China has built a Thorium molten salt reactor

[SPG]

The alternative at this point in time is we wait, a nuclear reactor site is No go area for centuries after its been decommissioned. Building more now is short term thinking and it would take another 10+ years to build one and that's after the countless meetings,

With fusion just around the corner and the amount of worldwide focus on it now, Fission is a complete waste of resource time and money.

Short term political thinking has put us in this position commiting to a new nuclear program now is nothing but knee jerk.

 

[SPG]

What we need is nuclear power simulator !!

 

[Angilion]

The alternative at this point in time is we wait, a nuclear reactor site is No go area for centuries after its been decommissioned. Building more now is short term thinking and it would take another 10+ years to build one and that's after the countless meetings,

With fusion just around the corner and the amount of worldwide focus on it now, Fission is a complete waste of resource time and money.

Short term political thinking has put us in this position commiting to a new nuclear program now is nothing but knee jerk.

Fusion is nuclear, but that's a side point.

My main point is what do we do while we're waiting for fusion? The earliest plausible hopes don't have it starting until 2040, so it would be well into the 2060s at least before there might be enough fusion power stations to be the base of electricity generation.

I'm aware that there are some small funding-seeking companies making happy noises about how they can bring practical fusion generators to market earlier than 2040. The chances of them being right are very low. They're just bigging themselves up to attract funding, as is the custom. I doubt if even the people funding them believe it. But even if it happened, we'd be looking at a tiny test reactor in the early 2030s copyrighted by a company far too small to scale up to global scale production. So it would probably still be the 2060s at least before there were enough fusion power stations to be the base of electricity generation.

And all that's assuming that this time practical fusion really does happen. Right now, the record is output power 67% of input power and then only for a very short amount of time. There's a long way from that to sustained power output in an operational power station. A very long way indeed.

So we have at least 40 years until fusion might be a solution. Or it might take 60 years. Or 100 years. Or never. Probably not never, but even if it's only 40 years, what do we do in the meantime? Waiting isn't an option - we can't put the whole world on pause for 40 years. That's on a par with time travelling into the future and bringing the knowledge and plans for a fusion power station back.

 

[physichull]

The shorter the half life of radioactive waste, the more radioactive it is. So it's not entirely a good thing when the radioactive waste produced is radioactive for a much shorter period of time.

The length of the half life of of a radioisotope does not directly relate to how radioactive something is. If you produce radioactive waste, it is only as active as the day it is produced, at which point you just have to deal with it from a radiation protection point of view or a spent fuel management point of view. However, it is generally true that those isotopes with very short half lives (~seconds) tend to give rise to quite high energy gamma radiation

Spent fuel management is, contrary to popular belief, something we are getting much better at and the new PWRs produce significantly less of it than the Magnox reactors did.

One of the suggested benefits of thorium reactors is that one of the products is such a potent gamma emitter that it would make it very difficult for terrorists to make and use a thoriuim reactor to make a nuclear bomb or even a "dirty" bomb because they'd be irradiated to death long before they could do so.

This hypothesis is a bit silly. In the real world, I think you are referring to the daughter product of U-232, Tl-208? It has a high energy gamma line of around ~2.5 MeV, which is a consideration when manufacturing fuel for solid fuel systems (external radiation is generally not a big consideration for norm Uranium Oxide fuels for conventional reactors).

What we need is nuclear power simulator !!

I've used one! There is one at Sizewell B, which is used for training, as well as the main simulator/replica room.

The alternative at this point in time is we wait, a nuclear reactor site is No go area for centuries after its been decommissioned. Building more now is short term thinking and it would take another 10+ years to build one and that's after the countless meetings,

With fusion just around the corner and the amount of worldwide focus on it now, Fission is a complete waste of resource time and money.

Short term political thinking has put us in this position commiting to a new nuclear program now is nothing but knee jerk.

To wait for fusion would be absolutely catastrophic. Fusion is not a proven technology, and frankly, it may never be (at least in my lifetime). You will be able to find lots of good news stories about how fusion is "getting closer" or has passed a new milestone, but ultimately, the technical challenges with fusion are VAST! You will read a lot of hype from companies like Tokamak Energy, who will blow their own trumpets and set demanding timescales such as 2040 for a credible spherical tokamak, power generating system....and that they have raised over £100M....! A tiny, tiny amount of what will actually be needed. I'm convinced that the only reason they operate is because people are willing to pay them to try and this hype generates more cash and keeps the wheels turning. Especially incredible when you have plants like ITER, international collaborations when hundreds of millions are pumped in all the time.

This all sounds a little negative from me, however I do want fusion to succeed, I just think people need a little perspective every now and again to realise just what an enormous challenge it all is.

 

[physichull]

Looking at the original article, it seems as though Th reactors are still quite a long way off and still possess a number of technical challenges. It may well be the future, but you'd need to do a lot to convince me, and moreover the energy suppliers that its worth investing in.

With regards to the availability of supply, we have loads of uranium that we can use in proven technology today, right this moment. What's more is that we have barely been looking for sources of uranium, certainly nowhere near the extent of the oil industry looking for oil.

Good luck to them I suppose, but there are many other competing technologies that may provide cheaper alternatives, I can't see us moving away from our existing technology just yet. That being said, I am still anxious for the UK to build at least one more big PWR to accompany HPC, but that seems to be floundering at the moment. Maybe the inflation of gas prices recently will bend their arm at bit.

 

[StriderX]

As long as it's being built does it really matter that much what is being built? The West has spent too long whining about non-existent risks.

 

[PlacidCasual]

Personally I feel PWR's and BWR's are inherently more risky than molten salt reactor. The requirement to deal with decay heat and the small thermal mass makes water reactors much more susceptible to melt down and explosion issues. The energy density is just so high and the material requirements right at the top end. A molten salt reactor by contrast has much greater thermal mass so the rate of change is lower passive safety by virtue of allowing the tank to empty into sub critical smaller tanks that can easily be passively cooled is a huge boon. The heat exchangers circuits can operate at far lower pressures because the room constraints are that much less onerous. Honestly I don't think if the requirement for bomb material wasn't an overriding requirement for civil reactors that PWR's or BWR's would have been developed and instead we would already have a mature fleet of molten salt or liquid sodium reactors.

 

[GreatAuk]

Uk and rolls royce are hopefully going to sucxed with the small modular reactor method

https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx


They want to build 16 of them them

Would be great if they do actually end up doing that. It's just that in recent history there have been a lot of promises about nuclear energy in the UK and none of them have been kept (a failing in political will and industrial strategy of successive governments as I see it). Wasn't so long ago that Mr Blair was telling us about grand plans for a whole new fleet of nuclear reactors to be built. 15 years on what we've actually got in reality is one inefficiently funded plant that will be delayed years and years, based on a French design that has caused nothing but problems at the two other sites where they've tried to build one in Europe.

Basically I fully expect the great promises of future smrs to evaporate. That said, if rolls royce's development goes well and there's enough political will to actually take the leap and build / install them in the UK then that would be a great thing. In theory I can see how a lot of the arguments for the benefits of smrs make sense, especially in our regulatory / political environment, but time will tell whether that's borne out in reality.

 

[Energize]

And also one of themost expensive

It's actually significantly cheaper than gas in the long term because nuclear fuel is so cheap. Yes the capital cost is high (which is why the government need to put something in place to offset the risk), but once the capital costs are paid off you're laughing, and changes in the price of nuclear fuel have very little effect on the cost of the electricity produced because most of the ongoing costs are operational.

Again Nuclear is fine till it goes wrong and it will go wrong.

It has never "gone wrong" in any Western design (in terms of significant radiation release) and the newer designs are safer, no one has even ever gotten radiation poisoning from a nuclear plant meltdown in the whole 60 years the west has been operating them. Compared to loads of deaths in hydro and fossil fuel plants.

 

[physichull]

It's actually significantly cheaper than gas in the long term because nuclear fuel is so cheap. Yes the capital cost is high (which is why the government need to put something in place to offset the risk), but once the capital costs are paid off you're laughing, and changes in the price of nuclear fuel have very little effect on the cost of the electricity produced because most of the ongoing costs are operational.

This is true. Also, decommissioning costs are a tiny fraction of the build cost and is all built into the initial funding model too, so its already been paid for. The vast majority of operating costs are spent fuel disposal and paying Sellafield to keep it.

SMRs aren't designed as big load operators either, their sole purpose is that they can be placed in remote areas and provide power solutions for remote areas of the country, so they will be part of a mix, but not the whole solution.

 

[Scougar]

China are also in the process of building their scaled up fast neutron reactor, at 600MWe that's about as powerful as our mature reactors already.

They are way ahead of the game when it comes to civilian nuclear power, while our old reactors fall apart, the wind dies down, gas prices shoot up and we cut down forests for biomass leaving us in energy and climate crises they are taking the initiative and building a safe, green nuclear program.

And would gladly harvest their citizens organs to fund such endeavors. /rant

But yeah... we as a western world aren't taking energy seriously because right now, gas/oil etc make people money.

 

[mattyfez]

Uk and rolls royce are hopefully going to sucxed with the small modular reactor method

https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx


They want to build 16 of them them

I thought RR is now owned by an Indian mega-corp? or is that just the car brand rather than the jet engine/tech part of the company?

 

[Diddums]

I thought RR is now owned by an Indian mega-corp? or is that just the car brand rather than the jet engine/tech part of the company?

Rolls Royce cars are ownes by BMW. Jaguar and Land Rover are owned by Tata iirc, an Indian megacorp.

 

[mattyfez]

Rolls Royce cars are ownes by BMW. Jaguar and Land Rover are owned by Tata iirc, an Indian megacorp.

So non are british companies lol..it figures.

 

[4K8KW10]

And would gladly harvest their citizens organs to fund such endeavors. /rant

But yeah... we as a western world aren't taking energy seriously because right now, gas/oil etc make people money.

Yeah, making short term money is more important than investing in the future of the whole human race.
Instead of 60 years of investments on research for new energy sources, we only invest in military hardware to send to the Middle East, so we steal their "precious" black "gold"...

We are run by idiotos.

 

[Quartz]

Looking at the original article, it seems as though Th reactors are still quite a long way off and still possess a number of technical challenges. It may well be the future, but you'd need to do a lot to convince me, and moreover the energy suppliers that its worth investing in.

Yes, this is a test reactor. We'll know if it works within a year.

Rolls Royce cars are ownes by BMW. Jaguar and Land Rover are owned by Tata iirc, an Indian megacorp.

Rolls Royce aerospace / engineering etc are owned by Rolls Royce Holdings.

 

[Angilion]

Yeah, making short term money is more important than investing in the future of the whole human race.
Instead of 60 years of investments on research for new energy sources, we only invest in military hardware to send to the Middle East, so we steal their "precious" black "gold"...

We are run by idiotos.

We're run as a partial democracy based on elections. So politicians very strongly prioritise at most a few years ahead - until the next election. They've avoided nuclear power because it costs them votes from the (very numerous) OMG NUCLEAR MEANS EVERYTHING WILL DIE! people. And they won't bet on something that might work in the future rather than something that does work in the present. Headlines about them "wasting" public money on something that doesn't work will cost them votes and something that might work half a dozen elections later is useless in getting them votes.

They're not idiots. Well, some of them are. But most of them aren't. They're just working the system as it is. Partial democracy has its advantages, but it also has its drawbacks.

 

[Tefal]

I thought RR is now owned by an Indian mega-corp? or is that just the car brand rather than the jet engine/tech part of the company?

Rolls royce engineering are considered strategic so kept British usualy the govt will buy thier shares if they need money and are going to sell to many abroad iirc

 

[Smokey Deza]

China's rapid technological progress is nothing compared to the wests massive progress on destroying its own manufacturing industry, white privilege, gender neutral language, censorship of anything that offends and being able to stop far left loons from blocking motorways. We're definitely winning this one lads.

Yeah, alongside a US president suffering from dementia trying to inspire a generation of self-obsessed TikTok plebs. Most of whom voted for him simply because they didn't like Trump

I really hope I'm outside the age range for conscription for when China thinks it's ready to take on the whole world. India probably poses more of a threat than all of 'NATO' given the aforementioned lunacy.

 

[Washout]

Yeah, alongside a US president suffering from dementia trying to inspire a generation of self-obsessed TikTok plebs. Most of whom voted for him simply because they didn't like Trump

I really hope I'm outside the age range for conscription for when China thinks it's ready to take on the whole world. India probably poses more of a threat than all of 'NATO' given the aforementioned lunacy.

lol, deconstruct that. Biden, in power for less than a year and already responsible for the decline of the west. The decline of manufacturing in the UK isn't a western thing. Lots of places in Europe are pretty good at it. Look at the Scandinavian shipyards, German car production, French power etc. The UK has been in decline in all these but whose fault is that? Read stories of lots of heavy industry here using machinery liberated from Germany after the war up to the 60s/70s where I assume they started over and modernised.
But yeah, Biden and tiktok.

Anyway, leave the heavy industry over there, it's a global economy and it's quite nice having air to breath that won't burn your lungs. Uk also used to be a leader in textiles, should we open the mills back up and get some sweatshops going too?