From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb
On 2/21/2014 2:27 PM, spudboy...@aol.com wrote: I am in agreement but I am guessing humankind does not yet possess a working LTFR that could power a large city. Nor, is a MSR (molten salt reactor) to accomplish the goodies we all need, abundant and comparatively safe. Like fusion, like solar, it needs development, and beyond a few bits of work here and there, little is happening. >>Human kind did possess a LFTR for a few years at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. It was a research reactor and was not used to produce electrical power. It was rejected as the powerplant for nuclear submarines because the Oak Ridge director had Adm Rickover thrown out of the lab for interfering with his directives. Rickover, who was famously arrogant, contracted with Westinghouse to build a powerplant using their technology. And that's how the world ended up with uranium fission power reactors. Thanks for the interesting back story on the Oak Ridge LFTR program; the why of how that program got de-funded and shut down was always a little murky. Chris >>There are a few companies pursuing development of LFTRs. One is proposing to do the actual development in Brazil to avoid the anti-nuclear political activists in the U.S. There are many reasons why nuclear power is dead in the water. The sector would have never existed without massive government subsidies. the cost overruns in nuclear facilities are legendary. The reason they are not getting built has less to do with political activists and a more to do with the negative economic profile, especially once one factors in the ultimate costs of long term (and perhaps absurdly long term) waste sequestration. Additionally, when one looks at the global recoverable uranium-235 reserve picture - not the rosy scenario in the red book (the quoted source for these figures and which has been shown to be unrealistically optimistic) - it becomes clear that there is no future for single pass through reactors, and that the world is nearing peak recoverable uranium. Naturally this is different for breeder types, such as LFTR (which IMO is the best option of all the breeder proposals, both for the relative abundance of the needed resources and for the inherent passive safety features - as compared to the hellish example of what can go wrong with say a Mark II type reactor (Fukushima and all across this country as well Mark II are ubiquitous bad designs (at the time of their release by GE I recall that two of the chief engineers on the design team resigned in protest because their reservations about this design were ignored). However realistically - the lead time to bring working LFTR reactors to market and to build out enough of them to begin to make an impact on the global (or some important regional) energy market is long and should be measured in decades at least. Decades from today is as soon as the first LFTRs could begin to come online. By that time - they will need to compete with solar PV and the per unit costs for PV that are achieved over the next two or three decades. If one projects the future per unit cost for PV based on extrapolating current long established trend lines the economics for LFTR seem questionable - IMO. Chris Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
