I find that enthusiasm for thorium reactors is inversely proportional to experience with nuclear physics.
suddenly a wild am_Unition appears When you talk to people who govern or research nuclear reactions for a living, their argument against thorium is along the lines of "yeah, you can run your truck on biodiesel I guess. Right now we're running on nitromethane and it still barely works out. Kind of seems like a waste to put up with nuclear waste at all when thorium has much lower potential for energy generation." This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors, he adds, because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium's superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste. It's like yeah - you can build a hydrogen fuel cell. But where does the hydrogen come from? burning fossil fuels. In some cases, cracking fossil fuels.Thorium cannot in itself power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive isotope uranium-233 – 'so these are really U-233 reactors,' says Karamoskos.
I'm of the mind that any investment into energy research is not a waste of money, but I'm also hella biased. So I'm not totally bummed to see that there's been a small revival into Thorium, although I also suspect that this will eventually lead to a dead end. But like you say, I have never been impressed with the arguments for Thorium. John Oliver recently did a bit that I listened to on the road home from Tennessee, and found myself thoroughly disagreeing with. Looks like I wasn't the only one [WARNING: Forbes autoplay bullshit]. So apparently John Oliver is not apart from the immense swath of folks who hear "radiation" and go into intellectual shutdown mode. And of course, I'm doing fusion (not fission), which produces a comparatively negligible amount of nasty byproducts. It's just really hard. I still think that if someone had a clever enough team and the right facilities/funding that they could pull it off, but it'd still take 10 - 15 years.
Considering the other stupid shit we spend money on hell yes let's build some thorium reactors just to see. But I'll be pleasantly surprised if it ends up changing anything. I think the issue most people have with nuclear power is they think it's invented by Einstein, built by Donald Trump and run by Homer Simpson. Most building professionals I've ever met are scrupulous and intelligent but it only takes one. Most power professionasl I've met are scrupulous and intelligent but it only takes one. And when you have a flour explosion or a propane explosion or a munitions explosion or whatever, it's destructive, it's terrible, it's over, it's done. Whenever you invoke subcritical isotopes it gets really complicated and scary. Nuclear weapons are actually less intimidating than nuclear power in that way - you drop a bomb it goes off it kills everyone and it makes that place radioactive until it isn't anymore but if you aren't under that bomb, oh well, right? But something like Fukushima just sits there and acts menacing forever.
I'll be stealing that. And if it wasn't Fukushima, people would keep fearmongering with Chernobyl, in all likelihood, with only infinitesimally less efficacy. I'm dumping some stuff, largely for my own future reference. You might've seen this before: I had been curious about that little black trace at the bottom, thinking maybe someone was low balling us to make a point. The DoE's latest budget report was easy enough to find, and basically confirms the plot above. The phrase "only several hundred million per year" should always be accompanied by "unlimited clean energy(, bitches)". Battery tech will be helpful, especially before we can miniaturize things. At least Musk is working on that one. ITER is a $14 billion thing. The U.S. is reportedly funding 9%-ish of it. If it turns out we can get some clearly* sustainable "burning"/fusing with that thing, which I honestly doubt, people might open more checkbooks. But a null result is still a result (I am required by law to say this to my reflection at least twice daily). In this case, it would pretty much put a nail in the coffin for the tokamak scheme of magnetic confinement. Stellerators are way cooler anyway, and there are some other schemes, including the "field-reversed" setup from this post: Like I mentioned therein, I'd like to revisit square one in another few months. I can't wait for all of the senior scientists to naysay my intentions! Seriously. The article I just submitted to a journal was motivated largely by comeuppance. Maybe a bit unhealthy, but it got the job done handily. Shoot, a few years back, I had a lot of folks tell me that I'd never go back to school. Hah. And I do apologize for hijacking a post about fission to yak about fusion and consolidate some links. I need all the practice talking about this that I can get. I appreciate everyone's interest. Any questions are welcome, it'll help me figure out where the gaps are in understanding. *Even declaring "success" isn't simple. See the optometrist algorithm article. --- Not required reading: Saw a guy on a friend's facebook telling folks that his old semi-truck's engine has better fuel economy than the newer models that've been engineered to emit less CO2. He feels no need to upgrade, of course. He then proceeded to tell everyone that the negative impact of wind energy is more of a concern, because of how much land area they require. Yeah, he got politely destroyed by several members of our grad department. But he still has no idea! Logic is fucking useless with these people. I might try to somehow swindle them into being better stewards of our planet. I've been avidly learning from the best: Presi-fucking-dential. But seriously, pitching this is going to be largely dependent on my own excitement about it. omfg, long-form is so nice. I'm no longer watching radar 24/7, constantly checking for tornadoes, and trying to update all my family and friends (so many texts though, I've never felt so loved :D!). The storm is screwing off, moving out earlier than expected, and the city's main bayou finished cresting a few hours ago. This entire city can start to sleep again! I've been pulling shifts with my girlfriend for several days now. I really wanna do some volunteer work, but it's so heavily discouraged by grad school deadlines... ugh.I think the issue most people have with nuclear power is they think it's invented by Einstein, built by Donald Trump and run by Homer Simpson.
So basically you're saying that the imaginary term in your dispersion relation is comparatively larger for the lower harmonics (including the fundamental?)? Yeah, I totally wanna see what assumptions you put into it, scan away, when you get a chance. I'll ruin one nasty surprise for you right now: In far too many occasions, there's nothing "intuitive" about the way plasma waves behave. And in far too many occasions, sometimes it seems almost unknowable. People do a lot of plugging and chugging. Some real genius goes into analytic approaches to simplifying the results of working in a particular regime or field topography, etc. etc. into an expression palatable for computations. A cohesive physical interpretation of the results is another rabbit hole. Right now, I'm working with anisotropies in electron velocity (phase) space (density) and applying the WHAMP model to see if it'll reproduce the waves we're seeing (some people seem to use the words in the parentheses, some don't). But the space plasma regime I'm working in is regrettably far from that of reactors :(. Still, let some of them words cook your google/noodle. Plasma is also notorious for nonlinear effects. That's part of the reason why they'll kick off a run of the engine, and even if they program in the exact same initial conditions/settings for their equipment on the next run, they hardly ever recover an appreciably identical result (obviously you know this, just translating for posterity). Like we've said before (I think?), nonlinearity seems to be a mathematical predictor of turbulence. Which seems to be somewhat ubiquitous to plasma
The lack of unity across plasma disciplines seems to be 100% true, unfortunately. Part of the problem is that plasma is fuckin' wicked hard, as you're painfully aware (or, not-so-painfully, because you kinda dig this crap too). People only attack fusion from one angle because that's the way we've incentivized the scientific community, both in our funding architecture and the intertwined systems of repute, and the way we're teaching things to the next batch of kiddos. Fusion is such a complex problem that, by necessity, we must divvy up the tasks, and there are a god-awfully large number of things on the "to do" list. The natural result is self-segregating communities of people afraid to jump across the boundaries of established disciplines for fear of having to learn new skill sets, new social circles, and secure funding all the while. And yep, it's absolutely human nature to take the path of least resistance, especially after grad school milks the snot out of people's souls. Even for once-headstrong kids in tune with the big picture. As if that all of that wasn't bad enough, there seems to be a lot more money in solid-state/QM/AMO research because of the immediate applications in industry, and that sucks up a lot of our best and brightest. It's also increasingly obvious (imho) that fusion will not be solved by theorists; It'll likely be worked out by a hybrid mix of theory and experimentalism, and then perhaps theory will perhaps allow us to understand it or miniaturize it. Something like that. The "shoot first, ask questions later" approach seems to be the way things are proceeding right now, largely. "Proceeding" being a questionable choice of verbiage, here. Yes, more money would unquestionably push things along, but scientists are notoriously poor at public relations and outreach efforts to impact policy in their favor. Especially if it's "WE'RE TOTALLY GOING TO MARS!!" (we're totally not, any time soon) vs. magnetic confinement fusion. And things are getting worse in the general public's perception of science, at least certainly here in the U.S. Edit: Forgot to mention that most plasma theorists and experimentalists just don't get along, which I think is pathetic. I have seen these old men's disdain for one another... >:( I'm definitely still working on wrapping my head around the current state of things. I've been given an incredible head start on a lot of the big picture stuff. Most notably networking. It's obvious to me that I'm not going to pull an Einstein and work this mess out myself, with a pencil and paper, while no one bothers me inside of a patent office. But I do stand a chance at assembling a crew of folks that might be able to make a pretty big dent in our path towards fusion. Baby steps, though. TL;DR - another worthless scientist foolishly trying to save the world attempts to justify his own petty existence. P.S. someone I respect immensely told me the other day that no one can really learn math past the age of 25. I thought it was pretty sad that they'd limit themselves like that, although the assertion is supported by a large amount of data. My guess is that it's not so much that the brain loses some innate ability to learn complex new ideas past age 25, it's simply that almost everyone loses the motivation right about that time in their lives. For whatever reason. Sucks for them. I'm happy, I'd say, but I'll never be satisfied, so I'll probably try to keep chugging along.
Dude you are awesome when I'm drunk. Don't ever change. I've had the Thorium conversation like three times now. It usually goes something like "I mean, yeah, you could use Thorium, but it's like? a lot of work? and you don't get a lot of benefit out of it and besides nobody's going to build new fission reactors ever again so like I get that the Internet thinks this shit is cool and all but like, no." Obviously that's me paraphrasing. It'd be super-awesome if nuclear physicists talk like that. They don't.