LFTR: A sadly overlooked option

[mandru]

I've seen a longer version of this but this vid cuts straight to the key information and is presented in an easily understood format.

From the way the details of this type of reactor are presented I gather it's not new technology.  While exploring the possibilities for power sources for future moon colonies the researchers rediscovered this type of reactor amid dusty books in a little used section of the library.  Apparently reactors harnessing this fairly common easily accessible element was kicked to the curb to favor uranium based power plants instead.

The only reason I can come up with for that choice was that there needed to be a forced legitimization of a "peace time" usefulness for uranium.  ::)


LFTR in 5 minutes


The most amazing thing for me was the description of a catastrophic failure of the cooling systems when the reactor types are compared.

With cooling loss our current systems invariably melt down.  This reactor type goes "Oh! Okay.  :)  I'm going to go to sleep now.  Wake me up when you're ready for me to get back to w@&k.  ^-^ :-X "

Something else to consider is the sheer waste of our current reactors.  For every Kilo of uranium used at least 990 grams (99% of original mass) are discarded as spent fuel and has to be stored somewhere so that it can never get back into the environment.  ???

[Dweller_Benthos]

Reminds me of an article I read a while back about refrigerators. The common type we have today takes quite a bit of electricity and has some toxic chemicals in it. There was another design that wasn't toxic (or less so) took much less electricity and was more efficient. Too bad it was invented by someone who didn't have connections to the big electricity companies. Something to that effect anyway, I can't find the article right now.

I bet your assessment of the uranium over thorium reactors is correct, they needed a way to make fissionable material "legitimate" so they could also make bombs with it. Or someone was more invested in uranium, had a stake in uranium mines, etc.

[mandru]

... invented by someone who didn't have connections to the big electricity companies...

An age old story.  :-\\

Tesla creates alternating current which will travel over wires many miles further than Edison's DC so Edison with his money and clout pulls a total hatchet job (Topsy the Electrified Elephant) to discredit Tesla's invention and take possession of the improved technology for cheap.  I've come to understand that holding a patent doesn't give you the right to develop and implement something you've discovered/invented.  It is only good for keeping anyone else from benefiting from it.

How many Plateau Breaking technologies are locked away by greed?

[PZ]

Way too many I suspect.  Greed is the main motivating factor that drives humanity.  Whenever I encounter something that sounds outrageously stupid, I now realize that I am simply unaware of the shady, greed-motivated factors behind the scene.  >:(

[fragger]

Just wait until fossil fuels really start to become scarce, then watch as the big oil companies roll out all the alternatives to internal combustion that they've been sitting on for decades. Fuel cell technology springs to mind for one. God knows how many others there are.

[mandru]

With enough inexpensive power anything is possible.  The LFTR being 1000 times more efficient that uranium based reactors and a million times more efficient than carbon based fuels could potentially change our entire perception of what we could accomplish towards improving the human condition.  Sea water could be easily desalinized, purified and pumped anywhere.  Even the metals extracted from that process of bringing drinking and agricultural water to where there is none would be a valuable byproduct.  Power from LFTR tech could also separate hydrogen from oxygen inexpensively.

I personally like the thought of cars powered with hydrogen fuel cells.  There's many pluses to them if they can ever make it to the market.  ::)

Pure electric cars I think are pretty much a novelty item.  We keep hearing the word Green paired up with electrics.  Don't the promoters of these potential lemons understand you still have to burn something polluting to make them go or are they just chosing to hide that fact. :-\\   I know, I know there's solar panels, and wind turbines but the current state of those is laughable and while hydro electric is good energy source here in the U.S. the same eco-activists screeching about Green solutions are busy trying to get all of them destroyed to return the Earth to it's pristine state while hopping around the country on airliners for their speaking engagements instead of addressing their concerns via pay-to-attend web conferences for those mercenary types wanting to be paid for their alarmist opinions. 

I don't think that pure electric cars will ever be fully embraced by the American public because most of us have it in our heads that it's insane to buy a vehicle that can't be used as an all purpose ride.  What?  For every hour of freeway travel you're going to rent a hotel room for 12 hours to recharge your car for the next hour leg of your trip.  That's freaking nut's!  At 7 miles an hour for 10 hours a bicycle is making better time than that but then I know that's exactly what the eco-nuts would prefer we all do.  :D

I think that there's only one way that a pure electric car could ever be widely accepted here.  It would require a battery being developed that will give 3.5  to 4 hours of freeway speed run time and instead of recharging the depleted batteries a widely distributed infrastructure of "Quick Swap" service stations would have to be in place to hot swap the depleted power cell for a fresh topped off unit.  A battery built to fill the required run time criteria is going to be pretty good sized.  One attendant with a modified pallet jack would pull your battery, run it to the back and start it's recharge for the next customer while another attendant slips the fresh recharge into place.

This process would have to be accomplished in a time span taking no longer than the amount of time spent filling a tank of gas or the customers would never go for it.

There's still a lot of odds and ends that would be required to make this type of a system w@&k.

Your car would have to be smart.  Once a battery has been loaded your car would have to diagnose the battery's condition screaming to get it immediately pulled back out if it was defective or warning you that the battery does not have a full charge status while telling you the correct amount to pay factoring the kilowatt shortage.  There would have to be an application built into the car to keep track of it's total remaining power level, project how far it can travel through information based on maps reflecting real road conditions like mountains, weather and construction delays.  It would also need to provide the optimal locations (along the route you are planning to travel) to get fresh battery swaps and could possibly even contact the suggested service station, reserve a battery and notify them of your arrival time once you've confirmed that it has made a correct choice.

Besides the cost of having all those batteries on standby all over the place and the man power to provide the hot swaps an even more insurmountable hurdle would be convincing all the various car manufacturers to cooperate and design their future models to be compliant to one of possibly three or four battery designs.

Like that could ever happen.  ;)

[fragger]

Great post mandru :-X I applaud every point you made there about electric cars, and especially about the greenies who believe it's the way to go. Hokey, ill-informed alarmist claptrap can never stand up to informed thought and unassailable logic :-D

Speaking of eco-nuts who would have us all ride bicycles, I can't help but think of the one currently sitting in the Lord Mayor's chair in Sydney. This is a new-age kook named Clover Moore - a latte-swilling, pushbike-riding Gaian lesbian with a swatch of black shag-pile carpet for hair and a penchant for wearing studded dog collars around her neck (think I'm kidding? I wish I were). This darling of Sydney's artsy-fartsy set apparently believes that the best way to make a city with four and a half million people in it "greener" is to take half the existing road lanes away from motorized traffic and dedicate them to bicycle riders instead, in the laughably naïve belief that this will encourage more "Sydneysiders" to make bicycling their primary mode of transit and thus save the planet (never mind all the people who are too old, too unfit or too physically impaired to ride, all the parents who have to get their kids to and from school, all the tradesmen who need to carry tools and equipment around with them, all the taxi drivers, couriers and delivery workers, all the public transport, all the people doing their weekly grocery shopping, and anyone needing to carry a bigger load than an iPod and a water bottle with them whenever they go out). Ms. Moore has begun to pursue this cloud-cuckoo-land ideal of hers in a serious way, with the inevitable result that the hundreds of thousands of cars, vans, buses, trucks and motorcycles on Sydney's roads are being progressively squeezed into fewer and fewer lanes, naturally increasing traffic congestion and consequently raising fuel consumption and exhaust emission levels dramatically as major Sydney streets become massive smog-enshrouded car parks during peak hours and maddeningly sluggish at all other times - while new the cycleways dedicated to less than a single percent of the city's road-going public sit almost completely empty and unused.

And if there are any major road accidents during peak hours - and there have been - the resultant gridlock is beyond belief. A rule of some sort allowing the cycleways to be used by motor vehicles in such an instance may seem to be a sensible and prudent measure, but apparently not to the pedal-pushing Ms. Moore. Apparently those having the unspeakably bad form to contribute to the demise of Mother Earth by driving a filthy motor vehicle on her are getting their just desserts whenever they become ensnared in a monster traffic snarl from hell.

That's just one of the inspired innovations from this enlightened Lord Mayor. Here's a few others:

Blocking off more and more of the CBD's streets, including those that used to lead to the Ocean (Liner) Terminal on Sydney Harbour so that trucks can no longer get to it. As a result, Sydney is losing millions of dollars in lost revenue as visiting liners take on their supplies from other cities before or after their stay in Sydney (and Sydney gets a lot of visiting liners);

Increasingly reducing the number of available car parking spaces in the CBD and turning them into pushbike parking areas instead, complete with showers. These are presumably necessary for all the bike-riding office workers to wash and change out of their sweat-soaked Spandex and into fresh business attire before turning up for w@&k (and oh yes, Sydney is positively overflowing with bicycle-riding businesspersons lugging briefcases, portfolios, laptops, dress shoes and business suits all neatly folded crease-free in their little backpacks);

Ripping up the paving from a very busy pedestrian thoroughfare in the very heart of the CBD and replacing it with lawn (that's right, grass) right in the middle of the wettest time of the year, so that the heavy rain and thousands of high-heeled female office workers between them could, in just mere hours after the grass was laid, turn said pedestrian mall into such a sucking muddy quagmire that the city council had to lay hundreds of hessian doormats over it to save people from slipping in the mud or ruining their shoes. It's also costing the shops and small businesses that front onto this thoroughfare heartbreaking amounts in lost trade until this fiasco can be corrected - which will be done at taxpayers' expense, of course.

The above is just a sampling of this nitwit's harebrained schemes. The good news is that the people of Sydney have had enough and are raising a growing chorus for this woman's head and for God's sake to get someone in the chair who will treat Sydney like the major commercial city it is and not like flipping Hobbiton.

[mandru]

Wow fragger.  ???

A quick Google search of this Lord Mayor and switching over to the "Images" tab shows that she does have a real penchant for the choke collar.  Too bad someone couldn't also get a muzzle on her quickly enough.  I always had a mental image of the Aussies being composed enough to recognize a dangerous snake and how to go about stomping on it's head before it could become a serious threat.

It must be contaminating outside influences that allowed this one to slip through.  ????

[Binnatics]

A quick Google search of this Lord Mayor and switching over to the "Images" tab

:-X :-X ^-^

I did exactly the same and thought to myself, if this woman would have been at least a bit good looking :-D NOT!! :D

She has the kind of nose that gives you the idea she's smelling something stinky all the time... hmm may be the sweat of all these bikers around :-()

I agree with you on the electric cars Mandru. It looks green and sounds green (which is not good because we want a car / bike to howl, not zoom) but it's pretty feckin' far from green. The most popular way of generating electricity is still fuel, coal or uranium. And what about all these high tech batteries needed to provide the growing demand of carry-able electricity? Aren't they toxic as hell, both in production and in waste?
Another bothersome green movement is the EU demanding that in the near future 10% of used fuel in Europe will be 'second generation bio-diesel'. 10%! That means food prices will raise worldwide because we will need space to generate the bio mass to supply such a quantity. 'Second generation' means that it's made out of recycled material that is not directly threatening food production, but it's got to be produced one way or another so finally it WILL threaten the food production.  And this new 'law' or 'rule' or whatever doesn't even predict that the total amount of fuel being used in Europe is decreasing. Fuel consumption can just keep on raising as long as 10% is green.

I have the feeling that worldwide people are only trying to 'move' the problem from a visible to a less visible place. Or they come up with solutions that will cause new problems to rise somewhere else.
Others try to mask the problems or just simply deny them: "Global warming is a strictly natural periodic phenomena." And more others see new opportunities; shorter and faster transport lines when the North pole has melted :-X

I think this Thorium reactor is a good alternative, although I don't totally understand it yet. It sounds good, if everything the guy explains is true.

Good reads fellows :-X ^-^ I wish my English was so tasty :)

[fragger]

lol mandru :-D Clover is a persistent weed that takes over your turf and is a bitch to get rid of ;)

I just realised I never replied to you original post. I meant to but I got distracted by other stuff and I forgot ::) Very interesting and thought-provoking clip, thanks for posting it. I'd say you are right about uranium and the need to try and legitimize it.

Cheers Binn :) And don't worry, your English is way better than my Dutch - it would have to be, seeing as how I can't speak any Dutch. Actually, your English is better than some English-speaking people's English :-()

[Binnatics]

Thanx Fragger,  :-[ and well, I know my English is adequate, but when I read these mind-twisting, tongue-tackling phrases you and Mandru produce here talking about a theme that's just a bit less ordinary than cows and calfs I do get jealous sometimes :-D

But whatever. I'm glad it's written down so I can keep up and discuss these great themes with you guys :-X ^-^

[mandru]

Binn, I also think you speak Engrish very goodly.  Sorry had to tease a bit.  ;)

I've always thought of skills including things such as speaking and writing as being most usefully improved through jumping in and practicing with others.  That's exactly what you are doing.  :)  By reproducing what you desire and learning to set aside what you find undesirable from among your own habits your skills can only improve.  We are sharpened one against another as iron sharpens iron.

So have patience with yourself as you've already recognized what you desire.  :-X

[Binnatics]

Thank you Mandru ^-^

[Art Blade]

Reading and writing here will help you fulfil your dreams -- keep at it :)