careful Hasbeen, Craig might revert to 18C if you keep offending his religion.

Jon R, your technological info is dated! Thorium reaction now only needs an isotope of thorium to get the reaction started!

And then only possible inside the larger internal graphite chamber! Which is stopped/prevented when the fluoride is pumped around narrower tubes and other chambers, needed to add more material or remove medically useful isotopes!

If you study the diagrams available to anyone who can access U tube?

You will see that below the molten salt reactor is a chamber that safely stores molten salt, where is rapidly cools back to crystalline salt once more [fluoride/beryllium or fluoride/lithium,] and that the evacuation tube leading from the reactor to that chamber has cold air blown across it, which effectively is cool enough to recrystallize the salt!

This then becomes a plug, which in the event of loss of power for any reason is allowed to melt, allowing the entire liquid contents of the reactor to safely drain into a purpose built holding tank.

The reaction takes place at atmospheric pressure, meaning no containment pressure vessels are necessary nor any containment of escaping steam inside a purpose built building, given there isn't any!

And if deployed at chernobyl or fukushima, still busy creating power for up to 100 years.

Fluoride doesn't readily absorb neutrons and therefore has limited capacity to transfer them into surrounding infrastructure. Which allows far safer less costly decommissioning, or recycling?

In fact if you need to drive a turbine, hot air is all you need!

Understand, that with this very technology we can SAFELY BURN CURRENT NUCLEAR WASTE reducing the half life to around 300 years, given that's all that remains when you've extracted all the available remnant energy from it! And think other nations will pay billions to us for doing just that! Not completely without some manageable risk.

Incidentally, did you know it is possible to create plastic from methane and Co2 harvested from the atmosphere? But easier if garnered directly from the products of biological digesters, created to treat biological waste! Like that now thought to negatively impacting on the reef?
Alan B.

Technically coal and maybe gas powered electricity takes say 24 hour to start up, to be running at 50 hertz per second. Wild and sun especially at night are not stable enough to rely on.

I watched a US documentary on recycling steal. During the middle of the day, surplus electricity coming from solar sun light was used to melt steal. I watched 2 large (I believe carbon rods) melt steel.

All the global conferences agreements are little more than entertaining BS, news print fodder.

I believe the thorium reactor built and operated without a single incident for five years, late sixties/early seventies, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Was a molten salt reactor!

From where we rescued some notes; although apparently ordered destroyed, when honesty personified, Nixon ordered the plant shutdown and destruction of all technical material?

Only because some stalwarts had the courage to defy a President, do we have access to the technical material that proves molten salt reactors are tried and technically proven fact!

With a molten salt reactor, which could be built today for around one hundred million; you can turn out the lights, go home, take a week off and comeback to find an entirely automated and safe system is doing what it was designed to do, produce endlessly available heat!

Yes 400-800C is hot, and hot enough to melt steel, aluminum, copper and run turbines etc!

Remember we have conducted a few successful fusion experiments that require temperatures of one thousand million degrees!

So, although some anti nuclear ban the banana brigades, will declare that such heat as is required might be dangerous; not more so than a dozen industrial applications occurring in our literal backyards, and safely contained using purpose created ceramics, some of which along with assorted acrylics are stronger than steel, to the point of being bulletproof!

Let me conclude with the admission I once worked for a power authority, in a science related capacity. And before that as an industrial chemist utilizing nuclear isotopes as part of a daily analytical regime. And before that as a chemical engineer, operating a modest industrial complex.

Those that believe they have anything to fear from cheap clean abundant energy need to rethink, if only to understand, this will allow us humans to end all want and war!

And get started on progressive depopulation that is coupled exclusively to progressively improving the average lot and just by removing poverty in all its forms and guises, on the back of universally available clean cheap abundant energy.

Who in their right mind would argue against that!?
Alan B.

Jon R you are incorrect in relation to wave energy.

Carnegie Wave Energy have been producing green energy and desalination at the HMAS Stirling naval base south of Perth for a couple of years.

Additionally they are about to commence testing a new 6MW unit based on their earlier, operational 1MW system in close proximity to the existing unit.

Read about it all here- http://carnegiewave.com

Cheers Geoff

Just yesterday, I watched the last ford roll off the production line, then heard ford stalwart, Dicky Johnson lament, we had to accept change! And inherently true! But this change?

We can make cars here as good as anyone and export them to the world! We have all the raw material here save rubber and available from Malaysia, one of our closest neighbors.

The ideological imperatives in play are, #1 the privatisation of energy and the cost to our industries of widescale rollout of renewables! #2, Turning our back on cooperatives, the only free market private enterprise model to largely survive the great depression largely intact!

And only rejected here due to an ideological imperative that essentially gifted free enterprise to the corporate model and like car manufacture, foreign corporations bereft of patriotic loyalty to us! Just the mighty dollar!?

In our case, our leaders have rolled over and begged for a tummy rub? Look there was/is and remains other choices that retains/expands manufacture here!

The first is the rollout of ultra cheap publicly owned and operated energy! The second the purposeful government initiation creation of employee owned co-ops recruited from former ultra experienced employees! And tasked with producing all components on a single site to eliminate transport and the tyranny of distance and multilayered cost and transport components that more than triple the cost of making anything here!

Cheap energy, profit or loss sharing employees and everything produced on a single site, is the only production paradigm that has a snowflake's chance in hell of allowing us to not only compete with china for our domestic market but with them for theirs including global markets!

When we have the balls to do that!? We can once again become one of the wealthiest nations on earth, with more than enough internal revenue! But once again a creditor nation at that!

And given the rollout of cheap clean safe energy? Make our nation drought proof with productive deserts that bloom! And all this is on the line, right here right now!
Alan B.