Thorium Breeder VS Fusion Reactors

[Sad123987]

I just want to know what opinion everyone has. Both are very good for replacing fossil fuels. 

[Slottr]

-Moved to Off Topic-

[TetraSky]

I don't believe we even have a working fusion reactor right now, no? Because it currently takes up more energy to get it working than what it can produce, or something like that? Did that change? (Or am I thinking of something else here?)

 

In any case, they are certainly much better than fossil fuel, no arguing there, since they don't exactly produce CO2.

 

What I don't like about nuclear reactors, is the waste they produce and how the entire site is useless for hundreds/thousands of years afterward (not to mention, it cost a LOT in maintenance, upkeep and security of the site after it is no longer used, forever more until the end of time, basically, since we can't have kids go play in an old nuclear power plant site after all).

The good thing about Fusion is that the waste produced would have a much lower half life, so it's mostly bad for 50~100 years, compared to fission which is thousand of years.

 

 

 

As for Thorium Breeder... It sounds like a fairy tale, too good to be true by how it can reuse old plutonium stocks and shit like that. But apparently it cost a LOT to operate those and no government would want to fund them. And how they output more damaging radiation than regular reactors in the short term.

whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html

 

The single really good thing I can find about Thorium, is that the material used, cannot be used in bombs (so far anyway).

 

 

 

Considering the cost of renewables keeps going down and how much cheaper the upkeep is, I see no reason to go with nuclear considering all the costs related to it in the short and long terms.

 

Wind and solar are both proven to be safe and relatively inexpensive. The main issue is that they take up a shit ton of space for relatively low power generation, unlike nuclear.

Then there's some people who "claim" to get sick when near a wind turbine... but pretty sure that has been shown to all be in their heads. They think it makes them sick, so they become sick... It's the nocebo effect.

There's also the recycling issue... But lets face it, between wondering how you're going to recycle a solar panel... and literal nuclear waste that we have to literally bury and which will pollute the environment if it ever leaks... I'll take the recycling issue.

[Donut417]

6 hours ago, Sad123987 said:

I just want to know what opinion everyone has. Both are very good for replacing fossil fuels. 

To be honest I dont think we will have a working Fusion reactor in my life time. As far as current nuclear power goes, Im not sure the public would approve the building of the amount of reactors we would need to replace fossil fuels. What happened in Japan is till fresh in many peoples minds. Before someone says "They built it on a fault line" the fact is their are fault lines every where. While California is the best known for earth quakes. In the 32 years I have been on this earth, we have had at least 3 here in Michigan, and I dont know of any major fault lines here. 

 

I was kinda hoping that Hydrogen fuel cells might take off at some point. If we can just figure out how to produce the amount of hydrogen we would need. Plus you keep your solar and wind farms. Maybe some geo thermal as well. 

[Nanook]

7 hours ago, Sad123987 said:

I just want to know what opinion everyone has. Both are very good for replacing fossil fuels. 

Antimatter reactor!

[HM-2]

15 hours ago, Donut417 said:

As far as current nuclear power goes, Im not sure the public would approve the building of the amount of reactors we would need to replace fossil fuels. 

People are irrationally afraid of nuclear power. More people die every year in China alone just mining coal for use in domestic power generation than have died in the entire history of civil nuclear power. When you take into account indirect deaths from pollution etc, they're hundreds of thousands of times more deadly in the real world.

 

Fun fact, most of the radioactive contamination in inhabited areas stemming from the Fukushima disaster had dropped to background levels now; the decision not to let people return to previously affected areas is an entirely political one.

[dalekphalm]

15 hours ago, Donut417 said:

To be honest I dont think we will have a working Fusion reactor in my life time.

I don't know how old you are, but I'm guessing you're in the neighbourhood of 20's to 30's. Let's say you have at least another 50 years left on this Earth. By 2070, I'd actually be surprised if net-positive working fusion reactors are still not a thing.

 

That's not to say they will be commercially successful or wide spread - we literally have no way of knowing the economics of that far in the future.

 

But with a lot of the current designs (and test reactors), they're making steady progress towards the ultimate goal. The biggest issue with Fusion is how so goddamn expensive the research and test facilities are. A lot of the test reactors are looking at specific issues of Fusion (eg: plasma generation, temperature, pressure, etc), rather than attempting a full blown power station.

 

ITER is maybe the first full scale demonstration reactor that will attempt a power-station scale? They're estimating completion somewhere around 2025 (ish - I expect that to be delayed more). The reactor should be capable of 500 MW of generation. Their main objective is to create more thermal power than it takes to operate (there are other objectives too).

 

The science is there, saying that it should work in theory, under the right conditions. The question is, are those conditions cost effective? Once one of these reactors demonstrates a practical application, you'll likely see a massive scale of new projects.

 

The planned DEMO reactor (A demonstration of a commercially successful reactor) is planned for 2044 (Construction to begin around 2031) - if successful, the DEMO reactor will require 80 MW of input power, but will output 2000 MW of energy - it has a Q Value of 25 (meaning it increases input by 25x for the output).

 

There are a few other planned DEMO-like reactors, including a Korean design.

 

With that in mind, I think you'll be pretty old (me too) by the time commercially viable reactors are available. I may well be in retirement before even the demonstration reactors are online.

15 hours ago, Donut417 said:

As far as current nuclear power goes, Im not sure the public would approve the building of the amount of reactors we would need to replace fossil fuels.

Maybe not. But the public is stupid about these things. Nuclear reactors - even when including Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island and Fukushima - are safer than some existing power generation systems. Did you know that Coal, for example, causes much more cancer than Nuclear? And is significantly more dangerous to both the environment and to people.

 

Frankly you don't even need that many nuclear stations to replace fossil fuels specifically in regards to power generation - there exist newer very large scale reactors. Some countries will have bigger issues due to geology, but it's a solvable problem.

15 hours ago, Donut417 said:

What happened in Japan is till fresh in many peoples minds. Before someone says "They built it on a fault line" the fact is their are fault lines every where.

There are not fault lines everywhere. In fact, you can find maps for all known fault lines. Fault lines are most heavily problematic at areas where continental shelves meet.

15 hours ago, Donut417 said:

While California is the best known for earth quakes. In the 32 years I have been on this earth, we have had at least 3 here in Michigan, and I dont know of any major fault lines here. 

And what scale have those earthquakes been? The largest I can find on record is 4.6 magnitude. Nuclear reactors are actually designed to handle a decent amount of seismic force.

 

The reason why Fukushima went balls up was not the earthquake itself (that was a magnitude 9, btw) - the reactors automatically shutdown as they were designed to. It was the 40 foot tsunami that followed that knocked out the backup generators that caused that disaster.

15 hours ago, Donut417 said:

I was kinda hoping that Hydrogen fuel cells might take off at some point. If we can just figure out how to produce the amount of hydrogen we would need. Plus you keep your solar and wind farms. Maybe some geo thermal as well. 

The major problem there is that Hydrogen Gas (required for HFC vehicles) does not exist naturally, so it needs to be produced. The two main methods are:

1. Steam reforming, which uses Natural Gas to separate out hydrogen - this requires fossil fuels and contributes to climate change (and is generally bad for the environment)

2. Electrolysis - using electricity to make Hydrogen from water - much better solution, but is very inefficient. And is only green if your power source is green.

 

HFC's make sense in a situation where you need extremely long range with extremely fast refueling. So, long haul truckers might benefit. But because it takes more electricity to create hydrogen than it would to simply charge an EV to go the same range, there's little benefit to HFC's at this point.

 

Maybe that'll change, but I don't really see how, unless we get to a point where we have so much excess clean energy (Fusion, maybe) that we simply don't care about the inefficiencies anymore.

 

25 minutes ago, HM-2 said:

People are irrationally afraid of nuclear power. More people die every year in China alone just mining coal for use in domestic power generation than have died in the entire history of civil nuclear power. When you take into account indirect deaths from pollution etc, they're hundreds of thousands of times more deadly in the real world.

Agreed - something people either don't know, or forget about.

25 minutes ago, HM-2 said:

Fun fact, most of the radioactive contamination in inhabited areas stemming from the Fukushima disaster had dropped to background levels now; the decision not to let people return to previously affected areas is an entirely political one.

Most Nuclear policy decisions are.

[greenhorn]

The perception of risk doesn't necessarily have much to do with objective risk. When you ask people about nuclear power plants, big accidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima etc come to mind.Those accidents are single events that cause a lot of devastation and therefore get a lot of media coverage. The effects of using coal power plants and the associated mining activities etc are also there, but they are distributed over time, so rarely considered newsworthy and therefore might be perceived to be less dangerous.
 

I am not advocating nuclear fission here, the dangers are real and there are many unsolved problems, especially related to nuclear waste.

One aspect that seems to be missing in some discussions about energy sources is the issue of power grids/power distribution: While wind and solar have their advantages (being "clean"), they can cause headaches for the power grid operators since their output tends to vary a lot, which makes controlling the grid challenging (even more if we increase the percentage of our energy from those sources). What would really help us out here would be an efficient, large scale energy storage solution in my opinion.

Fusion sounds very nice, but it seems to be too far away for now, which means that we have to rely on other technologies in the meantime.

[TetraSky]

3 hours ago, HM-2 said:

Fun fact, most of the radioactive contamination in inhabited areas stemming from the Fukushima disaster had dropped to background levels now; the decision not to let people return to previously affected areas is an entirely political one.

Pretty sure that's because Japan threw a shit ton of money at the problem and removed an entire layer of the ground over the entire surface where fallout could've fallen on.

They basically removed a mountain full worth of radioactive dirt and other material.

[Sarra]

Nuclear Fusion is an interesting topic. I know almost nothing about Fusion, as a Commercial Nuclear Power concept, than I do about Fission.

 

As far as Fission is concerned, you take fissile material, put it into a place where you can regulate it, and extract the energy it produces, and keep it contained as best you can.

 

With Nuclear Fusion, aside from knowing that it consists of taking Hydrogen, putting it into a place to contain and regulate it, it requires an initiator, which is tricky, and then... How do you get the energy out?

 

With Fission, you can use liquid water as a moderator and a method to extract the energy from the fissile materials, but the materials here tend to be really heavy metals, so keeping them from going into solution in your moderator isn't too hard. With Hydrogen/Helium, how is the energy extracted? You don't need a moderator, and while I may not be a physicist, I'm pretty sure you're going to have problems with using water to extract the energy from this process... But water is probably going to have to be involved at some point in the process, as converting the energy to heat, then using the heat to boil water and shove it through a massive turbine is what our current technology is most capable of.

 

The other problem with Fusion is waste. Or maybe? Again, I'm not very current with it, but I recall hearing and reading that the Fusion process tends to bombard the containment structure, and cause the containment structure itself to become quite radioactive. What I can't recall is, is that a high level or low level waste product, if the containment structure is decommissioned? Also, what do you make the containment structure out of, so that it doesn't just fail after extended use?

 

In a Sci Fi world, why not take the byproduct of Fusion, shove it in a fast neutron reactor, and blast it back apart into Hydrogen, then shove it back into the Fusion reactor?

 

Personally, I would love to see Thorium reactors be a thing. If they were half as safe as they were portrayed as being, they would be a step up from LWR/BWR.