[ExI] cost of SBSP and thorium

[John Clark]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> John, you're a very poor troll.
>

On the contrary I'm a excellent troll! I've been on this list for 20 years
and according to the Guinness book of world records people that makes me
the longest lived internet troll in the world.

> Thorium is not fissible, but fertile.


Good thing too, otherwise nuclear bombs would be as easy to make as
popcorn.

> A thorium MSR must be kickstarted with fissibles, and have sufficient
> breeding factor.


Yep.

> This has never been tested.
>

The Molten Salt Reactor at Oak Ridge during the 1960's used a liquid fuel
made of U233 and Florine, it ran at full power (7.4 Megawatts) for 4167
hours. The U233 had to be bred from Thorium because U233 does not exist in
nature. It's true it was bred in a different reactor but I don't see why
that makes a fundamental difference, it still ran on the Thorium fuel
cycle; if you still find that unimpressive and want something better I'm
sorry but nobody has spent a nickel on LFTR's since 1969, and if people
like you get their way nobody ever will spend one more cent on LFTR design.

Incidentally if it had been a full LFTR with a blanket of breeding Thorium
it wouldn't have suffered the neutron damage to its metal parts that you
mentioned in one of your very rare substantial non-hysterical posts on this
subject because the Thorium would have absorbed the neutrons, that's where
the U233 comes from.

>> So, allow 10 years for a test build and problem solving. Then a few
>> years for designing a full-size power station and getting quotes for the
>> actual build. Then 5 to 10 years for a production build. It could easily
>> take 20 years.
>>
>
> > In 20 years, the demand gap is 20 TW. You've missed the goal by 20000
> new reactors. You're too late. Buh-bye.
>

It's true it could easily take 20 years or more, but not for any
technological reason. It took less than 6 years to go from the purely
theoretical discovery in Nazi Germany that the Uranium nucleus contained
enormous energy and liberating it did not violate the known fundamental
laws of Physics, to engineers in the USA making machines that used that
energy to destroy 2 cities thousands of miles away. They moved with such
incredible speed because they thought their lives quite literally depended
on it. If there were half as much urgency today we could get a medium sized
LFTR up and running in a matter of months, perhaps weeks; but that's just
not the world we live in. Eugen, you like to make scary noises about how
global warming or energy starvation is going to kill us all any second now,
but it's clear you don't really mean it, if you did you'd be the first to
push for LFTR research and anything else that might offer a solution to
this horrible situation. As it is there is zero urgency so 20 years to
build a small demonstration LFTR is very very optimistic, a infinite number
of years might be a better estimate.

> Oh, and where do you think the ~40 kT of U-233 is coming from?
>

That much U233 would supply enough energy to replace the entire world's use
of coal for at least 20 years, all 120 BILLION tons of it, and it will come
from the only place U233 can come from, Thorium. Existing Uranium reactors
have produced about 1600 tons of Plutonium, there is no way to avoid them
making the crap and regular reactors don't burn it up so it just
accumulates. A LFTR produces U233 from Thorium but it burns 100% of it up,
it has to or the reactor won't operate, and it makes virtually no Plutonium.

> Why are you lying, John?
>

This sort of emotional response indicates to me that there is something
other than logic behind your opposition.

  John K Clark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20120820/1a101740/attachment.html>