From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb
On 2/24/2014 11:24 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote:
>>That would certainly be true if there is no sense of urgency to get the
job done, but we got to the moon in less than 9 years once we decided we
really really wanted to go there. There is no scientific reason it would
take decades to get a LFTR online, but there are political reasons.
How many Apollo V rockets did we build for all that dough? It would take
many trillions of dollars to retool our energy systems; again there is no
comparison between the moonshot Cold War race and deploying a radically
different electric energy generation infrastructure.
>>Except nuclear power is not radically different, it's just using a
different heat source to make steam for turbines. The infrastructure is
essentially the same.
True. in that nuclear power, is basically boiling water to produce hot high
pressure steam. It is essentially the same from the stage of having produced
high pressure steam to spin a turbine to make electricity, but the entire
logistical tail is vastly different - and of course the nature of the
"boilers" is essentially untested (sure there may still be some data from
the old Oak Ridge experimental LFTR reactor that operated for some years in
Oak Ridge during the 1960s, but that is all there is) The reactors
themselves will need to be designed, tested, verified, stress tested,
systems tested, material fatigue tested, and finally built from scratch.
LFTR reactors do not exist, there are no blue prints to build them from. It
is unknown how various proposed materials will actually perform, in the
reactor core environment - over the years of operational life.
How many years do you think it would take - if it was a national priority?
10, 20, 30?
And finally - just to underline my point -- fusion reactors are also
essentially water boilers - that does not make them the same as coal
thermo-electric plants and they are not buildable with our current
technology.. Though ITER is trying. There are fundamental technological
hurdles that remain. for fusion certainly - and, I would argue for LFTR
reactors as well -- even though in the end it is all about boiling water.
Chris
Brent.
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