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from the I-think-you're-doing-it-wrong dept.
What a surprise: If you subsidize something, you get more of it. In the EU, there are financial incentives for generating energy from renewable sources. Trees are a renewable resource, true enough, but I doubt that the Eurocrats intended to subsidize the massive destruction of forests.
Protected forests are being indiscriminately felled across Europe to meet the EU's renewable energy targets, according to an investigation by the conservation group Birdlife.
Up to 65% of Europe's renewable output currently comes from bioenergy, involving fuels such as wood pellets and chips, rather than wind and solar power.
Bioenergy fuel is supposed to be harvested from residue such as forest waste but, under current legislation, European bioenergy plants do not have to produce evidence that their wood products have been sustainably sourced.
Birdlife found logging taking place in conservation zones such as Poloniny national park in eastern Slovakia and in Italian riverside forests around Emilia-Romagna, where it said it had been falsely presented as flood-risk mitigation.
[...] Jori Sihvonen, the biofuels officer at Transport and Environment, which co-authored the report, said: "It is easy to fall into thinking that all bioenergy is sustainable, but time and again we see some forms of it can be worse for society, the natural environment and, in the case of burning land-based biofuels or whole trees, even the climate.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @09:29PM
Shaking my head at those loony environmentalists! They won't shut up about "sustainability" and it's just annoying! Sad!
Other concerns about fission--overlooked, I'm sure, by crazy greens--centre on the facts that the irradiated fuel is much more radioactive than mined uranium, that radioactivity can lead to cancer and mutations, that reactors designed for power production can instead be operated to produce materials for nuclear weapons, and that such weapons can ruin one's day.
As for "sustainability":
The "Red Book" of uranium resources, produced by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency, indicates that the world's available uranium as of 2013 amounted to about 7.6 million metric tons—enough to last for about 150 years at current rates of consumption. Consumption, though, is bound to increase as an increasing number of countries turn to nuclear energy to meet their energy requirements.
-- https://web.archive.org/web/20150918222607/http://thebulletin.org/reprocessing-poised-growth-or-deaths-door/sustainable-nuclear-energy-closed-fuel-cycle [archive.org]
More efficient use of nuclear fuel requires reprocessing, which was invented to separate plutonium for use in weapons and can still be used for that purpose. Reprocessing doesn't please loony environmentalists, either: for example Greenpeace are saying that
The Sellafield and [La Hague] facilities are the biggest source of radioactive pollution in Europe. [...]
In addition to raising general background levels of radiation, marine life in particular algae, plankton, and crustacean's including lobsters have absorbed significant amounts of radionuclides, in many cases exceeding safety levels set for seafood after a nuclear accident. There is an increase in the rate of childhood leukaemia and other radiation linked diseases in the vicinity of both Sellafield and La Hague.
-- http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/nuclear/waste/reprocessing/ [greenpeace.org]
Drawbacks to deuterium-tritium fission include the need for fission reactors to produce the tritium, induced radioactivity due to neutron capture, and of course the lackluster energy return on energy investment. The Americans started work on a hybrid fission-fusion system that would run on "small" thermonuclear bombs, but it was cancelled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER [wikipedia.org]
Don't tell those wacky greenies that the Sun runs on nuclear energy! They'll try to ban it, LOL!
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday December 02 2016, @10:41PM
Current reactor designs are designed for bomb making, not efficiency.
If your waste is too radioactive to handle, you are leaving energy on the table.
THE THORIUM PROBLEM - Manufacturing & energy sector hobbled by thorium [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Saturday December 03 2016, @12:16PM
Actually - no.
Civilian/power reactors:
PWR - designed for naval propulsion primarily (compact)
BWR - designed for ease to build (cheap)
CANDU - designed to be able to be built to 1950's canada's industrial level (ie, no access to enrichment nor processing - both requirements for weaponmaking)
AGR - a power-optimized derivate of the MAGNOX, practically useless for weapons Pu.
EGP-6 - power and heat optimized miniature version of RBMK, will be shut down when the floating NPP is completed.
Civilian/research:
Pool-type/tank-type - almost all research reactors, designed for high neutron flux (can be used to transmute pretty much anything)
Dual-use reactors/power-production:
RBMK - Chernobyl-reactor, built to be as cheap and fast as possible to build and operate (hence no containment), has its origins in productions-reactors and are decent at that. (no new builds, current ones are upgraded to be better at power and safety at the cost of lower Pu-production)
MAGNOX - purpose-built as a production reactor and one of the best at it, found more economic use as a power reactor in the UK (only running is a derivate in N.Korea)
Production reactors are a different breed - the optimizations for power (higher temperature, longer runtimes) makes it produce a lot more of Pu-240 which makes bomb-making _very_ hard (actually, makes the core pre-ignite), hence pretty much only MAGNOX, RBMK and research-reactors are suitable of the non-production reactors (and the former two was built specifically to be dual-use).
I agree, which is why we should build more breeders and CANDU (which can take spent fuel from LWRs and use it as fuel - see DUPIC).
Quick - name one power-reactor that can't use thorium ;)
Seriously - _all_ current power reactors can use thorium just fine (normally to augment fuel) and with some (normally extensive) modificaitons can use it in the U-233/Th-232 mix as breeders. And to further point out how mundane thorium is the current CANDU's on offering (AFCR, with the Qinshan as reference unit) can do it off-the-shelf.
Really, do no mix up "thorium" with "molten core thorium with a Pu/U driver" - they are completly different things to anyone that taken even a cursory look at nuclear fueld cycles.
(as an aside - using a Th-232/U-233 mix actually places you closer to what you need to build a bomb than running a CANDU on natural urianium or DUPIC does - since the Th-232/U-233 requires reprocessing while CANDU on NU/DUPIC doesn't)
And as an aside: while you can (and pretty effeciently) produce Pu-239 in a viable form in a CANDU this is akin to buying sportcars to haul manure - just get a tractor (research reactor) or a truck (production reactor) instead since its both cheaper and better at the job. (and since you need enriching and reprocessing to build a bomb you might as well build a civilian LWR-fleet to offset the costs)
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday December 05 2016, @12:58AM
The advantage of molten salt reactors is that you have liquid fuel that can be exchanged using chemical, rather than physical processes. (I suppose you may want me to find a citation for this one).
I have also heard (mentioned in the video I linked) that China is building all new coal plants such that they can be retrofitted to use a thorium (molten salt) reactor layer (once they finish inventing it).
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday December 05 2016, @09:32AM
No need for citation. However the advantage of fluid vs mechanical repo is a matter of where you want to deal with gasses..
Personally I'm a fan of CANDU and AHR (AHR kinda violates the divide of molten vs solid core) so I tend to read up on oddball methods and fuel.
I almost never watch online-videos (but I do read transcripts). However - that the cinese can retrofit their supercritical steam coal plants with high-temperature nuclear cores is more if a sideeffect of similar profiles in heat-quality than special consideration for nuclear cores (china has been building suitable coalplants for more than a decade)
This advantage (to be able to use supercritical coal components, research, materials...) is pointed out for pretty much all very high-temperature and supercritical water-reactors.
(What the chinese intend to use is a HTGR/PBR - so it is solid fuel (triso most likely))