What are your thoughts on Thorium reactors

[Cosmic Janitor]

Yeah... it tends to be so much more efficient than other methods, but people are so panicked about it. Also, I hope you didn't take my comment in a negative light. I genuinely would like to see a working Thorium reactor!

While nuclear is more efficient in terms of base load management for the grid, the whole industry is heavily subsidized. Depending on how you want to count your beans you can call it more efficient or just flat out tax payer funded (while often ignoring any kind of insurance standards that every other industry would have to adhere to).

That being said, I also like to see more progress in that regard. Especially when it comes to waste materials. It's quite sad how active they still are yet we lack the ability to make use of that and just dump them in landfills..

[Dacien]

They're probably better than RBMK reactors, so that's a plus.

[jimboa24]

I firmly believe that the future of energy is in nuclear power, and a working Thorium reactor would be a milestone. Sooner or later, someone is going to have to bite the financial bullet and produce one, and I hope it's my country. The more work we can invest in and develop nuclear power, especially something that promises to be as relatively safe and stable as Thorium, the more we can utilize it for greater endeavors than just keeping our city lights on.

[luciano]

They are like uranium reactors but better.

I doubt 99.99% of the people who respond will have a legitimate basis for their opinion and even fewer will have a thorough understanding of the topic at-large. Thanks for wasting everyone's time, OP.

[Logwyn]

They are like uranium reactors but better.

Basically boils down to money. Is it as profitable as Uranium reactors?

[Gaaz]

i would like to know people's opinion on antimatter fuel sources in rockets.

It is about as feasible as Dark Matter powered rockets. Production of antimatter requires enormous energy input. If I remember correctly, all of humanity combined can produce less than 0.0000001 gram or so of antimatter annually, even if we combine all of our labs that are capable of doing so. It is also extremely inefficient as a fuel source with current technology. The amount of energy needed to produce antimatter relative to the amount of energy stored in it is about 1000000000 to 1, and the total amount of antimatter produced to this day can only power a simple light bulb for a couple of hours.
Fun fact, 1g of antimatter contains about 25GWh of energy. To make it, we need to spend about $1 000 000 000 000 000, or about 50 years worth of USA's current GDP. Alternatively, that is a total amount of energy per day produced by a single VVER-1200 reactor (when accounted for inefficiencies and conversion to electricity losses), at a cost of about $4 000 000 (in retail prices).

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Basically boils down to money. Is it as profitable as Uranium reactors?

Nope. Likely never will be. It is not a question of fuel price, as it constitutes only a small fraction of your overall costs. Even if we bias our estimates to skip all possible hooks and crannies, Thorium reactor would only give a 20-25% electricity price advantage (6.5c/KWh vs 5c/KWh). But that requires "magic" science and engineering, with zero R&D costs and a bunch of new techs inventing themselves. Also, Thorium can only be mined and is quite evenly spread through the crust. If shit hits the fan, Uranium can be extracted from ocean water at just x4 of current costs. And there is an enormous amount of it in the water. So basically, while Thorium is more abundant, the total amount of material humanity can get our hands on heavily favors Uranium. Unless you are willing to sift through ALL of Earth's crust grain by grain.

[Osmeric]

Many of the advantages attributed to thorium are actually due to differences that have nothing to do with thorium.

For example, molten salt reactors will work just fine with uranium (and plutonium).

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It is about as feasible as Dark Matter powered rockets.

Amusingly, there's one theory of dark matter than has it made of antimatter. In this theory, at the quark-hadron phase transition (when quarks become confined) there was an asymmetry between quarks and antiquarks. The antiquarks became segregated in extremely dense nuggets of "quark matter", while quarks produced protons and neutrons.

In this theory, these extremely dense lumps of antimatter are sailing through our solar system all the time. If the theory were true (which is something of a longshot) then one could imagine the lumps being detected, tracked, slowed and redirected back toward Earth, where they could be used as energy sources in space, even for rockets.

[enigma77]

I remember farming Thorium in Silithus.

Hey that's what comes to mind.

[Ihavewaffles]

Waste of monies, all funding should go towards development of fusion reactors.

[Aenigma84]

I remember farming Thorium in Silithus.

Hey that's what comes to mind.

that stuff was all over the place
and pretty valuable in vanilla to, now we know why
i bet the dwarfs where building nukes

[Cosmic Janitor]

that stuff was all over the place
and pretty valuable in vanilla to, now we know why
i bet the dwarfs where building nukes

That shit was spawn camped 24/7 on most realms.. especially the large deposits because of the crystals.

[Aenigma84]

That shit was spawn camped 24/7 on most realms.. especially the large deposits because of the crystals.

there where easier methods to get gold then farm them anyway

[Thekri]

Thorium reactors are one of the many, many, buzzwords for energy production that offer theoretical advantages, but a whole lot of major engineering work before anything useful comes out of it. Also we may find a lot of negatives in the process of developing one as well. Now that isn't to say that developing them isn't a good idea, but it is a risky one, and there isn't a lot of incentive for most entities that actually have the capability to do so, so the real question is who do you think should lay out the money to do so?

Private companies are the first place to look, but they really have no clear path to profitibailty for one. Natural Gas and oil are quite cheap, require (relatively) little initial capital expenditure for creating new energy production, and have plenty of room for development. Wind and Solar are becoming increasingly efficient, and new installations are matching global energy demand increases. And finally uranium nuclear plants are still viable from a cost perspective, with far low initial capital expenditures then a potential thorium plant. So there isn't really a market for the massive effort it would take to develop the technology into a viable product. The RoI timeline is insane as well, with no private company being capable of putting a power generating plant online until at least 2040, with maybe a working prototype by 2030, and it would take easily another 15 years after that before fuel and cost savings began to recoop the additional costs just for the plant, let alone reimburse the company for the massive R&D costs.

So what is viable from an engineering standpoint may not be viable from an economic one. The other option is government development, and the country with the most to gain there is India. They may attempt it, but expect it to be even slower, and frankly India has a lot of work to do on its science and corruption efforts. With sufficient emphasis this could help clear out some of the backwards "scientists" they have so much trouble with in their government, but the corruption problem would probably kill the program anyway.

i would like to know people's opinion on antimatter fuel sources in rockets.

a) We don't have a reliable source of anti-matter.
b) We don't have a reliable mechanism to store it
c) We don't have a actual method to use the energy
d) We don't truly understand the byproducts
e) We don't have a great way of shielding from the massive radiation burst
f) see a)

Get back to me when we actually know what it is and what it does and we can make some.

[Afrospinach]

Waste of monies, all funding should go towards development of fusion reactors.

Terrible plan to back solely an idea that may actually be impossible to either be economical OR maybe even work at all.

[Velerios]

Terrible plan to back solely an idea that may actually be impossible to either be economical OR maybe even work at all.

Exactly. But yes, we need far more money for research of fusion reactors.

About Thorium Reactors: NAH, not really a big fan out of them. Nuclear Waste from Thorium reactors is actually more useless than nuclear waste we have nowadays. What we need instead are more power plants that run on nuclear waste. Nuclear waste has still a lot of energy in it: 95-96% of the power are still inside this "waste" and could be used.

Here russia do it right: they use the nuclear waste and use it to gain energy from it, since they have already the first reactor like this in commercial use. More fast breeder, and more efficient use of nuclear material by not only using the first 5% of power from it, but instead using all 100% of it. And with the nuclear waste that we have already, we could run on it on energy for hundrets of years. Until then i hope that fusion reactors come into reality.

[kaid]

I watched a YouTube video on it the other day. Safety seems to be the biggest feature of thorium reactors. You can shut them down in an emergency without releasing radiation.

You can still make nukes with Thorium reactors. Some people were saying that it was impossible to make nukes with thorium reactors but apparently that isn't true.

They basically shut themselves down. The early test beds bascially had a plug of a metal that once a simple fan stopped cooling it would melt and the whole thing drained out and the reaction stopped. So its fail state in case of massive power failure is off and safe.

- - - Updated - - -

Thorium reactors are one of the many, many, buzzwords for energy production that offer theoretical advantages, but a whole lot of major engineering work before anything useful comes out of it. Also we may find a lot of negatives in the process of developing one as well. Now that isn't to say that developing them isn't a good idea, but it is a risky one, and there isn't a lot of incentive for most entities that actually have the capability to do so, so the real question is who do you think should lay out the money to do so?

Private companies are the first place to look, but they really have no clear path to profitibailty for one. Natural Gas and oil are quite cheap, require (relatively) little initial capital expenditure for creating new energy production, and have plenty of room for development. Wind and Solar are becoming increasingly efficient, and new installations are matching global energy demand increases. And finally uranium nuclear plants are still viable from a cost perspective, with far low initial capital expenditures then a potential thorium plant. So there isn't really a market for the massive effort it would take to develop the technology into a viable product. The RoI timeline is insane as well, with no private company being capable of putting a power generating plant online until at least 2040, with maybe a working prototype by 2030, and it would take easily another 15 years after that before fuel and cost savings began to recoop the additional costs just for the plant, let alone reimburse the company for the massive R&D costs.

So what is viable from an engineering standpoint may not be viable from an economic one. The other option is government development, and the country with the most to gain there is India. They may attempt it, but expect it to be even slower, and frankly India has a lot of work to do on its science and corruption efforts. With sufficient emphasis this could help clear out some of the backwards "scientists" they have so much trouble with in their government, but the corruption problem would probably kill the program anyway.

a) We don't have a reliable source of anti-matter.
b) We don't have a reliable mechanism to store it
c) We don't have a actual method to use the energy
d) We don't truly understand the byproducts
e) We don't have a great way of shielding from the massive radiation burst
f) see a)

Get back to me when we actually know what it is and what it does and we can make some.

Well technically there are a lot of reliable sources of anti matter they just don't produce very usable amounts. Bananas are reliable sources of antimatter.

[Ihavewaffles]

Terrible plan to back solely an idea that may actually be impossible to either be economical OR maybe even work at all.

What you just said, is sacrilege! Heathen!!

Fusion is how we fix everything, it just has to werk! Otherwise there are no long-term solutions n that would suck major donkey balls...

[Thekri]

Well technically there are a lot of reliable sources of anti matter they just don't produce very usable amounts. Bananas are reliable sources of antimatter.

True, I should have specified reliable and scalable source. I mean I suppose you could scale by just getting lots of bananas, but since they only make positrons you can't actually make any atoms our of them anyway. All you have is antimatter particles, no antimatter atoms. And of course they don't make very many.

[Nefastus]

Is this real? LOL, when I read the title here I thought it was some World of Warcraft engineering stuff! Isn't thorium a mineral in game as well? Don't remember anymore.

[Adam Jensen]

They're nuclear reactors that use thorium.

Which is an element made of high density Chris Heimsworths.