We could mass produce Liquid Molten Salt Reactors or many other reactors with current technology, current manufacturing processes and replace all carbon we use now and fulfil the growing demand.
I simply dont understand why people continue to hope for fusion when they refuse fission.
Number of electricity-generating molten salt reactors built: 0
I agree that the challenges of scaling up and industrializing molten salt fission reactors appear significantly less daunting than those of industrializing fusion power. But there is still R&D required. The last molten salt reactor to actually attain criticality shut down in 1969 (ORNL Molten Salt Reactor Experiment). That experiment was too small for direct translation to industrial practice (7.4 MW-thermal, e.g. 3.3 MW-electrical with 45% efficient conversion). It didn't generate electricity, didn't operate long enough to demonstrate industrial durability (only 13,172 hours (1.5 years) of full-power-equivalent operation), and didn't demonstrate the neutron economy of a breeder or even a near-steady-state burner reactor.
There are a lot of steps remaining before any molten salt reactor becomes a commercially available product that a utility company can buy from a nuclear supplier. It would take many fewer steps than for a fusion reactor, but saying that molten salt reactors can replace all carbon we use now with current technology and current manufacturing is way overstating their technological maturity and availability.
The good thing about PWR and BWR reactors is that the radioactive portion of the system is mechanically simple. All the complexity is outside. The working fluid is water, which is easy to handle and, other than the production of tritium, doesn't become radioactive.
Every reactor design which had complicated stuff happening in the radioactive portion of the system has been a commercial failure.
EDIT: oh, uranium and thorium halides hydrolyze except at very low pH. And so will a number of fission-product-halides. So maybe not simpler to start with halide salts instead of oxide fuels.
There are two main theoretical advantages for breeder reactors.
One advantage is that the total energy extractable from terrestrial mineral resources is much greater with dedicated breeder reactors than with reliance on naturally fissile U-235 in simpler non-breeding reactors. In practice, nuclear power production has not grown fast enough to cause uranium shortages. Until there is a significant uranium shortage, reflected in much higher prices for freshly mined uranium, the higher complexity/cost of a breeder reactor cannot be offset by cost savings on fresh uranium fuel.
The other theoretical advantage is a reduction in actinide waste production (plutonium, americium, curium). These heavy waste atoms dominate the radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel in the medium term, thousands to tens of thousands of years from now. But in the short term (years, decades, and centuries), the radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel is dominated by fission products rather than actinides. Breeder reactors do not notable reduce production of fission products compared to conventional reactors. Further, the reprocessing of nuclear fuel to separate the fission products has a tendency to turn potent but small, easily-handled waste problems into less potent but much larger and more unwieldy waste problems. Even though there are some theoretical waste advantages to reprocessing fuel instead of using it once and sealing it up forever, in practice waste reprocessing has always led to higher expenses and more radionuclides actually released into the wider environment.
Some startups actually propose to produce reactors with the fuel inside and then recycle the hole reactor.
Chemical plants might be a pain but its far easier then doing isotopic separation.
My point is that the technical challenges are pretty minor compared to the rest. Nobody believes what I am proposing is impossible. There might be a discussion if it can be built in 2, 5 to have a full scale reactor that could be commercialized.
The real point is that this could have been done 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago or at any time. The issue was never a technical one.
If the government made a serious push including regulatory changes, action by national labs and copy the NASA approach to commercialization I am certain we could mass produce these things in under 10 years. Once you mass produce reactors the energy production capacity you produce is quite unbelievable. It dwarfs everything else.
> current manufacturing
My point about manufacturing is that reactors are not more complicated or need higher tolerances then rocket engines for example. SpaceX is producing rocket engines for 2M a pop at a rate of more then a 100 year. Boeing is producing far more complex air planes for 200M a pop at the rate of 1 per week.
It is far easier then producing all these wind, solar and battery plants. The needed scales of production are multible order of magnitude different.
A mass produced nuclear reactor will produce between 100-300MW, while most wind turbine produce around 3MW while being just as hard to produce and harder to install.
Well, kinda. Many of the possible revolutionary alternatives in fission reactor design would require new industries and industrial infrastructure. These would be able to build on existing technology and infrastructure, but as we've seen with the evolution of electric cars, this is hardly a trivial matter. (Witness: The Gigafactory.) If it weren't for the pre-existing demand and infrastructure for Li-ion laptop batteries, the current crop of electric cars may never have gotten off the ground.
So for fission alternatives to get off the ground, we'd need some entity with really big pockets to "pick a winner" and invest in that infrastructure -- preferably after investing in enough R&D to validate that pick. Either that, or the new alternative needs to be an order of magnitude better than the existing ones. When you account for the infrastructure costs, are any of the new alternatives that much better?
Nuclear has the advantage that it needs for less then any other infrastructure.
> When you account for the infrastructure costs, are any of the new alternatives that much better?
Yes, if you calculate it threw based on first principle it is much better.
It will talk 100 gigafactories and possible more just to get the required store to balance out wind and solar. 2-5 gigafactories sized reactors production plants could power most of the world in the next 30 years.
The scale of difference required in infrastructure, resources and investment is simply on another level.
The problem really is that in the west its practically impossible to do privately, and thus most nuclear startups move to the east and the government has no interest in doing it themselves.
China is already selling 4th gen pebble bed reactors, and after that they will probably commercialize different forms of MSR. It will however take another 10 years until you can buy them.
People have all sorts of deep seated fears about fission. They don't have to be accurate to be afraid.
Knowledgeable people are aware that more people have died falling off of roofs trying to install solar panels than have ever died from a nuclear power plant.
The problem is insufficient propaganda from the nuclear fission industry. The tech works fine, but people don't believe it.
[1] http://www.dw.com/en/belgium-says-its-nuclear-plants-are-saf...
Because of the time required to evacuate people from the impacted areas, one of the objectives of a response plan would be to minimize radiation exposure due to contaminated food and water.
Providing iodine tablets before an accident is intended to minimize radioactive exposure due to contaminated food and water sources from the time the hazard is discovered to the time you are evacuated, and allows planners to apply those resources that would otherwise be spent distributing those supplies to helping evacuate more people, or responding to the incident.
And since that's normal and predictable, it should never happen except in cases of major force, like earthquakes and tsunamis. A government should be able to resolve the situation would letting the risk rise to this point.
They aren't the same thing at all, obviously. But that said, it is much more likely that someone die from installing or servicing solar panels than someone die from a nuclear incident.
We tend to be afraid of abnormal but possibly fatal or maiming events - the ones that are newsworthy - compared to the risks we face on a daily basis. Which is why we are cautious when climbing a ladder twice a year but not when we get into the shower as an older adult, even though shower accidents, including broken hips, are incredibly common. The poster is putting the actual risk into perspective.
The point is that the risk of death with nuclear plants isn't nearly as high as people feel it is, even when factoring in the high-profile accidents that have occurred. Right now, a lot of people have an irrationally over-inflated perception of the risk posed by nuclear power.
This doesn't engage with the real world consequences of nuclear accidents that are devastating to life and the environment, long lasting and extremely expensive and complex to cleanup.
There's a real discussion to be made on the trade-offs between the potential environmental damage caused by an accident versus the looming threat of climate change. Unfortunately that discussion isn't really being had because nuclear power's public perception hurdle is so great.
It kills less people, it uses less land, it uses less resources, it uses less mining and so on.
Areas of nuclear fallout and in protection zones are actually reclaimed by nature and animals don't give a shit about living there.
Environmentalist should love nuclear. There is that movement called 'eco-modernist' who subscribe to that.
> nuclear accidents that are devastating to life
Hardly. Most of the people that were evacuated were not in danger, devastating to their live was government action because of fear mongering.
Far more people died of the evacuation then of the radiation.
People are again living in cities near Chernobyl and their cancer rates are not unusual.
If you can offer cheap power people will usually take it.