Introducing a bold nuclear energy initiative to win an election?
thoriummsr.com
thoriummsr.com
It's easy to be optimistic about thorium and nuclear energy. The problem is that our optimism has burned us before, and in big, easily obvious ways at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, but also in the difficulties of radioactive waste management. And we don't have practical evidence that thorium power really will be useful, only assurances from the same sorts of people that said, back in the 1950s, that fission power was safe and would soon be as cheap as that from conventional sources.
Reread the letter from the Telegraph. It doesn't want to deal with the decades of lying "self-serving opponents of anything nuclear science", and the "waste" that is the Blue Ribbon Commission on nuclear waste, nor the effort to "convince the anti-nuclear voters that their thinking has been wrong." Instead, the author wants to make an end-run around to entire system: bypass the legislative system and the popular vote, and appeal directly to the executive, almost as if the executive were tzar.
That's why the letter sounds desperate. It's thrown its hands up at democracy.
The obvious, and mentioned, analogy is to Kennedy and the moon program, but there was already popular support for the moon program; at the very least from pulp novels and TV shows. There was also no existing wide-spread concern about the public dangers of rockets. Therefore I don't see how they really are comparable.
All I want to happen is that some form of energy that does not create green house gases to replace the coal plants and other polluting sources that are currently ruining the lives of many forms of animal and plant life on land and in the seas.
We can make very good educated guesses about Thorium molten salt reactors that can be made better than the already successful experiments that took place at Oak Ridge National Laboratory back in the 60's and 70's.
Scientists who actually study nuclear energy know that the damage caused by the fossil fuels has been far, far greater than that cause by nuclear energy.
If I were preaching to the President to lie to the public then that would be pathetic. It would be non-democratic to try to go with the whole mess without getting the people's approval but that is not what the article is saying. I wrote the article and I do believe that people want to know the truth and if someone like Obama were to suddenly start down that path there is a much better chance that he would get that message across than anyone else.
In case you had not noticed every election year is getting further and further from democracy because neither candidate is addressing the real problems in their campaigns. When they do get elected after a close election nothing much changes. They are criticized for false promises. Well I'm only asking that something valuable actual be part of the agenda.
The system does not work very well. The wealthy can damage an opponent anonymously by funding smear campaigns just because the opponents want to improve conditions for the majority of the population.
The four year cycle that every president has does not get enough time to implement his plans and he's blamed for the damages caused by previous regimes. The republicans successfully blocked most of Obama's ideas for change then they criticize him for not doing anything.
The fear factor has played a role in preventing technology from advancing. Besides the assassinations of the 60's and the terrorist attacks that keep killing people the irrational fear has been growing. Fear of things people don't understand is normal to some extent. What is beginning to be less normal is that people are willing to be fed information without investigating and seeking the truth.
The Chernobyl accident is the only truly serious nuclear accident that took place. It is well documented. Even a little research reveals that Chernobyl was unique because it had no containment. That is why people died. The other two you mention had far less radiation and no deaths occurred at Three Mile Island or are predicted by the well informed scientists and professionals at Fukushima.
The article is really just an exercise to make the reader think.
I already addressed your point about "very good educated guesses." That is, the people in the 1950s said that they made "very good educated guesses" about the reactors then being designed, which in turn were based on "already successful experiments." It's the same sort of people making the predictions now - how do we know that their predictions are any more well grounded? Freeman Dyson, in "Disturbing the Universe", gave a reason which resonates with me. In short, you need multiple iterations to get a the technology working well, and the reactors which came online in the 1950s-1970s were too early in the evolution cycle. The exception was military reactors, which went through lots of iterations, but of course which aren't appropriate for utility power generation.
Which is exactly how the Moon missions worked - build plenty of rockets, watch them explode, figure out what went wrong, and do a new iteration. How many iterations of thorium power plants will we need to develop in order to make safe, efficient, economical thorium power plants? One, ten, one hundred? What practical experience justifies that estimate? So permit me to feel skeptical when I read echoes of the rose-colored promises from the Atomic Age which mention nothing about the practical matters learned the hard way.
You may say that all you want is "some form of energy that does not create green house gases" but the article barely mentions other non-greenhouse-gas systems, and mostly dismissively in the ambiguously written line "The newest reactors produce far less waste, run far more safely and are far more reliable than solar or wind." (It's ambiguous because it reads like 'the newest reactors run far more safely than solar or wind', when it's trying to say that they are safer than older reactors.) It also mentions nothing about improved energy conservation.
I never said anything about preaching to the President to lie. You (since you say you are the author) are the one who calls people liars, specifically the "self-serving opponents of anything nuclear science."
Your comments about the political system are only somewhat applicable. The US is not the only political system in the world. India has strong economic incentives to go towards thorium, and have a technological base at least equal to the 1960s US, yet they don't predict working thorium reactors for at least another few decades. BTW, your argument seems to be that everything's getting corrupted, and you just want things to go corrupt in the way you want it to be. I am morally opposed to that justification.
You mistake the lesson I took from TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, which is that people don't like reactors because dense power sources which can't trivially be shut off are suspect. Coal is 'safe' because its direct failure modes is to catch on fire, and that's easily handled. Solar is 'safe' because its direct failure mode is to stop generating electricity. Wind is 'safe' because its failure mode is to fall down. Hydro based on large reservoirs is less safe, because the history of dam breaks shows that they have some pretty nasty failure modes. All of these 'safe' systems have have hundreds of design iterations and improvements, and real-world failures. Note that by 'safe' I am not including environmental impact. The term "safe" has several different meaning, and I'm limiting it to just this one.
This article was supposed to make me think? It made me think that the author understands neither people nor politics nor history.
Look, I'll say this again. You asked which of the two PythonDeveloper thought were desperate. It's pretty obvious that he meant the author of the essay about "the thorium and nuclear advocates." Now you completely agree that you are desperate. Why did you ask the question if you weren't looking for an argument? The non-argumentative one would be "yes, I am desperate; Desperate that we as a civilization won't be able to survive."
You think that desperate implies a sneaky agenda. It doesn't. Here are all the dictionary entries: "1. reckless or dangerous because of despair or urgency: a desperate killer. 2. having an urgent need, desire, etc.: desperate for attention. 3. leaving little or no hope; very serious or dangerous: a desperate illness. 4. extremely bad; intolerable or shocking: clothes in desperate taste. 5. extreme or excessive." Notice how none of those imply a sneaky agenda.
Nor am I against reactors. I'm explaining, the best I can, why anything associated with nuclear power is viewed with deep distrust. Referencing work from the 1960s doesn't help. That's from the same era of researchers which downplayed the negative consequences of Operation Plowshare. The problem is that the public reaction against decades of official optimism, which deliberately deemphasized the actual consequences, cannot be easily overcome just by more optimism.
The only way to do it is to set up pilot plants now, redo the same sort of engineering project as the MSR but using the fixes suggested from that project (I believe KAMINI did that), and then develop a demonstration pilot plant which actually produces power, test out the entire lifecycle (including breeding U-233 from thorium), present all experienced problems with radioactive contamination, effect of fluorine on the pipes, etc. And above all, make that information available for public and expect rejection.
This work of convincing the public cannot be done in a single presidential term. It'll be at least 5 years just to get the full engineering data. Hence, I find the proposal that the President should use Roosevelt's bully pulpit to advocate the issues on a national scale at odds with what I think is the right way to actually do this.
Furthermore, you wrote "When they finished a weeks work. They simply turned it off for the weekend and turned it back on the following Monday." but based on http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/NAT_MSREexperience.pdf , they most certainly did not have a weekly work schedule. It does not appear that you are working from the primary or even the secondary sources to make the above statement. Is you're above statement meant metaphorically? As it, I interpret it as truthiness.
In any case, you are confusing the issues. TRIGA is safe enough that it can be operated by undergraduates, and it can also be "turned off for the weekend." I think it can even be turned off for lunch. While power production reactors are a different scale entirely. Can you tell me how much decay heat will come from a thorium MSR which has been generating 300 MW use for 6 months? Can that sort of power reactor be so easily shut off and walked away from?
I read that the MSR decommissioning costs were higher than expected. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment#... says "the MSRE cleanup project was estimated at about $130 million", including a possibility for a nuclear criticality accident caused by the U-233 remaining in the system. To say nothing of the "one atmosphere of fluorine" gas above the solid salt. Are those costs and problems amplified in a full-scale commercial power plant?
And if you want to talk about alternatives to light water reactors, then one should also look to pebble bed reactors. Wikipedia quotes Richard Muller as saying they are "in every way... safer than the present nuclear reactors, and arguably safer than the global-warming danger posed by fossil fuels." Now, where have I heard that argument before? Note that PBRs had problems which were only identified by building reactors, and more PBRs have been built then thorium ones. Why should I presume that thorium MSRs won't also have problems?
Thorium234 is much safer than uranium or other fissile material, and unlike those, it can be used to make neighborhood reactors, allowing energy independence on a local scale.