https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M __yYbsZ4 Is thorium a m

>Is thorium a meme?
Yes.

>Are thorium reactors they as miraculous as this video and everyone seems to be telling me?
Of course not.

>If so...?
They're not.

Can we please just leave it at that?

>>7653718
They are good.
If you can get one running that is.
The biggest offset is the creation of a liquid salt holding facility and mining.

Picture this: You have to start mining for a material that has never really been sourced before AND you must start the first ever factory with equipment JUST for the processing of thorium.

>>7653734
But if this was subsidized as most nuclear energy projects are, that would just be an opening investment wouldn't it? If they truly work, it should pay off.

>>7653729
>Can we please just leave it at that?
If you want, but I'd like to know what the big obstacle is, if only for ammunition against these people.

>>7653752
Yes...there is already a group of scientists that were using thorium chips inside a regular reactor in Norway.
Also a thorium reactor has been used in an airplane a long time ago...so a stand alone thorium plant will work....
also it is very easy to source on mars.... so thats always a plus....

Yes it would work nicely...but...ugh....effort....lets just keep mining fossil fuels....

>>7653774
http://thorenergy.no

Regular Uranium reactor
my bad...
you see you can use thorium chips to make more energy in a refitted Uranium/thorium reactor...but the efficiency of the thorium is lost....

sure you get like 40 percent extra energy (not including what you get from the Uranium) with a thorium/Uranium but you could get
60-70 percent out of a stand alone Thorium ONLY reactor....

>>7653718
>Is thorium a meme?
yes
> Are thorium reactors they as miraculous as this video and everyone seems to be telling me?
no

fusion >>>> muh thorium

>>7653790
This anon brings up a good point
if the Wendelstein makes good on its promise before christmas we can forget the whole petrol wars deal and move into making antimatter for space ships....


(and the glory of the Emperium of Mankind)

>>7653798
>(and the glory of the Emperium of Mankind)
As we spread out into the stars, like the grand disease we are.

>>7653752
>I'd like to know what the big obstacle is, if only for ammunition against these people.
No big obstacle. It's just not some miracle technology. Thorium reactors must be breeder reactors. Breeder reactors can end up with somewhat less waste than U235 reactors, but they're also more expensive, more complicated, less developed, more prone to radioisotope leakage, and present a greater proliferation threat.

Thorium-uranium breeders are less developed than uranium-plutonium breeders, which means they'll require more research and development to get going and probably have more delays and accidents for a long time.

It's still just nuclear power, with the usual concerns of high cost, catastrophic risk, non-catastrophic environmental/health issues, and nuclear weapon proliferation.

Claims that switching to thorium dramatically improves on the basic value proposition of nuclear power are hype and wishful thinking.

It's a meme because the problems with nuclear are political/regulatory
aka, hordes of commies & boomers & fossil fuel lobbyists who hate nuclear

Thorium doesn't solve that.

>>7653825
>and present a greater proliferation threat.

Thats not really true
You can build nukes with reactor grade PU

>>7655078
Sure, and you can build nukes with sea water. It's all a question of how much processing you have to do and how tricky it will be to build a bomb that doesn't fizzle.

Breeders are a bigger proliferation threat as long as there's any reprocessing involved (yes, this includes continuous reprocessing), which is an opportunity to divert refined fissile material, or any separation of breeding material from actively burning fuel, which makes the Pu-239 or U-233 cleaner and easier to separate.

>>7655139
A fizzle bomb will still be several kilotons

I don't think this proliferation threat is even real
If it really existed they could just put a military base next to every relevant nuke plant.

>>7655078
You need breeders to get PU as well though. The real issue isn't thorium, it's breeder reactors. We could get better use out of uranium with breeders, but we're unwilling to due to the proliferation risk.

>>7656021
>A fizzle bomb will still be several kilotons
Not neccessarily, nuclear weapons aren't ordinary explosives, it's quite possible for them to not go off at all.

>>7653718
My understanding is that not all of the details have been worked out and all the big companies are already invested in existing technologies (Thorium would essentially be starting over from scratch, but why do that when the current system is already really profitable).

I guess Sorenson started a company and began work on a Thorium plant a couple years ago but I don't know how far along they are.

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>>7653790
This. Fusion is the most abundant source of energy in the universe.

>>7656190
But we still haven't figured out how to make one work.

>>7656196
Well yeah, the conditions for fusion are a pretty extreme. It's no wonder man-made fusion has been stalled for years.

Natural fusion, on the other hand, is widely abundant perfectly viable today.

>>7656021
>A fizzle bomb will still be several kilotons
Little Boy, which destroyed Hiroshima, was only 15 kilotons. Fat Man was only 21.

Those were some pretty well-made weapons. They had some of the world's best scientists, engineers, and technicians working on them.

While weapons have advanced since then, the details of how to make them better haven't been shared around. The advances took years of effort by superpower nations with a lot of money to spend and a lot of talent to draw on.

If the primary fizzles, you're not going to get multiple kilotons. Sometimes, when the secondary fizzles in a staged nuke, you still get a huge explosion because the primary went off properly and was powerful, but a primary fizzle is probably going to have a yield measured in tons, not kilotons.

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>>7656202
>is widely abundant
Hehehe. Are you perhaps talking about memepower? Sure, it works on top of buildings in heavily populated areas for distributed production, but for real power density you'll need something else.

>>7653813
I want to see this happen

>>7657144
Memepower?
So we use memes to make energy?

>>7657166
It's a meme because solar power is immensely inefficient and requires equally large damage to the environment to have a wide scale use of it.

Not every location on the planet is the same as a hundred miles of flat desert land.

File: solar power surface area required.jpg (386KB, 1000x706px) Image search: [Google]

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>>7657144
>for real power density
You don't need "real power density".

The sun dumps more energy on our planet every day than humans have ever used in controlled form. More than every campfire, every furnace, every engine, every power plant of any kind. We only need a fraction of 1% of that. If we went fully solar, the land use would be much less than farming, and it's not exclusive land use anyway. You can have whatever you want underneath the solar collectors.

The amount of land you'd need roofed over in solar collectors to support a region is like a speck on the map.

Land use is a bullshit objection to solar power. It's simply a non-issue.

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>>7657263
And then you wake up and realise we don't live in the whole surface of the planet, only in a portion of it. And you realise that the farther away you are from the generation of power (specially in the dc format solar cells produce) the more you lose power. Add to that the efficiency of only 20%, and you'll see the world isn't as pretty as spherical chickens in vacuum. Then you start to think, "what would happen to the earth if we started painting it all as black as solar cells? Oh noes, maybe there will be real global warming this time!".

Did I mention solar power can only produce for, at best, half a day?

It is very good for densely populated areas, but it shouldn't take the form of farms, ever.

>>7657263
> to power the world
its bullshit alright

>>7657682
>>7657671
>>The sun dumps more energy on our planet every day than humans have ever used in controlled form. More than every campfire, every furnace, every engine, every power plant of any kind. We only need a fraction of 1% of that.
>And then you wake up and realise we don't live in the whole surface of the planet, only in a portion of it.
We live on a lot more than a fraction of 1% of the world. Arguments against solar from land use are based in simple innumeracy.

We can certainly use solar for all of our needs. Right now, with no further technological advancement and only economies of scale and amortization of investment in research and production facilities, solar, battery, and fuel synthesis are good enough that we could gradually phase out everything else without reducing our standard of living.

Electrical joule for joule, solar is already cheaper than nuclear and competitive with coal. As the capital investment in solar panel factories got paid off, and new construction and landscaping incorporated solar panels from the design stage, solar power would become much cheaper than coal, if the technology stood still. More than enough to pay for the batteries and the losses involved in fuel synthesis. It's good enough for a gradual phase-out as the old power plants wear out and need replacing.

But of course the technology is advancing rapidly as well. When it comes down to it, you're talking about rearranging sand, or other ridiculously cheap raw material, into thin sheets that give you substantial amounts of electricity. We're rapidly getting better at that, doing it with less energy and labor, making longer-lasting panels. There's no hard limit on how cheap it can get, especially once it starts lowering the cost of energy.

Once solar panel production is fully automated, with the energy provided by solar panels... well, how cheap is grass?

>>7656190

>Fusion meme reappears
>Again
>mfw they used the fusion "reactor" from the NIF as a plot device in the reboot of Star Trek
>mfw all those billions of dollars spent and we use that equipment as a fucking prop
>mfw the only way we can get any meaningful amount of energy is from the sun
>mfw we will have to build a reactor on Mercury to get that energy
>mfw that reactor becomes a future meme
>mfw we will never get it right as humans

>>7658820
>and you're still sitting in a cold basement somewhere bitching about something you can't understand

>>7658826
>anon makes assumptions

Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups

>>7656360

>primary fizzle measured in tons not kilotons

Most two staged weapons have yields in the half megaton range.

While most primaries aren't designed to produce a large yield (that isn't the job of a primary anyway) the yield is still measured in kilotons.....albeit in the single digit kiloton range. Not tons. True, it still results in a fizzle, but the explosion is still substantial. There were several tests carried out in the 1950's that saw fizzles measured in the single digit (and low double digit) kiloton range. Their predicted yield was on the order of five to as much as 10 megatons

As for this not being shared, of course it isn't shared openly. But it is being shared clandestinely.

Having said this, even if it was shared it doesn't mean the nation/group receiving this information is going to make a ton of nukes. It takes a SUBSTANTIAL amount of resources to produce weapons grade uranium (and especially plutonium).

>>7653718
We'll find out when the Chinese or Indians figure it out. Amerifats cut funding for MSRs over the past decades that significantly crippled our nuclear program.

>>7653718
>If so, why are we not using them?

They tend to produce a lot of weapons grade plutonium in certain cycles.

>>7659242
Indian plan is actually very good and reasonable. 3 stages designed to maximize the amount of energy that can be produced using thorium and other nuclear fuel cycles.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India's_three-stage_nuclear_power_programme

But everything about it revolves around using Plutonium 239. The most prevalent fissile material for making nuclear warheads. Hence why Western nations will never want to adopt it, nor proliferate it.

>>7653718
In the ted talk he says thorium plants don't have to be near rivers, but then how do you get the temperature difference needed to operate a heat engine? Air cooling hundreds of megawatts? Come on...

>>7658853
I don't think you get it. By "primary fizzle", I meant that the primary is what fizzles (so of course, the secondary doesn't go off either), and by "secondary fizzle", I meant that the primary works properly, but the secondary fizzles.

Large-yield fizzles are pretty much always secondary fizzles.

>>7656190
>plasma_leak_at_the_worlds_largest_fusion_reactor.gif
It may surprise you, but the sun isn't the largest star in the universe.

>>7659398
It may surprise you, but the world is not the universe.

>>7659406
It isn't the solar system either :^)

>>7658820
>>mfw they used the fusion "reactor" from the NIF as a plot device in the reboot of Star Trek
>>mfw all those billions of dollars spent and we use that equipment as a fucking prop
Pretty sure that's the only fusion reactor that's put out more energy than put in so far (even if for just a few milliseconds). That's a pretty decent accomplishment, the movie was just to subsidize it.

>>mfw the only way we can get any meaningful amount of energy is from the sun
>>mfw we will have to build a reactor on Mercury to get that energy
You don't use a "reactor" to get energy from the sun.

>>7657813
>The stupid, it hurts.

There's no arguing with retardation like yourself.