Sure, let’s pay private corporation billions in subsidies by handling their waste and have more centralisied and expensive energy production. Oh and trade dependencies due to uranium
Loads of people love to pretend an NPP is just a hut with a magic gem inside delivering an endless amount of power for free. In reality they are huge, highly complex, high-security facilities that take decades and billions to build and need to be operated and maintained by loads of highly trained staff in 24/7 shift operations. This isn’t to downplay their merit of providing CO2 emission free power, but for the love of god please appreciate the enormous effort and expense this is achieved with, especially when comparing it to renewables.
It’s almost like many things operate exactly like that but don’t have people spreading disinformation or fearmongering to the point where people are so pants shittingly terrified of them they won’t even consider it.
Yeah, fossil fuel companies have spent the last 70 years propagandizing against nuclear because it’s their largest threat.
Sure, but hopefully you have no trouble believing that simultaneously, nuclear power companies and governments wanting to use nuclear, despite the risks, have been propagandizing for nuclear.
Pro-nuclear folks are often completely unaccepting of there being risks and externalized costs, which feels to me like they’re subject to propaganda (notwithstanding that I’m likely subject to different propaganda).
Things that don’t exist yet aren’t a solution for problems we have now.
It’s not like we could now just build a thorium reactor that makes economic sense without decades of serious prototyping. And by that time we might have found that there are more pbolems with it than we thought.
I mean, China is doing it right now, and we’ll have answers in a lot less than decades.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Operating-permit-issued-for-Chinese-molten-salt-re
If the TMSR-LF1 proves successful, China plans to build a reactor with a capacity of 373 MWt by 2030.
Not sure which unit MWt is. Anyway, let’s see how far they are in 7 years.
Thorium is abundant and a byproduct of rare earth mining. It’s also what the moon is mostly made up of, so our energy requirements on the moon could use locally mined sources for power generation making moon bases much cheaper to operate.
A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR, not only can’t melt down, it can be smaller and require less staff to manage, requires no external cooling so it can be built anywhere, and cannot be used to make bombs. It’s also not radioactive by itself.
In the 1940s, both uranium and thorium were looked at as potential fuels for nuclear energy, but you can’t make bombs with thorium, so the US went with uranium. LFTRs create no nuclear waste, can be used to burn existing nuclear waste created by other nuclear energy processes, extracting more energy from our giant stockpile of unusable nuclear waste, and if the plant loses power, which is only needed to keep a frozen plug frozen, excess fuel melts and the empties into a reserve tank. Most rare earth mining companies don’t even know what to do with the thorium they mine, so they store/stockpile it in hopes of future uses.
It simply baffles my mind that this isn’t even on the table for potential, near limitless energy generation in addition to, or in replacement of, wind and solar green energy. The nuclear fearmongering has tainted the idea of safe nuclear power generation to the point that I suspect many of you have never heard of it. We literally have the answer to energy needs for the entire world, using greener production, but since it’s new and would require billions to fund and start, it hasn’t been considered until recently.
If billionaires really wanted to help humanity, rather than simply saying so for PR and launching their cars into space or creating flamethrowers, this is an investment that, while not as quick to return gains, would be lucrative, forward thinking, and beneficial enough to help all of humanity and this planet. And they could have started in the 50s when the government played around with a test reactor for proof of concept and proved it worked. Imagine a timeline where capitalism and greed weren’t a thing and climate change wasn’t even an utterance outside of explaining why Venus is so fucking hot!
and cannot be used to make bombs
That is not true. Scientist even argue if LFTRs are a powerful way to create Uranium233.
LFTRs create no nuclear waste
Also not correct. Where did you get your facts from?
