Posted on 03/20/2011 8:25:08 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium.
This passed unnoticed –except by a small of band of thorium enthusiasts – but it may mark the passage of strategic leadership in energy policy from an inert and status-quo West to a rising technological power willing to break the mould.
If China’s dash for thorium power succeeds, it will vastly alter the global energy landscape and may avert a calamitous conflict over resources as Asia’s industrial revolutions clash head-on with the West’s entrenched consumption.
China’s Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball. Further evidence of Barack `Obama’s “Sputnik moment”, you could say.
Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.
“The reactor has an amazing safety feature,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert.
“If it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami. The reactor saves itself,” he said.
“They operate at atmospheric pressure so you don’t have the sort of hydrogen explosions we’ve seen in Japan. One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release.”
Thorium is a silvery metal named after the Norse god
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
China is not the only one .. India has a working Thorium reactor now .....
I just read a thread suggesting India was taking the lead on this...
Don’t use that cobalt thorium G stuff, though. It’s got a half-life of 93 years!
And Mr. Sputnik isn’t giving the go ahead for the US to get into the game.
I would say that boiling water pressure reactors are pretty safe, even the Japanese reactors, with all the damage have not done what the anti-nuc crowd said they would do. To date nobody has been exposed to a life threating dose of any type of radiation nor has anybody died from radiation exposure.
As per usual, we invent it and hand the benefits over to our nemesis while cowing to liberal pressure.
Thorium is without doubt safer. Can we use it? Hell no!
You think China will be better stewards of the technology?
Hell No!
Leave it to the Broker-in-Chief. He's got us lined up to buy everything we need from George Soros and his buds.
Hey. America is like children. We might get hurt if we actually pursue things.
Does anyone else have issues with the words “safe” and “Chinese” in the same sentence?
Is that like a combination of Thorazine and Valium?
All that stimulus money that we threw away could have developed this for the US, then we could have $5/barrel oil.
just because they don’t have as many torts lawyers doesn’t mean they are lacking in technologists that can do nuclear safely.
They are picking their geniuses from the biggest population on earth.
“The reactor has an amazing safety feature,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert.
“If it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami. The reactor saves itself,” he said.
He knows this how? as an indepedent scientist or as a paid
consultant to the Chinese company in question?
mark
I have absolutely no nuclear expertise whatsoever beyond a penchant for nerd and subscriptions to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics.
However - reading the comments on that story was interesting and I wanted to share one such comment.....
_______________________________
“”””Mark Stevenson
23 minutes agoThought I might add some realism. Fast breeder reactor technology has been researched since the dawn of the nuclear age by every major industrial and nuclear power.
It is also worth pointing out that the UK is still paying a multi-billion pound bill for our failed experiments at Dounreay and will be for many years.
Germany actively researched fast breeder reactor technology for over 14 years and then gave up
France actively researched fast breeder reactor technology for over 30 years and then gave up
The US actively researched fast breeder reactor technology for over 32 years and then gave up
The UK actively researched fast breeder reactor technology for over 37 years and then gave up
India has been researching fast breeder reactor technology for over 24 years and is still at the research stage.
Japan has been researching fast breeder reactor technology for over 35 years and is still at the research stage.
Russia has been researching fast breeder reactor technology for 56 years and is still at the research stage.
If the Chinese now want to give it a try then they are in good company. Good luck to them but I won’t hold my breathe. “””””
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Is this considered the same technology as the “pebble reactors” which were supposed to change nuclear energy and were written about with great promise a few years ago? These were the daisy-chains of small reactors.
I know that many big companies will go out of their way to blunt new ideas and technologies but it is hard for me to believe that something that seems so promising would have been ignored for this long. If Mr. Stevensons post above is correct it sounds like many have tried and failed to implement this.
I definitely believe new technology will change the world of energy but it’s hard to get excited about the latest greatest thing because we rarely hear much about them again.
Despite what has happened in Japan, nuclear power is going to be a part of our energy future. We need to accept that reality and do all we can to make it as safe as possible.
The future of nuclear is cold fusion.
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Despite what has happened in Japan, nuclear power is going to be a part of our energy future. We need to accept that reality and do all we can to make it as safe as possible.
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Agree 100%
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