rune]

In 1900, 90% of Americans were farmers. Now it's 2%.

The same trend has been happening in manufacturing, a fact that is taken for granted by nearly all economists. And the trend is strong.

It is forecast that the same sort of thing will happen in the area of cognitive skills.

Frequently, I am reading economics analyses that declare that growing wealth disparity will only increase - because only those with the proper skillsets to work in collaboration with machine intelligence will be worth hiring. Trends in automation, robotics, AI and all that are evidence that the middle-to-low class skill sets are not as valuable, as they once were in the 20th century.

"Average Is Over" was the title of one economics book I read recently describing the reasons behind the decline in median income and the erosion of the middle-class.

Only about 15% of the workforce has the sort of skills that are desperately needed.

But these trends have NOTHING to do with energy scarcity.

Recently, I went to Amazon and counted the number of books written about the 2008 financial crisis. I got to 59 before I started encountering titles with things like "chemtrails". NONE of these books attributed the crisis to energy scarcity as a primary contributor to the financial crisis.

On about the 9th page of results, I found one that dealt with the effects of the financial crisis ON the oil industry - the exact causative reverse.

It's a damn good thing that oil is priced where it is - at around $100 +/- $20.

This price allows for all sorts of energy innovation, conservation and efficiency improvements without wrecking global economic development.

It's interesting to watch these developments, which is what I mostly do on this site now.

It's farcical to pretend that we are living on some Mad Max era. We are not. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

[Rune]

Small Modular Reactor for Military Use

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he military has a good reputation of being first adopters of technologies that make a transition into the civilian world.

“It certainly doesn’t sound far fetched that the next phase of commercialization could involve military installations, or defense related installations,” Chupka said.

And, as history shows, it has been done before.

The Cold War-era Army nuclear energy program marked several notable achievements. One reactor became the first to be transportable on the back of a flatbed truck. The first use of nuclear-generated power to desalinate water took place at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.

The Camp Century plant was the first prepackaged nuclear power plant to be installed, operated and subsequently removed, according to a declassified Energy Department report on the history of highly enriched uranium.

Today, gaining a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a long and arduous process, Chupka said.

[dinopello]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'R')une, machine intelligence? Like Siri? Serious? Can Siri make my bed? Wash the dishes? Sirious?

[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ROCKMAN', 'S')everal months ago I watched a couple of families sell their kids toys and old cloths at a garage sale so they could raise money for their share of car pool expense so they could make it to their min wage jobs. That’s not a Mad Max world but it is very unpleasant.

[Rune]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dinopello', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'R')une, machine intelligence? Like Siri? Serious? Can Siri make my bed? Wash the dishes? Sirious?