And another video dug up from a Google search-





Nuclear energy doesn't have to be expensive or dangerous, idk why this is not being pursued as a successor to uranium/pressurized water reactors.

I'm doubtful tbh - more about reducing our power consumption and moving to localised renewable sources of energy e.g. solar, wind, hydro IMO.

http://www.guardian.co.u.../thorium-nuclear-uranium

There really are so many options now that there is no excuse aside from the immediate cost and logistics of a total overhaul. To be honest, I'd like to see a migration away from the grid system. Some sort of super-efficient generators paired with solar cells and wind-turbines could be ideal and pragmatic in the not too distant future for modest residential conveniences.

To be without doubt on nuclear technology is probably very rare.

But I wonder, could it be that in the end these kind of reactors will be necessary to deal with the problem of nuclear waste?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power

So when it's decided the world is done with nuclear weapons, this technology can be used to burn up the radioactive waste so instead of 100 of thousands years, it's going to take just 300 years to get rid of the high radioactive waste.

This strikes me as very ironic as it is very plausible that the only way to get rid of the ever increasing amount of high radioactive waste of nuclear fission is through nuclear fission.

Also the notion that this kind of technology has already been developed and was probably neglected because it doesn't produce weapons grade plutonium.

Having to choose between evils, which is the better?

While thorium reactors are promising, simple recycling of current uranium based fuels is also a great, albeit expensive, solution. If the long and short term half life elements in leftover nuclear fuel were separated, the long half life ones could be recycled into new fuel and the short half life ones could be safely stored to disappear within just a few hundred years (versus millions for current waste). France is already a leader in these processes and the US would be smart to adopt them as well.

I'm of course hopeful for fusion reactors in the near future. These could literally be powered off seawater and provide as much energy as humanity needs for any purposes, including purifying more salt water for our growing world population.

The real shame is that we ever built such a vast power system to run on hydrocarbons, when such a clean technology was available. Yes, there are some waste products, but technology is already proving to be able to take care of the waste. All of that "spent" fuel sitting around is going to prove to be very valuable!

I also can't fathom why plants were ever built like 3-mile Island, or Fukushima. I won't get into Chrnobyl, as that was a near the end of the USSR pile of crap plant anyways. The big lesson from that is what happens when lack of proper oversight is applied to plants being built by stuggling economies(Iran).

Even on the standard fast-breeder reactors currently dominating nuclear energy, the plants could have been built to be nearly fail safe. It's not like fluid dynamics, and heat transfer were new subjects when they built Fukushima and 3-Mile. Plants can be built, and in-fact many have been, to be able to operate solely on natural circulation (by convection alone, rather than relying on a pump). The pump allows the plant to run at higher power states and efficiencies, but plants should be designed to be able to remove heat without any electical help.

I digress.

Thorium, along with the new generations of safer built Uranium plants could indeed bridge the gap between the near future, and the advent of fusion power. The romoval of all of the hydrocarbon power plants would be quite a boon in curbing CO2 emissions.

The underlying issue is whether we can be trusted with that kind of power. On one hand, cheap clean energy may finally be the thing that opens up the flood gates and ends poverty and hunger on the scales currently seen in the world. On the other, if abundant energy simply reinforces our consumptive ways, is it a good thing? Should we learn to live sustainably before we really try expanding to other worlds?

I sometimes wonder if there is a point where the population is so used to having everything, all the toys and gadgets, that on a large scale people begin to downsize, and live more simply. That's where I am, personally, so it's how I see things. I get the feeling though, that most are very content to live the consumer life style, buying more and more, and using more and more.

Ultimately, clean, cheap, abundant energy may be a major catalyst for bringing about global prosperity, but it may also bring about an even faster pace of the over consumption of resources and destruction of the biosphere. It's probably far too complex to really figure out which way it might go.

Actually I would like to know a little more on the various types of nuclear reactors, how they function and what products go in and out. This whole thorium thing is propaganda in the first place.

What it makes me wonder is actually how much there is to the decision making that happened back in the 50's early 60's which set in motion the development that lead to Fukushima, Chernobyl and probably some other.

Clearly it was poor decision making. The facts speak for themselves. If you just take the numerous weapons tests performed, both above and underground and say well that was for the best, you keep the disasters that are still leaking into the enviroment. And even this is poor logic.



So I am just wondering how present day reality would look like if there had been decision making that led to the commercial use of liquid salt reactors instead of the current high pressure water ones. Would there have been disasters as we know today?
Or could it be that in this case there would have been such a grand scale nuclear boom that people would get home reactors, car reactors, those 60's fantasies of nuclear stuff everywhere...

Those thorium propagandists also promote homebased thorium technology. At least the current situation doesn't easy lead to people having a reactor in their basement.
There are however a lot of nuclear reactors active in deep ocean territory along with warheads combined in a metal shell that propels itself and has people on board. How many crashed exemplars are there lying on the seabed rusting? Or how many lie rusting in abandoned harbours, like a certain eurasian country has.



It's total madness if you ask me. Just so crazy how I learned that rainwater is not to drink, it's poisonous. Don't swim in streams, they are poisoned too. Don't drink groundwater without filtering, it's not suited for consumption. If nobody tells you, how do get to know that this is not a natural situation?

But I guess the same technology that has poisoned the planet can be used as a cure as well. It's not the technology that created the problems, but the thinking behind it and while the same thinking never solves the problem, the same technology could be used for this.

So excess nuclear fuel can be used in plants that convert CO2 to O2 on a scale that compensations the current situation. But there are probably much better plans, just that I don't really have all the facts.