Nanoplasmonics can now be used to purify ever present U232 contamination from U233 so that U233 can be made pure. Extremely toxic U232 as a prodigious alpha emitter is touted as a full proof proliferation barrier since it destroys the chain reaction mechanism of U233 and will kill anyone truing to make a bomb. . When U 233 is pure, you can make a gun type bomb in your basement. Therefore, thorium breeders are extremely dangerous as a proliferation enabler.
https://phys.org/news/2012-12-thorium-proliferation-nuclear-wonder-fuel.html *Thorium: Proliferation warnings on nuclear 'wonder-fuel'* *"*Alongside its abundance, one of thorium's most attractive features is its apparent resistance to nuclear proliferation, compared with uranium. This is because thorium-232, the most commonly found type of thorium, cannot sustain nuclear fission itself. Instead, it has to be broken down through several stages of radioactive decay. This is achieved by bombarding it with neutrons, so that it eventually decays into uranium-233, which can undergo fission. As a by-product, the process also produces the highly radiotoxic isotope uranium-232. Because of this, producing uranium-233 from thorium requires very careful handling, remote techniques and heavily-shielded containment chambers. That implies the use of facilities large enough to be monitored." On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 3:53 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: > bobcook39...@hotmail.com <bobcook39...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > >> Any fission reactor LEAVES A MESS for future generations, including the >> fast breeders. >> > > That is true. Yet despite this, and despite the terrible problems at > Fukushima, I still think nuclear reactors are better than fossil fuel > alternatives such as coal and natural gas. I still hope the reactor in > Georgia is completed. > > There is no doubt that fission reactors leave a mess for future > generations but it will probably be less of a mess than alternatives > because: > > The total mass of the mess is surprisingly small and it is concentrated in > a small, well-defined area, rather than being spewed out in the air and > over the landscape the way radioactive products from coal are. > > Nuclear power does not cause global warming. It is better to leave a pile > of radioactive garbage than global warming. > > Posterity may be upset with us but I think they will be able to deal with > the mess much better than we can. I hope they will have better technology. > > I am sure they will have robots far better than ours which are capable of > doing the physical work of moving, packaging or burying the nuclear waste. > > It is conceivable that nuclear theory may improve and they will find a way > to neutralize or "use up" the fuel to the extent that not much radioactive > material is left in it. In other words, breeder reactors may improve > tremendously hundreds of years from now. > > In the distant future, people may have something like an extremely > reliable space elevator. I mean an elevator that handles millions of tons > of freight and passengers and has not had an accident in over 100 years. > With something like that, they might package up the nuclear waste, put it > in orbit, and drop it into the sun or store it on the moon. This might call > for an extra "strand" (elevator path) dedicated to dangerous or radioactive > freight only. That would be a tremendous expense today, with a first > generation space elevator, but centuries from now it might be a trivial > expense equivalent to a few million dollars. > > I doubt there will ever be antigravity spacecraft and I do not think that > rockets will ever become reliable enough to carry radioactive waste from > earth to orbit, but we cannot rule out these possibilities. Rockets are > extremely unreliable today despite 70 years of intense development. But if > space elevators are not developed, perhaps rockets will become so reliable > they go for decades or centuries without an accident. From the 1920s to the > present day, airplanes went from being the most dangerous mode of > transportation to the safest per passenger mile, despite the inherent > danger of traveling close to the speed of sound 10 km above the ground. I > would not want to transport nuclear waste on airplanes -- or rockets, no > matter how safe they become. But perhaps some method of packaging the > material can be developed that would survive a crash, or falling from > orbit. We are talking about the distant future, in any case. > > I have read discussions about how we have to make sure people know that > nuclear waste is dangerous thousands or tens of thousands of years into the > future. I do not think this will be necessary. I expect that before > thousand years have passed people will deal with the waste that we have now > generated. A thousand years is not very long. There are many buildings, > infrastructure such as roads and irrigation lakes, and institutions such as > universities, and even a few Japanese companies that have continued for a > thousand years. They have detailed records of what they did circa 1000 AD. > They know where their ancestors put things, and why they put them there. > > - Jed > >
