Are Thorium / molten salt reactors over hyped and unrealistic...

Are Thorium / molten salt reactors over hyped and unrealistic? or is it really the best alternative we have to the current energy climate?

youtu.be/0BybPPIMuQQ

Other urls found in this thread:

bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421512002133
astro1.panet.utoledo.edu/~relling2/PDF/pubs/life_cycle_assesment_ellingson_apul_(2015)_ren_and_sustain._energy_revs.pdf
physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/
worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20150715wnisr2015-v1-lr.pdf
youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_1789360585&feature=iv&src_vid=d2PxY-wOrI8&v=568iDYn8pjc
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

>over hyped
there it is champ

Overhyped. Completely possible, but not a significant enough of an improvement over current fission technology to care about when we are well on our way to fusion already.

>when we are well on our way to fusion already.
we are?

relative to thorium, we are

Yes. We already have working experimental reactors.

What will it take to make these better things happen?

we had thorium reactor working in the 60's

competent and educated leaders

As I already said, it is not a significant enough of an improvement over current nuclear technology to be worth the cost. The money is far better spent on fusion, which is a huge improvement over both. It's like if you have a 2010 Mustang and instead of saving up to replace it with a Ferrari you buy a brand new 2016 Mustang. The only case in which Thorium research should be funded is if the entire fusion endeavor has a fatal flaw.

Thorium is already ripe for the taking, and it's a lot safer than uranium/water-cooled reactors. We should go for Thorium while we try to figure out fusion.

Ripe for the taking? It still requires a large amount of research and funding before it can be rolled out for industry. Essentially nothing has been done in the field in the past 30 years and there was not much before that.

then do it.
>oh wait, you cant because youre a fucking retard who waits for others to do it for them
>and guess what, those smarter people crunched the numbers
>its a fucking waste of time

>those smarter people crunched the numbers
>its a fucking waste of time
at least watch the video. retard.

>mfw his only source is a youtube video
>this is what hes gonna show to investors

I guess that's why china is pumping so much money into it?

Sometimes, some people overhype some aspects.

The Integral Fast Reactor, IFR, is pretty nifty too.

The short list:
MSRs are not proliferation proof, but AFAICT, most people believe that they can be designed to be about as weapons resistant as normal light water reactors, which is to say that you can make weapons, but there are probably easier ways to make weapons, such as just building centrifuges.

They are ridiculously safe.

The stories about the smaller volume of waste that has a smaller "net" half-life is also true.

It's also true that nuclear breeder reactors are the only tech that we have right now that can stop global warming, ocean acidification, and even mere mundane 8 million deaths per year from airborne particulate pollution.

Anything else? I love answering questions and responding to challenges.

>Overhyped. Completely possible, but not a significant enough of an improvement over current fission technology to care about

It has a good shot of being substantially cheaper, and much much safer. Also, with a breeder, we can be assured that our supplies of nuclear fuel are basically infinite.

>when we are well on our way to fusion already.
Lol.

They actually built a working reactor. All of the tech is well demonstrated, or close to that. ThorCon is ready to built a full scale prototype right now, and it's expected to work out of the box (admittingly not a breeder because of the lack of isoptically pure lithium, and because of potential "plumbing issues" which I can get into.) What fusion tech is anywhere close?

Last week Portugal for almost 3 days, ran solely on renewable energy. Yes it's a small agrarian society, but it proves it can be done. Cheaper than nuke, coal, oil or gas in the long term. The cost is in land area.

Whenever I hear these news stories and look into them, they always turn out to be bullshit. I haven't had a chance yet to look over the original article in Portugeuse and make my way through with google translate, but it's very, very likely that they're playing tricks on you (or they have an amazing amount of hydro).

The biggest trick that they might be playing is the same trick that the recent Scotland report did, which is to pretend that, as long as net amount of exported electricity equals net amount of imported electricity, then it's 0, and it can be ignored. The biggest problem with wind and solar is that it's intermittent, and society cannot run on intermittent power, and it's not thermodynamically possible to use energy storage.
bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

It's not cheaper. It won't work. It's a farce. The modern environmental movement is almost a complete sham. It's nature worship, combined with radical elements of communism / anarchism, with a particularly strong trend of anti-corporationism, and often with strong elements of de-industrialism. And this is coming from someone who is and who calls himself a radical Marxist.

The idea that we can power our society with wind, solar, biofuels, and the rest of it, is a crock of shit, told by bald faced liars, frauds, and their duped followers, or by people who want to de-industrialize.

>it's not thermodynamically possible to use energy storage.
???

>The modern environmental movement is almost a complete sham. It's nature worship, combined with radical elements of communism / anarchism
Have you ever noticed that saying that kind of shit makes people think you're a kook?

Claiming that people only disagree with you because they're lying or irrational cultists doesn't make you look wise, it makes you look like your either an idiot or in some kind of denial. It's not an argument, it's a refusal to acknowledge a view.

>bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
Are you seriously citing a blogpost that in turn cites Energy and Environment?
That's not even funny, that's just sad.

Also, some of the numbers in that are downright bizarre. Solar panels have a EROI of 3.5? Are they living in the 1980s?

>>it's not thermodynamically possible to use energy storage.
>???
I did provide a citation right after that. Here, let me provide it again.

bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

>Have you ever noticed that saying that kind of shit makes people think you're a kook?
>Claiming that people only disagree with you because they're lying or irrational cultists doesn't make you look wise, it makes you look like your either an idiot or in some kind of denial. It's not an argument, it's a refusal to acknowledge a view.

Just calling it like I see it.

>Are you seriously citing a blogpost that in turn cites Energy and Environment?
>That's not even funny, that's just sad.

Would it make you satisfied if I found another paper that replicated the results?

>Also, some of the numbers in that are downright bizarre. Solar panels have a EROI of 3.5? Are they living in the 1980s?

Hmmm? Do you have other sources that have wildly better numbers, that don't ignore the mining (energy) costs, recycling (energy) costs, energy costs to manufacture the inverters, power line manufacture and maintenance costs, etc etc.?

>It's not an argument, it's a refusal to acknowledge a view.

Also, you see, what you said might be right if I just posted that and nothing else. However, I also happened to include reasoned argument and citations, which means that I am engaging the alternative, irrational, view.

Similarly, by way of analogy, a common mistake is to say that name calling is always an ad hom fallacy. Simply calling someone wrong and calling them an idiot is generally an ad hom fallacy. However, if you thoroughly refute their point, /and/ call them an idiot, it's not ad hom. Many people don't properly understand that.

Samefag

>I did provide a citation right after that. Here, let me provide it again.
I clicked it again, but it was just as dumb the second time.

>Just calling it like I see it.
I honestly can't tell if you're being serious.
12-year-olds in the playground "call it like they see it"; everyone else knows that's just an excuse for them to call each other names.

>Also, you see, what you said might be right if I just posted that and nothing else.
No. Calling people cultists just because they don't agree with you is just as dumb in the middle of an argument as it is on it's own. It's pointless, and it raises questions about your objectivity.

>Would it make you satisfied if I found another paper that replicated the results?
I'd be fun to watch - that paper's apparently quite an outlier.

>Do you have other sources that have wildly better numbers
I can do one better - there's a meta study that seems to get talked about a fair bit:
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421512002133
Here's a link:
astro1.panet.utoledo.edu/~relling2/PDF/pubs/life_cycle_assesment_ellingson_apul_(2015)_ren_and_sustain._energy_revs.pdf

Why yes, I am a samefag. How astute of you to notice that the posts by a tripfag with his tripfag name happen to be the same person. I am absolutely astounded by your powers of observation and deduction.

/snark

>No. Calling people cultists just because they don't agree with you is just as dumb in the middle of an argument as it is on it's own. It's pointless, and it raises questions about your objectivity.

Hey now. I didn't say cultists. I said:
> told by bald faced liars, frauds, and their duped followers,
> duped followers
"Cultist" is a lot more pejorative than that, and it also brings in a lot more extra connotations that I did not say with my language.

For example, people who deny global warming are not cultists. Most of them have simply been misinformed by the sources that they trust, and perhaps they have bad critical reasoning skills. That doesn't make them cultists. Most anti-nuclear environmentalists are the same - sometimes bad critical thinking skills, and they're being misinformed by sources that they trust which they shouldn't trust.

And thanks for the links. Let me go read before I respond.

Also, I know that I'm replying to two posts by two separate people (probably). I missed the link to the second post. Sorry. Hope no one takes that the wrong way.

Also, the paper in question is discussing photovoltaic in Germany.

And your first paper is behind a paywall. I know sometimes that the good papers are behind paywalls, but it's also a dick move to link to a paper behind a paywall, especially if there are alternative sources.

>Also, the paper in question is discussing photovoltaic in Germany.
That is, my paper is discussing the situation in Germany, and so it might be off substantially when considering alternative locations, like the Sahara desert, but still probably no more than a factor of 2 or 3 IIRC.

Ok. I'm skimming / reading the second paper. Nothing immediately flying out as bullshit.

However, going based on figure 7, mono-crystal silicon cells have an EROEI of about 9, which means that when you add energy storage, even pumped water, the EROEI is shot. Further, pumped water cannot scale,
physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/
and chemical batteries have generally 10x more energy requirements in a EROEI context, which means that solar is really, really sunk.

Figure 7 says that cadmium telluride cells have an amazingly high EROEI, looks around 35. I'd have to do the math, but with chemical battery storage, I strongly suspect that the numbers will put the EROEI down to unviable levels.

Am I making a mistake here? Please chime in.

In particular, I want to emphasize that your second paper didn't address the problems of energy storage, and that's why using solar cells as a primary energy source for our society is not thermodynamically possible.

Can you keep your brainless shitposting down to one post at a time?

For example, one can argue that this is an example of an ad hom fallacy.

>butthurt hippy who fell for the solar/wind meme

>extra heat desalinates water
That is so horribly inefficeint it hurts.

>Thorium
>inefficient

...

...

>sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421512002133
this study assume A LOT wrt to PVs
for example, assuming a lifetime of 30 years for several of those systems is currently, bullshit.
especially the CdTe cells, there are tons of issues with stability, lifetime, and leeching of Cd into the environment.

...

>post on chinese cartoons forum
>whine about chinese cartoon pics

Yes, but what else are you going to do with low-temp waste heat?

Thunderf00t debunked Thorium Fuel a long time ago.
Youtube him.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20150715wnisr2015-v1-lr.pdf

>Thunderf00t
He's not a very credible source. I hope you know this.

Still, let me see what he has to say.
...
Ok, I'm going to need a link. The only thing I can find offhand on youtube from him is a debunking of a thorium powered car concept, which is of course a ludicrous concept.
youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_1789360585&feature=iv&src_vid=d2PxY-wOrI8&v=568iDYn8pjc

well there u go
thorium power car bad
thorium power reactor bad
what is difference mister science

>bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
For god's sake, stop posting this trash. It's been debunked repeatedly, and you keep spamming it month after month.

The argument in it is just total fucking garbage. The facts are bad, the logic is bad.

Somehow, a tiny dandelion seed, using only solar power, atmospheric carbon capture, and whatever materials are laying around in the dirt, can make hundreds of copies of itself in its first season, in addition to a plant that can live for years after that spawning thousands more copies, with no input of labor, yet we're supposed to believe that the ultimate potential of solar power is an EROEI of about 4, with an initial payback time of years.

The reality is that PV power's EROEI is already up around 7, and it's an immature technology advancing by leaps and bounds. Wind power's EROEI is up around 20. Grid-scale battery and fuel synthesis systems designed with an eye to EROEI are just being developed now because there hasn't been a market for them in the past.

>ad hom fallacy.
That's not what it means, you fucking trash.

The ad hominem fallacy is an argument of the form, "What you say is wrong because of who you are."

"You are an unwanted person because what you say is wrong. Please stop talking and go away." is not an argument, and can't be fallacious. The argument that what you say is wrong has already been made separately.

You claiming that this is an ad hominem fallacy, however, is a perfect example of how you don't understand logic and are therefore unwanted garbage here, in this board that values sound reasoning. So please, go away and don't come back.

We should make Thorium reactors. They can solve the high level waste problem, by using it as fuel. It also makes uranium fission energy more economical. Since the spent fuel rods now have value.

I see hot air and wishful thinking. I see no facts.

Further, the facts are against you. Chemical batteries are about 10x more energy intensive to make compared to pumped water storage, and pumped water storage was used in the study, which means that any system based on chemical batteries is going to be even worse.

PS: What does dandelions have to do with anything? Complete non-sequitir.

Also, while the solar panels themselves might be seeing drastic price reductions, other parts of the system are not. For example, the frames and inverters are not going to see multiple magnitude decrease in money cost and energy cost.

Similarly, we've been working on chemical batteries for over a hundred years. There has been no exponential improvements. IIRC, today's batteries are barely 10x better than the batteries used by Ford in the model T car. There is absolutely every reason to believe that chemical batteries are close to peak efficiency - except perhaps in terms of weight but who cares about weight for this discussion. Anything else is delusional or ignorant.