[ExI] cost of SBSP and thorium

[Eugen Leitl]

Have fun playing in your sandbox. Alone.

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 11:46:28AM -0400, John Clark wrote:
> 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

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-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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