[Newsbot]

Title: India plans 'safer' nuclear plant powered by thorium | Environment | The Guardian
Category: Science
Posted By: DrCaleb
Date: 2011-11-02 08:37:02

[DrCaleb]

Uranium was originally chosen for nuclear reactors because of it's secondary use in weapons. Thorium has no such secondary use, and decays into relatively safe materials. Win/win!

[PublicAnimalNo9]

Shhhhh don't tell the enviro weenies that. Their green portfolios might take a hit after the market realizes solar and wind just won't cut it.

[DrCaleb]

PublicAnimalNo9 PublicAnimalNo9:

Shhhhh don't tell the enviro weenies that. Their green portfolios might take a hit after the market realizes solar and wind just won't cut it.

Wind and solar do have uses though! The energy can be stored using molten salt - just like the Thorium reactor. The heat then used to make steam and drive generators to make electricity, and the salt keeps the heat long after the sun goes down and the wind dies. It's just much cheaper to build one nuclear reactor than hundreds of wind farms and thermal salt storage systems.

But yea, nuclear is so much more efficient. IIRC, one 'teaspoon' of uranium has the energy potential (3 x 10^13 Joules) the same as 10,000,000 gallons of Gasoline (1 x 10^8 Joules per gallon). Imagine the CO2 emmissions of a power plant equivalent to to a nuclear plant, running on gasoline!

[Canadian_Mind]

I gotta put more money into Thorium related industries...

[Prof_Chomsky]

I never understood all the anger driven toward "green" energy. Sure it's not as cheap, and it's a new technology, but it's a LONG TERM solution. So long as the sun shines we can use wind, solar and tidal power plants. We just need to invest.

I'm not against nuclear either, far from it. I think if run properly we should exhaust every ounce of fissionable material, but that means new safer reactors that are "everything" proof, because you can let even a half dozen Cherynobyl's occur. I don't even think the storage is a real issue, people are just scared of nothing considering there are old unanium mines with radioactive concentrations so high they actually went "critical" on their own over the millenia. Store it all there. People however never do talk about the cost of mining uranium, look at Australa or Kenya if you want to see the damage it can do if unregulated.

Rant ended. All I'll say is everything has a use if done right. We as a race for some reason though tend to take shortcuts and never do anything with the future in mind.