Why would we spend 20 years building a renewable infrastructure based on the principle of distributed generation while we wait?
There are 6 countries actively and legally selling nuclear power systems to anyone they can find to buy them. The competition is fierce. If thorium has the answers to the problems that plague the nuclear industry, why are they not marketed?
No one has blocked development. France, Canada, Russia, China Korea, Japan - they all have not only the ability to do the research, but also the economic incentive to differentiate their product from that of their competition, that means that the most nuke savey people in the world have not pursued thorium as a commercially viable product for some very good reasons. The concept isn't new. The technologies have not changed in any way that enhances their economic viability as a competitor against renewable and conventional energy sources.
Now, I could get into a hair splitting contest with you about why thorium SOUNDS good, but in the end it wouldn't matter. The fact that the quasi-governmental entities that market nuclear power FOR PROFIT have rejected it as not competitive means it would have zero chance on an open market against either renewable energy or conventional energy. The one guarantee that can be made is that it would cost more than the technologies that have already been 20 twenty years in the pipeline and are just now starting to be built.
That obviously leads us to the issue of lead time and technology development. Go to the World Nuclear Association's website and consult India in their profiles of the various country's nuclear programs. Take a moment to observe the overall process behind India's effort, the time line it has followed and the course they plot ahead. Then go to the section on Canada and read the history of the CANDU program. Again. consider the time to development and the ambitions for tomorrow.
Then ask yourself about what we are going to do between March 2011 and the time the technology you believe is a good solution will be ready to present to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to *begin* an evaluation that will take about 15 more years.
What place within the energy system of let's say 2040-2045 do you think will be a good fit for thorium reactors? What I'm asking is where will it find a market for its electricity?
If you say you support nuclear power, you do not support thorium because it isn't actually an available option. To BELIEVE it an option, you have to not understand the way the energy sector is developed over time. Particulary the way development trends in the infrastructure are already committing themselves to a *distributed smart grid* in order to facilitate the changeover to electric cars. The electric car industry will mass produce battery packs also suitable for home energy systems storage. You hear a lot about what will happen in the area of energy storage, so you might have heard how this use of high capacity advanced batteries which are already developed will play a major role in the solution.
I hate to be so pedantic, but already underway we have today's complex system in the process of evolving into a decidedly more refined entity with a far more sophisticated neural network controlling it and I feel you should be aware of that when you are considering where thorium will fit into the future.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x644471#649489REPORT: UNSUCCESSFUL “FAST BREEDER” IS NO SOLUTION FOR LONG- TERM REACTOR WASTE DISPOSAL ISSUES
After Over $50 Billion Spent by US, Japan, Russia, UK, India and France, No Commercial Model Found; High Cost, Unreliability, Major Safety Problems and Proliferation Risks All Seen as Major Barriers to Use.
PRINCETON, N.J. – February 17, 2010 –
Titled “Fast Breeder Reactor Programs: History and Status,” the IPFM report concludes: “The problems (with fast breeder reactors) ... make it hard to dispute Admiral Hyman Rickover’s summation in 1956, based on his experience with a sodium-cooled reactor developed to power an early U.S. nuclear submarine, that such reactors are ‘expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.’”
Plagued by high costs, often multi-year downtime for repairs (including a 15-year reactor restart delay in Japan), multiple safety problems (among them often catastrophic sodium fires triggered simply by contact with oxygen), and unresolved proliferation risks, “fast breeder” reactors already have been the focus of more than $50 billion in development spending, including more than $10 billion each by the U.S., Japan and Russia. As the IPFM report notes: “Yet none of these efforts has produced a reactor that is anywhere near economically competitive with light-water reactors ... After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries.”
The new IPFM report is a timely and important addition to the understanding about reactor technology. Today, with increased attention being paid both to so-called “Generation IV” reactors, some of which are based on the fast reactor technology, and a new Obama Administration panel focusing on reprocessing and other waste issues, interest in some quarters has shifted back to fast reactors as a possible means by which to bypass concerns about the long- term storage of nuclear waste.
Download report here:
http://www.fissilematerials.org/ipfm/pages_us_en/nuclearenergy/nuclearenergy/nuclearenergy.php
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