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from the more-then-just-a-fission-expedition dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The road to cleaner, meltdown-proof nuclear power has taken a big step forward. Researchers at NRG, a Dutch nuclear materials firm, have begun the first tests of nuclear fission using thorium salts since experiments ended at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the early 1970s.
Thorium has several advantages over uranium, the fuel that powers most nuclear reactors in service today. First, it's much harder to weaponize. Second, as we pointed out last year in a long read on thorium-salt reactors, designs that call for using it in a liquid form are, essentially, self-regulating and fail-safe.
The team at NRG is testing several reactor designs [javascript required] on a small scale at first. The first experiment is on a setup called a molten-salt fast reactor, which burns thorium salt and in theory should also be able to consume spent nuclear fuel from typical uranium fission reactions.
The tests come amid renewed global interest in thorium. While updated models of uranium-fueled power plants are struggling mightily to get off the ground in the U.S., several startup companies are exploring molten-salt reactors. China, meanwhile, is charging ahead with big plans for its nuclear industry, including a heavy bet on thorium-based reactors. The country plans to have the first such power plants hooked up to the grid inside 15 years. If they pull it off, it might just help usher in a safer future for nuclear power.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Saturday August 26 2017, @06:15AM (2 children)
We'd have to increase current demand by three or four orders of magnitude to consume that much electricity. Do the math.
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Saturday August 26 2017, @10:20AM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption [wikipedia.org]
-> 109,613 TWh / year or 12.5 TWh/h is the 2014 world energy usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy#Electricity_production [wikipedia.org]
-> 3.5 to 7 kWh/m2 per day. [Using 5kWh for a world wide avg, which is optimistic]
Earth land area: 510.1 million km2
earth * 5 / 24 -> kWh of solar radiation (per h).
kWh/h 106270833333333 of solar -> 106.3 TWh/h
Decent PV@20% efficient -> 21.3 TWh convertible to grid.
So every m2 of the entire land area of the earth is just a little bit over current demand.
I don't think that's going to work. YMMV.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 26 2017, @03:12PM
The sanity check here is that while a modest fraction of global generation of power is done via solar or wind (like a few percent), the surface area of Earth devoted to these means of power is extremely small in comparison. That indicates solar power, which drives both, is a lot bigger than our production of relevant energy.