On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 2:24 AM, Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com>wrote:
> I think the early experiments at Oak Ridge with LFTR were side-lined > because it did not fit well with the requirements of the Cold War. The LFTR > fuel cycle does not support (i.e. help scale up) the military need for > highly enriched U-235. > The problem is that a LFTR does not produce measurable amounts of Plutonium, in the 1950s that was considered a severe disadvantage, today it looks like a big advantage. >>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. > Switching over to a LFTR based economy would be a radical change, but not nearly as radical as switching over to one based on wind or tides or photovoltaics or fusion. > Dilute sources of power actually match quite well with how power is > actually consumed for the most part. Most electric power is consumed by the > vast number of dispersed (dilute) small consumers. > Well let's see, my car has 306 horsepower, one horsepower is equal to 746 watts so my car needs 228,276 watts. On a bright day at noon solar cells produce about 10 watts per square foot, so my car would need 22,827 square feet of solar cells, that's not counting the additional air resistance caused by the 151x151 foot rectangle mounted on the car's roof. And how do I get to work at night or on cloudy days? > >> James Hansen is one of the world's leading environmentalists and has >> done more to raise the alarm about climate change than anybody else, he >> started to do so in 1988. Hansen has recently changed his mind and is now >> in favor of nuclear power because he figures it causes less environmental >> impact than anything else, or at least anything else that wasn't moonbeams >> and could actually make a dent in satiating the worldwide energy demand. >> > > Yes I know and Hansen is terribly wrong on this. It is ironic to hear > you speak of this alleged small environmental impact of nuclear just a few > years scant years into the beginning of a trillion dollar mess at Fukushima > The coal power plants in China alone kill about 350,000 people EACH YEAR; the number of people that Fukushima, the worst nuclear accident in almost 30 years, has killed is ZERO. And environmentalist go on and on about "the sixth extinction" and the existential threat brought on by the "terrifying" .74 degree Celsius increase in temperature from 1906 to 2005 ( it increased between 4 and 7 degrees Celsius over the last 5,000 years), but say we shouldn't use nuclear power even though it does not contribute to global warming because it's too dangerous. If global warming was half as dreadful as the environmentalists say I wouldn't care if we had a Fukushima ever damn day! John K Clark -- 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.
