Professor Hargraves who teaches Energy Policy at the Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth College has co-authored an article in the American Physical Society forum on Physics and Society‘s quarterly newsletter, called
Liquid Fuel Nuclear Reactors …it’s worth a read.
With only a limited supply of Uranium inside China, the described advantage only delivers 950 years, not 3000 years…Probably Not Just Uranium
Still, LFTR has superior advantages over the discussed dual breeder design: Higher Energy Density, Simplicity, Lower Cost Safety, to name a few.
“…Hats off to The Energy Tribune, which has done a fabulous job of chronicling the end of Spain’s wind/solar/renewable bubble that has left the country $26 billion in debt and desperately trying to rev up nuclear power…” Nuclear Townhall, 6 Jan 11
“…America’s most serious reactor accident occurred on what today is the site of the Idaho National Laboratory. This accident involved an ARMY small reactor project called SL-1…”
Yesterday, we received a lengthy commentary post that included several URLs in what appeared to be Cyrillic characters of the Russian language. Unfortunately, we have no way of translating such posts, as ATOMIC ELECTRICITY’s team is now limited to English speakers.
Small Modular Reactors, of which the LFTR is the best possible example, present special safety factors that are quite different from every existing reactor today. To understand why these SMR designs are game-changers, this MP3 provides an accurate overview.
Overview of Safety Aspects of SMRs
Nicholas Comfort reports in Bloomberg.com on 20 Dec 2010 that:
“…Popular acceptance of Germany’s renewable energy drive is likely to weaken when households see the cost of subsidies in their power bills jump as much as fourfold, the ZEW Center for European Economic Research said.
Households will pay 3.53 euro cents per kilowatt-hour of consumed electricity in subsidies next year, up from 2.05 cents in 2010, Germany’s four power transmission grid operators said in October. One kilowatt-hour is enough to power a 100-watt light bulb for 10 hours.
Some 45 percent of about 200 energy-industry officials surveyed by Mannheim-based ZEWexpect the price to rise to 4 cents to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour in five years, while 27 percent forecast a jump to 6 cents to 8 cents, the research center said in an e-mailed statement today.
An increase to 4 cents to 6 cents would threaten support, said about 30 percent of the respondents, while 24 percent viewed 6 cents to 8 cents as the “critical” level. Fifteen percent said even next year’s rate would be enough to weaken acceptance, according to the ZEW statement.
German consumers guarantee operators of wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable energy facilities fixed prices for the electricity they generate. The government wants to boost the share of renewable energy to at least 30 percent of gross power output by 2020…“
Is Nuclear Waste Really Waste…? No. Kirk Sorensen explains it.
Today, a letter to the editor of the “Northumberland Today” newspaper from one Roy Cowan of Port Hope, Canada began:
“… I am amazed at the widespread response on radio, TV, the national press, and the Internet, to the aborted Port Hope anti-nuclear presentation by Dr. Helen Caldicott. I also believe that it will help people to recognize that the issue of nuclear energy goes well beyond the borders of Port Hope. It is, in fact, a potential world-wide problem which few people understand.
In the Nov 18. Northumberland Today, Families Against Radiation Exposure (FARE) chairman Sanford Haskill states that Dr. Caldicott’s presentation was too technical for himself and other people. Having studied her background, her writing, and verbal presentations, I am surprised that anyone involved with the nuclear issue would not have made an effort to familiarize themselves with the fundamentals of nuclear energy, which are not all that mysterious.
As an analogy, one does not have to be familiar with the complexities of the Rolls-Royce gas turbine engines to understand why they keep a 747 in the air: the theory of flight can be explained in five minutes…”
It is imperative that society does not desert the playing field of survival to the environmental bigots selling gloom and doom to the willfully ignorant.
We need to develop a core curriculum on the atomic nature of reality and how mankind takes advantage of it to flourish.
“Keeping up with China…” The energy collective. 1 Dec 10
“…Since low labor costs, represent the most significant Chinese and Indian cost advantage, it is unlikely that European and American reactor manufacturers will be able to compete with the Asians on labor costs. Labor costs for conventional reactors can be lowered by factory construction of reactor componant modules, but the Chinese are clearly ahead of the West in that game. Yet the weakness of the Chinese system is the relatively large amount of field labor that the manufacture of large reactors requires.
“…If Europe and the United States cannot meet the Asian energy cost challenge, their economies will encounter a significant decline. Because of Labor cost advantages, it is unlikely that Generation III nuclear plants will ever cost less to build in the United States or Europe than in Asia. in order to keep the American and European economies competitive, the United States and Europe must adopt a low cost, factory manufactured nuclear technology. Molten Salt nuclear technology represents the lowest cost approach, and is highly consistent with factory manufacture and other cost lowering approaches. Couple to that the outstanding safety of molten salt nuclear technology, the potential for dramatically lowering the creation of nuclear waste, and the obstacles to nuclear proliferation posed by molten salt nuclear rechnology, and we see a real potential for keeping the American and European economies competitive, at least as far as energy costs are concerned.”
