An additional argument for why we don’t have an abundance of nuclear energy is that people are too retarded to be trusted to use it without causing extremely catastrophic events in the process.
I’m talking shit like nuclear waste in the ocean and meltdowns across the planet due to affirmative action hires. Also, people are lazy and will do cheap shit that somehow ruins the environment anyway.
diversity hires manning nuclear reactors? What could go wrong?
Nothing bigot!
Shut your super straight CIS white toxic mouth with 10 masks!!
Get vaxt!! It'll keep me safe from being safe and safer than safe for safes sake of safeness!!
Get a gun, that'll keep you safe.
I remember a few years ago an illegal was found working at a nuclear power plant in the US. So they must have great security.
Fukushima?
I heard that place radiates diversity.
Literally Chernobyl.
The United States could have been completely energy independent, with a robust distributed power network by the mid-sixties - early seventies. Research thorium reactors. Every small town across America could have had all their energy needs met by a thorium cycle reactor the size of a shipping container.
You could be a complete retard and still run it because it's a closed system. It has an on-off switch and a little light to tell you it's on. That's it.
Know what happens when a thorium reactor "fails"? Nothing. It just stops making electricity.
Oak Ridge had a thorium reactor for power research back in the fifties. They shut it down. Want to know why? Because all it produced was electricity. Nothing else. They shut it down, not because it didn't work, but because it couldn't be used to produce fissile materials to make nuclear bombs. And they really, really wanted to make lots and lots of nuclear bombs. So they shut it down and funded bomb making technology instead. For a weapon system that has only ever been used in combat twice in the entire history of the world. And here we are.
I think the real problem with Thorium reactors is they are molten salt reactors and the salt is corrosive as hell.
I don't think they've figured out a way to build a containment vessel or cooling system (think there are designs which use molten salt in one or the other) that doesn't have the risk of structural failure after a few decades.
Here's a decent link. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11837-018-2981-2
What I think is rather than developing speculative technology (China has already invested a ton in Th reactors anyway), just go with pebble bed reactors. Here enriched U is put in graphite spheres at precise distances and weights. If the reactor ever overheats, the graphite sphere expands, increasing the distance between fissionable material, and naturally stopping the reaction. It's a passive fail safe that 100% works, even if you drain all of the coolant. It's not theoretical, pebble bed reactors have been built, tested, and proven. We just need to industrialize the production of fuel pellets, build the reactors, and make it happen. These would be great candidates for micro-reactors using heat pipes too. Put the micro-reactors in the basement of every major police station for security. Boom. Practically free power.
It's possible the problem is we're applying U reactor rules to Thorium, and if we loosened them, and just replaced the corrosive bits of Thorium reactors on a regular basis (since the radioactivity hazard is practically nil compared to U), we would be fine. Like, planned obsolescence, the Westinghouses would love that because they get a recurring revenue stream.
Do pebble bed U reactors now, and send some spies to China to steal whatever technology they've developed around Thorium.
Then after we've stolen their intelligence, invest in researching Thorium. For Thorium, you probably want to start with a clean slate rather than have the current US regulation apply. Thorium is way, way less dangerous than U reactors. They're really kind of safe. Love the idea, but that corrosive molten salt is a real problem.
We owe China some industrial spying. Even if they haven't found anything useful, we should still spy on them, just because we need to get even.
The other thing is, well, C02 fear porn is bullshit. C02 isn't a major driver of climate change. It's the sun. We were actually getting dangerously low C02 concentrations before the industrial revolution. Plants begin to die off around 150ppm. We were at 170ppm. I think we should keep burning lots of hydrocarbons until we're at 1,000 or 2,000 ppm C02. Plant life would grow like crazy and the earth could easily support 2x or 3x more people. Hell we could bring back dinosaurs with that level of C02 because there would be so much plant life.
Posting before coffee so probably word salad. Deal with it too lazy to edit.
Everyone talks about thorium, I need to research more into this.
The problem is, as previously stated, there are far too many long established and very full rice bowls that would get broken by this. So it never happens.
Nuclear power is textbook globalist control. Any idiot can set up solar panels. Nuclear plants involve every level of government imaginable.
There's also the slight problem of waste storage requiring 10000 yrs of foresight.
" Any idiot can set up solar panels."
Uh-huh. And these solar panels, where do they come from?
Thorium. Look at it.
UK government - The rest of the world is bad for doing nothing about globo homo warmo.
Also the UK government - No more solar panel funding because free electricity is bad for energy suppliers.
Sort of my point exactly.The Mammon machine requires sacrifices.
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