/sci/ - Science & Math » Thread #12184982

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Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 06:37:15 2020 No.12184982 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>12184991 >>12185048 >>12185114 >>12185189 >>12185221

why the hell do we use uranium in nuclear power plants instead of thorium?
>easier to put under control in case of an emergency since it needs an extra element to produce energy, so it can be easily shut down by separating the two
>crates a minimal amount of nuclear waste in comparison
>way more abundant, easier to mine for since it doesn't release cancer gas and easier to use since it doesn't need enrichment
>straight up better at producing energy with less mass
the only reason I see is because its waste can't be used to make nukes unlike the uranium waste

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 06:44:27 No.12184991 Report

Quoted By: >>12185132 >>12185276

>>12184982
you can't just order a thorium NPP in this timeline. and it's already 2020, even today it doesn't make much economic sense to build new NPP when renewables are so much cheaper and offer a quicker ROI. by the time one of these thorium startups has their first reactor online we might already have fusion.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 07:08:54 No.12185021 Report

Quoted By:

All nuclear power plants are part of nuclear weapons production. Thorium doesn't make transuranics like a uranium reactor. So it was never developed.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 07:20:33 No.12185044 Report

Quoted By:

BRUH can I smoke thaT NUG?!!??!

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 07:22:16 No.12185048 Report

Quoted By:

>>12184982
can't make bombs out of thorium reactor byproducts

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 08:00:48 No.12185114 Report

Quoted By:

>>12184982
>thorium
that only means using U-233 instead of U-235

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 08:09:29 No.12185132 Report

Quoted By: >>12185170

>>12184991
>even today it doesn't make much economic sense to build new NPP
god i'm so fucking tired of this bullshit...do you realize that China is actively building up nuclear at an unprecedented rate? They've tripled their share of nuclear power over the last 10 years. They have very good prices for nuclear energy,competitive with renewables and objectively better than renewables plus storage or back-up/peaker plants. And they're working on creating nuclear plants that can do co-generation-using heat for industrial purposes like hydrogen generation or chemical processing,or even district heating, which helps get cities off of using gas for heating.

Nuclear energy is only expensive in the US because our regulatory structure is a paranoid nightmare that has, perversely, meant that most of out nuclear plants are outdated gen 2 style reactors instead of cheaper,safer gen 4s. Other countries humiliate us by easily building up nuclear power while we struggle to do anything.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 08:39:14 No.12185170 Report

Quoted By:

>>12185132
you can build renewables with 10mil or 100mil and will make your money back within a decade or so, you don't need a 5-12b investment that's only going to pay for itself after 40 years IF people don't suddenly decide to shut it down after 30. without government backed financing you're going to pay sky high interest rates.

and China is building 12 new plants, that's a drop in the bucket compared to their coal plants and their renewable buildup. they're hedging their bets (and they need a few plants to build nukes, much like the US) but they're far from spearheading a nuclear renaissance. and even China has an anti-nuclear movement and NIMBYism. i doubt that we will see another France-like nuclear buildup anywhere within our lifetimes. if it happens it won't be China but some gulf country or maybe some African nation.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 08:53:24 No.12185189 Report

Quoted By:

>>12184982
https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 09:15:20 No.12185221 Report

Quoted By: >>12185320

>>12184982
URANIUM
---------------------------------------------
Uranium fuel rod
U-235 5%
U-238 95%

when rod is used
U-235 breaks up
U-238 --> U-239 --> Np-239 --> Pu-239

after U-235 portion drops to 0.3%
the rod is used up

waste storage: 10,000 years

Pu-239 can be used to build nuclear weapons

THORIUM
---------------------------------------------
Th-232 --> Th-233 --> Pa-233 --> U-233

U-233 is then used to make pellets

when pellets are used
no U-238 in pellets => no Pu-239 is created
U-233 --> U-232 --> Tl-208

waste storage: 300 years

U-233 can be used to build nuclear weapons,
but only after the U-232 is separated from the mix

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 09:56:33 No.12185276 Report

Quoted By: >>12185291 >>12185306

>>12184991
Renewable is cheaper per raw kWh when you can ignore the extremely low and random capacity factor. In reality, predictable provision of power is critical in an energy market. Less predictable sources are just worth a lot less. Plain and simple. How much did a kWh cost during Californians last rolling blackouts which were done to cover their lack of predictable power?
Nuclear, coal and gas have one thing in common: They can give you their nameplate capacity continuously for months at a time with little downtime between runs, and a flexible schedule of exactly when downtime will happen. This makes their output suitable for baseload. It makes their energy worth a lot more because you can plan with their output on the long term.
Then you get hydro, which can usually also provide Baseload, but is also usually subject to external factors like river flow and environmental concerns. Hydro power is still very valuable, but you always need to keep some standby plan in case the dam is going dry. Usually this is coal because standby coal is "cheap". You can also overbuild your other plants and just have them run at slightly lower output most of the time. This is functionally equivalent to having standby plants, but it can be cheaper sometimes. Adding hydro almost always makes energy cheaper because it's still very reliable and the plants are inexpensive, even though having them makes long term planning a little more difficult.
Then you get shit like solar and wind. God, they fuck everything up. Their output is unpredictable from day to day, so you can't plan around them at all. They cause grid instability, which is ballasted by peaking coal and gas plants. These peaking plants run extremely inefficiently because they're running way lower than their nameplate and are designed to be able to swing output up and down very fast without cracking tubes and shit. They're expensive and dirty, and they're necessary unless you want to do what California did: Cut output.

Anonymous

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Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 10:02:55 No.12185291 Report

Quoted By: >>12185306

>>12185276
cope, fossil

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 10:11:51 No.12185306 Report

Quoted By: >>12185312

>>12185276
So what are the solutions? Greenie retards always say "battery". Yeah, okay. That works. How expensive are batteries? More expensive than the panels if you want enough battery to make the plant output barely baseload quality. Now, how do you expect to charge these batteries? Solar and wind plants don't produce anywhere near their nameplate capacity, so if you want 1MW out then you need to install 2MW of solar/wind and 1MHh of battery. That'll cover a few hours of really low output, which is the absolute least you need to do.
Your cheap solar or wind installation just became more expensive than everything else. You're also using twice the land and over twice the un-recyclable materials of what was promised.
What are our other solution's? A "smart" grid which can load shed with a better strategy. Instead of cutting off everything on a Substation, you cut off just shit like theme parks, factories, and residential. This is obviously not a real solution, but it's done in practice with time of use rates and critical peak rates. You might be charged several dollars per kWh in a critical peak time. Power companies have been rolling this out for years because they need to. That's what the cost really is when capacity falls below demand. This is also not a real solution.

>>12185291
That loop breaks down when the grid becomes too unstable for the remaining, extremely dirty peaking plants to keep up. This is where California is, and why they had blackouts.
t. Energy industry worker who has been very involved with all of this since 2012.

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 10:18:40 No.12185312 Report

Quoted By: >>12185370

>>12185306
>loop breaks
nah, the more wind&solar just intensifies even more

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 10:22:29 No.12185320 Report

Quoted By:

>>12185221
you still need to remove Pu-240 from Pu-239 to make a bomb
the idea that U-Pu bad, Th-U safe is absurd
Th-232 is analogical to U-238
U-233 is analogical to Pu-239

U-232 is highly radioactive gamma emitter (more radioactive = faster decay), which theoretically makes reprocessing more dangerous than with Pu-239, but not really, you would be dealing with Pu-241, which is about as bad

Anonymous

Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 10:54:27 No.12185370 Report

Quoted By:

>>12185312
You clearly didn't take a class on control theory.

Anonymous

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Anonymous Fri 02 Oct 2020 11:02:55 No.12185385 Report

Quoted By:

>muh thorium

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