Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

And we will eventually have online reprocessing of Thorium breeders but for now we will have to stick with using up the high level waste and standing stocks of depleted uranium in fuel tubes in designs such as the new Stabile Salt Reactor or Standing Wave reactors.
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https://youtu.be/4iRF6pilm3s
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https://youtu.be/-IiIdG0asbM
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Liquid salt fuel in standard certifiable rods that are solid during transport. Molten salt non-fuel coolant. Not sodium. No new materials to certify. Atmospheric pressure. So no high pressure steam in the reactor to explode. No water to make a hydrogen explosion. Iodine and Caesium are bound in the molten fuel salt. Only vents stable Xenon and Krypton.
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Negative temp feedback in the molten fuel density is self regulating. Online refueling by adding 1 rod in a row at a time eliminates critical controls needed. Simple Boron plates drop in for emergency shut down. Molten fuel salt and molten cooling salt are miscible so in the event of an attack, the fissile material is diluted in the coolant and the reactor goes out.
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Continuous passive air cooling by convection. No emergency cooling needed. 600C operating temp so turbines are the same as for the ubiquitous natural gas plants. 600C thermal energy storage in nitrate salt for additional load following of a high intermittent grid.
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Runs on simple processing of existing high level waste. 2X burn up, 125MW reactor modules are factory built and certified and small enough to transport by truck. Stack modules to make 1GW in one non hardened building. Very cheap. $2 Billion / GW plant. $0.055/ kWh lifetime with investors paid at 9% and with all costs of decommissioning and Moltex operator profits. $0.085/ kWh even with a 3X constuction cost overrun. Online in Canada 2026. 2nd, full size reactor online 2030.

If you look up, an incredible thermal reactor is already sharing plenty of it's energy with our spaceship.

If you look down, another incredible and consistent thermal source is under your feet just a few dozen miles.

As we are in a closed loop system, it would seem wise to better leverage finite resources towards tapping the already existing and more than adequate reactors that have been running with much better up-time than anything humans are likely to make.

Even with a Thorium reactor you still just have a temporary heat source you still have to convert to something useful. A fool makes things work by adding complexity, while the sun still shines and earth is still warm inside already.

sendler2112 said:

And we will eventually have online reprocessing of Thorium breeders but for now we will have to stick with using up the high level waste and standing stocks of depleted uranium in fuel tubes in designs such as the new Stabile Salt Reactor or Standing Wave reactors.
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https://youtu.be/4iRF6pilm3s
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https://youtu.be/-IiIdG0asbM
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Liquid salt fuel in standard certifiable rods that are solid during transport. Molten salt non-fuel coolant. Not sodium. No new materials to certify. Atmospheric pressure. So no high pressure steam in the reactor to explode. No water to make a hydrogen explosion. Iodine and Caesium are bound in the molten fuel salt. Only vents stable Xenon and Krypton.
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Negative temp feedback in the molten fuel density is self regulating. Online refueling by adding 1 rod in a row at a time eliminates critical controls needed. Simple Boron plates drop in for emergency shut down. Molten fuel salt and molten cooling salt are miscible so in the event of an attack, the fissile material is diluted in the coolant and the reactor goes out.
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Continuous passive air cooling by convection. No emergency cooling needed. 600C operating temp so turbines are the same as for the ubiquitous natural gas plants. 600C thermal energy storage in nitrate salt for additional load following of a high intermittent grid.
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Runs on simple processing of existing high level waste. 2X burn up, 125MW reactor modules are factory built and certified and small enough to transport by truck. Stack modules to make 1GW in one non hardened building. Very cheap. $2 Billion / GW plant. $0.055/ kWh lifetime with investors paid at 9% and with all costs of decommissioning and Moltex operator profits. $0.085/ kWh even with a 3X constuction cost overrun. Online in Canada 2026. 2nd, full size reactor online 2030.

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liveforphysics said:

As we are in a closed loop system, it would seem wise to better leverage finite resources towards tapping the already existing and more than adequate reactors that have been running with much better up-time than anything humans are likely to make.

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Exactly. We need an energy bridge to build out the massive replacement of the current system of everything. Energy and population/ economics. Solar generation can't yet build itself out to replace everything. Not even to keep up with growth of consumption for the next 20 years. Not even with current immense fossil energy inputs for it's creation. The end of the fossil fuel free lunch is coming and it takes immense alternatives to replace it.

sendler2112 said:

And we will eventually have online reprocessing of Thorium breeders...

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Runs on simple processing of existing high level waste. 2X burn up, 125MW reactor modules are factory built and certified and small enough to transport by truck. Stack modules to make 1GW in one non hardened building. Very cheap. $2 Billion / GW plant. $0.055/ kWh lifetime with investors paid at 9% and with all costs of decommissioning and Moltex operator profits. $0.085/ kWh even with a 3X constuction cost overrun. Online in Canada 2026. 2nd, full size reactor online 2030.

Click to expand...

So much sceptism about solar and wind which already operate with 100(s) GW of power and on the other hand you beleive in some "magic" Thorium reactor that will be online 2030 and will be cheap.

Have a look at that nuclear shit they build today and how "cheap" it is and how nice it works...

I will not show you industrialised countries where nuclear is shrinking today, but those few countries the nuclear addicts hope will be thhe future of those new fancy raectors that will be cheap and running "in just 10 years ago", as they do for decades.

Here is China:



and this is India:



Brazil:

Nuclear development has been long neglected. Wind doesn't always blow and solar does 20% of nameplate with a big peak at noon. And it is always dark every night. They need something to go with them. And up until now the easy choice has been coal or gas. Here is an interesting article on China electrical production.
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https://www.nrdc.org/experts/alvin-lin/understanding-chinas-new-mandatory-58-coal-cap-target
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They are considered to be doing the world a great favor by reducing the share of coal energy as related to the total electricity produced from 65% in 2016 to 58% in 2020.But it is just a reduction with semantics thus far. The percentage decrease of total electrical share of coal from '15 to 2016 was 2% less even though the actual production from coal decreased 1.3%. The chart doesn't have a minus sign but the article states it is a continuing reduction over the last three years. Total CO2 had a slight increase of .5%
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Wind increased 30% last year to make 4% of total
Nuclear increased 25% to make 3.6% of the total
Solar increased it's generation by 72% last year but still only makes 1.1% of the grid.
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And total energy consumption in China is 6 times the electrical consumption. Other nations that require liquid fuels for agriculture and mining and gas and oil for heat will have electricity as 1/5 of the total energy. All of that needs to be one day replaced by electric.
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http://www.marcon.com/marcon2c.cfm?SectionGroupsID=30&SectionListsID=30&PageID=2803
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One current trend is cryptocurrency and the miners are using tremendous amounts of energy in their exotic pc rigs, this is a major problem as I see it money itself will require energy to maintain ? A cashless society could he a nightmare in so many ways we will be trading rice again in high poverty areas or maybe drugs guns whatever has value surely the energy price we payed to make paper money is less than the annual consumption of a medium sized country.
As we talk the ice caps are getting smaller so get ready I say for massive change in the scale of time it's clearly there's not long left until this setup fails and earth goes through a big reset, anything we build even 1000ft deep will be at risk of environmental disaster populations will thin out and it's going to be hard to continue and thrive as a species and enjoy the fruits of earth's freebies as we have over the past 400 years or so.

world energy supply by source country comparison.
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http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/EnergyConsump/
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sendler2112 said:

Continuous passive air cooling by convection. No emergency cooling needed. 600C operating temp so turbines are the same as for the ubiquitous natural gas plants.

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The turbines are running on molten salt? That's going to be a VERY VERY different sort of turbine than the ones used for combustion or combined cycle natural gas.

Very cheap.

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Other nuclear energy advocates have said similar things. "Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter!" That claim (about nuclear energy) was made a long time before I was born (around 1954.) Would be great if it was true today. It would be great if thorium reactors deliver super cheap power too - but I won't hold my breath.

$2 Billion / GW plant. $0.055/ kWh lifetime with investors paid at 9% and with all costs of decommissioning and Moltex operator profits. $0.085/ kWh even with a 3X constuction cost overrun. Online in Canada 2026. 2nd, full size reactor online 2030.

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Great. So in 20 years we will see if it works.

sendler2112 said:

Nuclear development has been long neglected..

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??

In 2011, nuclear power got a $5 billion increase in funding through the DOE for loan guarantees for existing reactors, research into new reactors, work at handling nuclear wastes and safety improvements in existing plants. This year it got another billion, half of which is additional R+D money for small modular and advanced reactors.

Since 1950 we have spent 24 billion on fusion research. Compare that to the Apollo program which cost 20 billion in 1969 dollars. GE has spent over 10 billion on development of the AP1000 advanced reactor. This effort drove the division into bankruptcy. Georgia spent $14 billion on two AP1000's, which it had to abandon due to cost overruns and construction problems.

There has been no lack of effort to develop nuclear power in the US. We have spent hundreds of billions over 60 years to develop nuclear power sources, from basic R+D to experimental reactors to money spent to build reactors to money spent to clean up our mistakes. And as a result we have a lot of power plants that make electricity that's so expensive that the plants are being retired, and new plants are being cancelled.

Maybe another hundred billion (or three) will fulfill that promise of cheap energy. But until then . . . .

billvon said:

sendler2112 said:

Continuous passive air cooling by convection. No emergency cooling needed. 600C operating temp so turbines are the same as for the ubiquitous natural gas plants.

Click to expand...

The turbines are running on molten salt? That's going to be a VERY VERY different sort of turbine than the ones used for combustion or combined cycle natural gas.

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The turbines run on steam of course. The same as a combined cycle gas plant so economy of scale is already there.

Cost overruns in the US for new nuclear construction will not be experienced in China where there are no ultra rich contractors or endless fees from overpriced law firms fighting equally pricey protest groups. Why stop at $7 Billion anyway? That is still a bargain for 500,000 GWh carbon free over 60 years. Much, much cheaper and denser than batteries. And this Stable Salt Reactor will be much cheaper since the core sections can be factory built and transported by truck, operate at atmospheric pressure and can't melt down so no expensive containment or hardening is needed. Here is a good written outline of the design advantages for those that shun video for some reason.
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http://www.modernpowersystems.com/features/featurethe-stable-salt-reactor-transforming-the-promise-of-the-molten-salt-fuel-concept-into-a-viable-technology-5748063/
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But the video slide show by the designer is much better for those that are willing to learn something today instead of just blindly griping about it.
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https://youtu.be/-IiIdG0asbM
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Eventually China will own most of the rights to GenIV and be the only place with enough energy available to make things. I was very disappointed to see Bill Gates give up on alternate sites and agree to take his TerraPower project to China. But this is the new superpower in engineering and materials manufacturing so if you want to make great things of any type, that is the place to be. Fortunately China has started to speak a great amount of English or I would strongly advise all grade schools to teach Chinese language at a young age.

Still a long, long way to go. It will take decades.

But solar+wind already achieved in just 10 years what nuclear took 30-40 years with massive financing and lobbyism from the military complex.

In this chart nuclear is most likely calculated by the generated heat, not by the generated electricity, which is misleading by a factor 3. Renewable will include burning wood and "biofuels" which is a significant amount, so electricity production should be significantly smaller. Hydro seems to high.

There is a huge growth potential for solar + wind while the energy supply of nuclear will always be a drop in the ocean, but you get the risc and the waste.

sendler2112 said:

world energy supply by source country comparison.
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http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/EnergyConsump/
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Cephalotus said:

There is a huge growth potential for solar + wind while the energy supply of nuclear will always be a drop in the ocean, but you get the risc and the waste.

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But the intermittentcy is a huge problem. We need something 3X to follow and smooth it to go with it. And 5X capacity vs average for solar and 3X capacity for wind if 18 hours of storage is available instead. 44TWh of storage for 1 day at current for the world.
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https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/electricity-domestic-consumption-data.html
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(2.4TW continuous average from this site seems low but we will use that value). Total current world production of batteries would take 600 years. It takes 25 GigaFactories 60 years. We have essentialy not quite 2 right now. In 60 years electricity demand will be more than double to feed the current debt bubble with growth. And this doesn't replace any of the 3-4X fossil use that is not electric.
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The chart above may show some industial heat for nuclear? The USA is by far the world leader in total output and gets 20% of electricity from Nuclear. The chart is showing about 7% of total energy for USA as nuclear.
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https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
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The green for "other renewables" will include at least 2/3 from burning biofuels for cooking and heat
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That chart is total energy. Not just electicity

So go to your library and find a copy of Thomas Friedman's 'Hot, Flat and Crowded.' He wrote this 10 years ago, but oh what he had to say about China and the environment. I just had to go back and look at the last three chapters, eerie all the talk coming out of China back then about how CLEAN they were going to be but him pointing out how nothing was working. This followed by not one but two chapters comparing the U.S. to China. The most important part being the point that it might take years for the U.S. to initiate something that China can start up in weeks. But also that China may start it but they'll never make it work, whereas the U.S. has a way of, sooner or later, getting it at least sort of right.

He also offered up the company that had, all the way back in 1992, adverse environment solar panels. Unable to get funding, WalMart money came to the rescue. And they built up that the author says was the biggest solar company of 2007-08, etc. By selling to---GERMANY. Oh, you should just go ahead and read it. The point being they were going to go bankrupt if the couldn't find SOMEONE to buy their solar panels. . . .

Oh, I expect better of Friedman, but he goofed big here and there. The most painful being where he made a big deal of the U.S. taking 22 years, 1973-95, to end leaded gas, but several years afterward China took a tenth of that time. You mean AFTER the U.S. did all the work developing and China only had to copy? In a place where they were using so little gas at the time? Making a mountain out of a molehill in China's transition, aren't we?

sendler2112 said:

The turbines run on steam of course. The same as a combined cycle gas plant so economy of scale is already there.

Click to expand...

Ah. You said " So no high pressure steam in the reactor to explode. No water to make a hydrogen explosion."

The Achilles heel of most molten salt thorium reactors is the heat exchanger, which transfers reactor heat to water. Depending on chemistry and fuel cycle, the fuel/salt mixture runs at between 600 and 800C. If there's any contact between water and salt you get a violent explosion and a nice little plume of fuel/water products, including uranium, americinium, californium and neptunium compounds - and they are very nasty indeed. (Makes what was released from Three Mile Island look like a relaxing sauna.) Even if there's no contact, at those temperatures you can get thermal dissociation of water (i.e. the potential for that "hydrogen explosion" you mentioned.)

So you design the heat exchanger with lots of layers to guarantee isolation between the working fluid and the reactor fluid. Which reduces its efficiency. And you design in failsafes (T/P valves, blowout plugs etc) to keep steam temperatures from ever getting too high. Which increases complexity and maintenance requirements. And you ensure that the temperature differential is never so large as to cause materials failure from differential expansion. (i.e. come up with systems so cool or cold water never enters the heat exchanger.)

All that is doable, of course. But it's not easy. And design problems like that are why we've gone from energy "too cheap to meter" to expensive energy from nuclear power plants which sometimes shut down for no reason, leak, melt down and on occasion explode.

I am all for research into new reactor designs. But I've also watched the GE AP-600 and AP-1100 development cycle, how it was going to be the first Gen III+ reactor that was inherently safe, much cheaper and faster to build. Fewer valves, less wiring, less standby power required. Very little attention required during a shutdown event. It would usher into a new age of cheap nuclear power.

Now, decades later, there are a few being built - but most of the projects started have been cancelled. Both reactors have morphed into the AP-1000. The effort bankrupted the GE division working on it; it is now the Toshiba AP-1000.

Here in the US, all proposed AP-1000 projects have been cancelled, after years of delays and cost overruns in the billions. In China, four reactors are being built - but are at least three years behind schedule. The rest of the AP-1000 projects around the world are in limbo pending resolution of deals made with the now-bankrupt GE division.

So again I am all for development of new reactor technologies. Thorium fuel cycles sound great. CANDU reactors are great in theory - natural uranium fuel! No enrichment required! Traveling-wave reactors based on thorium fuel cycles also look promising. The various forms of fusion are also exciting. The D-HE3 reaction gives you electric power with almost no dangerous radiation, without needing any coolant, turbines or heat exchangers.

But all these are decades away from anything like large scale deployment. And until we do the research and development necessary to ensure that such reactors can deliver cheap (and safe) power we go with what works - which in the near future will be renewables and storage, with natural gas for peaking.

billvon said:

sendler2112 said:

The turbines run on steam of course. The same as a combined cycle gas plant so economy of scale is already there.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Ah. You said " So no high pressure steam in the reactor to explode. No water to make a hydrogen explosion."

The Achilles heel of most molten salt thorium reactors is the heat exchanger, which transfers reactor heat to water. Depending on chemistry and fuel cycle, the fuel/salt mixture runs at between 600 and 800C. If there's any contact between water and salt you get a violent explosion and a nice little plume of fuel/water products, including uranium, americinium, californium and neptunium compounds - and they are very nasty indeed. (Makes what was released from Three Mile Island look like a relaxing sauna.) Even if there's no contact, at those temperatures you can get thermal dissociation of water (i.e. the potential for that "hydrogen explosion" you mentioned.)

So you design the heat exchanger with lots of layers to guarantee isolation between the working fluid and the reactor fluid. Which reduces its efficiency. And you design in failsafes (T/P valves, blowout plugs etc) to keep steam temperatures from ever getting too high. Which increases complexity and maintenance requirements. And you ensure that the temperature differential is never so large as to cause materials failure from differential expansion. (i.e. come up with systems so cool or cold water never enters the heat exchanger.)

All that is doable, of course. But it's not easy. And design problems like that are why we've gone from energy "too cheap to meter" to expensive energy from nuclear power plants which sometimes shut down for no reason, leak, melt down and on occasion explode.

I am all for research into new reactor designs. But I've also watched the GE AP-600 and AP-1100 development cycle, how it was going to be the first Gen III+ reactor that was inherently safe, much cheaper and faster to build. Fewer valves, less wiring, less standby power required. Very little attention required during a shutdown event. It would usher into a new age of cheap nuclear power.

Now, decades later, there are a few being built - but most of the projects started have been cancelled. Both reactors have morphed into the AP-1000. The effort bankrupted the GE division working on it; it is now the Toshiba AP-1000.

Here in the US, all proposed AP-1000 projects have been cancelled, after years of delays and cost overruns in the billions. In China, four reactors are being built - but are at least three years behind schedule. The rest of the AP-1000 projects around the world are in limbo pending resolution of deals made with the now-bankrupt GE division.

And today nuclear power advocates - in some cases the very same advocates who said "ignore Three Mile Island and Fukushima! The AP-1000 will solve all our problems and give us cheap, safe baseload energy!" - are saying "ignore the AP-1000! The NEXT generation of thorium reactors will solve all our problems!"

So again I am all for development of new reactor technologies. Thorium fuel cycles sound great. CANDU reactors are great in theory - natural uranium fuel! No enrichment required! Traveling-wave reactors based on thorium fuel cycles also look promising. The various forms of fusion are also exciting. The D-HE3 reaction gives you electric power with almost no dangerous radiation, without needing any coolant, turbines or heat exchangers.

But all these are decades away from anything like large scale deployment. And until we do the research and development necessary to ensure that such reactors can deliver cheap (and safe) power we go with what works - which in the near future will be renewables and storage, with natural gas for peaking.

billvon said:

The Achilles heel of most molten salt thorium reactors is the heat exchanger, which transfers reactor heat to water. Depending on chemistry and fuel cycle, the fuel/salt mixture runs at between 600 and 800C. If there's any contact between water and salt you get a violent explosion and a nice little plume of fuel/water products

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The Moltex SSR is very safe and uses proven materials that are available and certified now. Please watch the video to understand the design if you want to discuss this.
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https://youtu.be/-IiIdG0asbM
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Thorium/ molten sodium is indeed dificult due to materials requirements. The Moltex SSR is not using molten sodium. Which is violently reactive with water. And the fuel is not the coolant The Stabile Salt Reactor does not do this. Moltex uses stabile salts instead. The fuel salt is sodium chloride. Table salt. And it is in tubular rods. It doesn't mix with the primary coolant. The coolant is 42%ZrF4/10%NaF/48%KF
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The coolant system consists of the primary coolant, as described above, which passes heat to an identical secondary coolant through heat exchangers immersed in the reactor tank. The primary coolant becomes radioactive due to neutron activation, the secondary coolant remains non radioactive and transfers heat out of the reactor building. A small positive pressure in the secondary coolant loop ensures no leakage of radioactivity out of the reactor in the event of a heat exchanger leak. The fuel salt is miscible with the primary coolant salt so in the event of terrorism, a ruptured fuel tube will mix with the coolant which dilutes the neutron flux and the reaction goes out. No steam anywhere near the core so no radioactive steam explosion. And no water for a catlytic reaction with zirconium to make a hydrogen explosion. Decay heat is cooled entirely by an air jacket through gravity/convective flow of the temp differential of the incoming air. No pumps, water, or electricity is needed for emergency cooling.
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The 600*C operating temp is the same as combined cycle gas plants use for the steam portion of the turbines so scale is high for turbine supply. And this temp is also optimal for molten heat storage the same as concentrated solar is using so it is very economical to make the SSR a peaker plant by adding molten storage and extra steam turbines at a cost of $0.005/Wh, the reactor can run at 100% efficiency while the electrical output runs at 1GW for 4 hours, 0% for 8 hours, 1GW for 4hours, and 2GW for 8 hours at night.
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This will be many times cheaper than batteries. And much less resource intensive.
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This is radically cheaper to build. And runs on high level waste that we have sitting around with simplified processing since it upbreads Pu238 and burns all of the actinides also.
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And.
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Alta Wind was 2-3 Billion on 6,000 acres and is averaging 19% (Wiki states 30% but then also states annual production of 2,680.6 GWh) for .3GW.
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$7-10/ Watt of average output installed.
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So why do we cry and pull the plug on a new AP1000 reactor when it hits $7 instead of $4? And will crank out 90% of a nameplate 1GW day or night for 60 years?
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Comercial solar PV in my area is $2.50/ nameplate capacity Watt installed but only does 15%. So on average that would make it $16/ Watt. And there will be many days of zero in the winter. The weather is terrible where 100's of millions of people live in the North East USA. Unless you like fresh water for farming which I have plenty of.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_Wind_Energy_Center
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Alta Wind Energy Center in California, USA
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Solar PV and wind will do their part but they need something non intermittent and demand controlled to go with them.

sendler2112 said:

The Moltex SSR is very safe and uses proven materials that are available and certified now.

Click to expand...

Heard the same thing about the AP-1000. AND it would be super cheap. AND it would be easy to build, because it was so much like existing reactors.

This will be many times cheaper than batteries. And much less resource intensive.

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Great! So build a dozen or so (preferably somewhere else) and get back to us. If they prove out, then in 20 years or so we might have a good additional option for power.

In the meantime we will go with what is working for us right now.

billvon said:

In the meantime we will go with what is working for us right now.

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Coal and gas and crude oil world wide.

sendler2112 said:

Coal and gas and crude oil . . .

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. . . are on the decline, and will continue to decline as their costs increase. The new generation will continue to come from renewables.

billvon said:

sendler2112 said:

Coal and gas and crude oil . . .

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renewables.

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Yeah renewables are up to 2.8% of world energy. 2/3's of which is biomass for heat and cooking. We can have a party now that solar plus wind broke 1% with additions of 2017.
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Solar works fine up to 15% of the electrical grid. 40% of electric with 100's of TWh of ev's running V2G if we ever get that far. Which is still only 20% of total energy.
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Even 15 years into "Green Germany"'s massive solar and wind build out, Germany still gets twice as much energy from biomass.
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Solar and wind are 3.3% of the 2016 total Germany. But this is 3 times the world average so I guess 3.3% is something to brag about.
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This is a very nice example for the "nuclear lie".

In 2016 Germany produced 84,6 TWh electricity from its nuclear power plants.

In 2016 Germany produced 66,3 TWh wind onshore, 12,3 TWh wind offshore and 38,1 TWh from photovoltaics, so together 116,7TWh wind + solar energy.

So you would assume that Germany produced significantly more energy from solar+wind than from nuclear power plants, wouldn't you?

This data is from the exact same source as your picture: http://www.ag-energiebilanzen.de/index.php?article_id=29&fileName=20170811_brd_stromerzeugung1990-2016.pdf

And yet your nice picture shows us that solar+wind count for 3,3% and mighty nuclear for 6,9% in Germany in 2016.

How can that be?

Well, if 1kWh is produced from solar or wind it counts as 1kWh.

If 1kWh electricity is produced from nuclear it is counted as 3kWh, because this is the "primary energy" produced. So all those nice water vapor and river warming produced from our nuclear power plants is nicely counted as "energy production".

This is similar with worldwide data.

This is also why coal has such a high percentage, all those waste heat in power plants are counted in your chart. All those heat produced in your ICE car is counted at primary energy.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics and I assume that you knew exactly why you chose exactly that type of chart to try to prove your nuclear perspective, other charts have been sitting directly next to your chosen one, you could not have missed them:

Very interesting. It is misleading if total energy is always quoted as thermal. So how do we correlate the total electrical production from your graph with the total energy from mine? Obviously all thermal manufacturing and most transportation and heat is not electrical so the total energy consumed will be much more than the total electrical.

One question though: How do we explain the USA total electrical production of electricity being stated as 19.7% at EIA.gov with the USA total energy from nuclear at 7% on the world chart?

Germany has already built a Thorium reactor.

The THTR, that started fll power production in 1987 and was shut down in 1989

The THTR-300 cost €2.05 billion and was predicted to cost an additional €425 million through December 2009 in decommissioning and other associated costs. The German state of North Rhine Westphalia, Federal Republic of Germany, and Hochtemperatur-Kernkraftwerk GmbH (HKG) financed the THTR-300’s construction

Several billion Euro of tax payers money to get some radioactive shit and less than two years of power production. Dismantling is not expected to start before 2027.

Maybe others will be more lucky with their safe and cheap new technology reactors. Let them try (as far away from me as possible, please)...

This reactor accidentally realeased some radioactivity into the air in May 1986, but this was "luckily" (for the operators) during the Chernobyl disaster and got no significant media coverage in the "shade" of Chernobyl.