Hi Aidan,

So we can soon look forward to wind towers and solar panels made exclusively using renewable energy ?

Joe

Actually joe, wind towers needs to turn for around thirty years before they actually compensate for all the carbon created in their manufacture.

Solar voltaic creates mountains of environment harming toxic waste that take centuries to work its way out of the environment. And they can only supply intermittent unreliable power!

Imagine a steel mill when the power heating the arc furnaces dies in the ass, allowing the molten metal to harden inside multimillion dollar, refractory grade graphite crucibles!

They could all be ruined and send the operation straight into bankruptcy.

The green movement seem to believe all we need are our P.C's and mobile phones and she'll be right?

Moreover there's almost a religious fanaticism for these so called renewables, given they're allegedly carbon free and not coal.

This fixation on renewables by a tiny section of society shows the paucity of thinking inside the alleged greens, who in this guise are more like your average ecofascism personified?

Makes one think doesn't it? Herr Hitler was a tree hugging vegan! And lack of essential b12 can result in some strange psychosis and extremely poor memory, Perhaps Russian troll, Adian's problem?

And he sang a different tune when I accused him a couple of years ago of being a St Petersburg resident and one of Putin's trolls.

He replied the closet he'd ever been to St Petersburg was when he flew over it. And In the archives or stored on my old computer.

Adian is routinely abusive and challenges establish fact as a matter of course and typical of obfuscating Russian trolls.

He is not here to help, but like a good little Putin's personal pupett, here to bury thorium and virtually any emerging technology that could conceivably threaten Russian gas or oil sales.

Don't be taken in by his abusive denials, just look at what he actually condemns or supports!

As for thorium, if he is not condemning it? Kicking way way off into future our grandkids may not actually have?

As for him, he probably believes they could simply migrate to a warmer Siberia?
Alan B.

Not such good news for the recalcitrant anti nuke propagandists, as this could easily awaken interest in the cheaper safer alternative, cheaper than coal thorium?

Which deals with virtually every legitimate concern of the anti nuke lobby. Thorium is fertile not fissile and therefore thorium in its unaltered state can't be used to make a thermonuclear device, or produce plutonium!

Yes, some fissile material is created but would be notoriously difficult to first extract from a reactor! Live or use it to produce a weapon, given the very short half life of some of the critical hot elements.

The product that makes abundant cheap thorium capable of sustaining a nuclear reaction is U33. U33 produces xenon 133 used in nuclear medicine a a gas breathed in, which assists scans of lungs, brain and several other important organs.

In a molten salt reactor spent fuel is pumped to the treatment side of the reactor and processed to remove unwanted products like neutron eating xenon, which in a thorium reactor is exclusively xenon 133.

Xenon also exists in nature, has a half life of 12 million years, therefore not particularly radioactive!

After spent fuel is thus refreshed, it's reintroduced back into the reactor again and again, until every erg of available energy, 99% is extracted. The remaining far less toxic 1%, vital as long life space batteries! We are running out of this material.

Lots of noise is being made about corrosion. Of concern where one is running pressurised systems, like light water reactors operating at 150 atmospheres!

A molten salt reactor operates at unpressurised normal atmosphere, so corrosion hardly a concern. Particularly, where leaks are self sealing, just alerts the operator it's time for scheduled shutdown/routine maintenance.

A molten salt reactor can't melt down. In the event of a power failure, passive safety design shuts reaction down, drains the reactor to a purpose built safe holding tank where the molten salt cools/crystallizes! TBC.
Alan B.

Sounds like a load of wishful thinking to me.

People and our alleged representatives need to get their facts from the world's most knowledgeable premier experts on thorium, rather than a chorus line of detractors, many of them facing ruination! If we are finally smart enough to give thorium a go! By the way, if you want the facts on thorium.

Suggest former NASA scientist and eminent nuclear technologist, Kirk Sorensen is the bloke you need to listen to and as close as U tube and google tech talks and where you can listen to former ivy League professor and world leading economist, Robert Hargreaves, encapsulate his authoritative book, Thorium cheaper than coal.

Where he estimates the median price of molten salt thorium to be, one point nine eight cents!

Or you could listen to prize winning investigative Journalist, Richard Martin and fully informed Author of, Thorium, Super fuel, subtitled, green energy!

Or don't look and take a leaf from economic illiterate, Adian's book and continue to blather! And or, raise non issues and or science already a century or two out of date, or blatant crap, your choice!
Alan B.

Whenever I see an article by Jim Green I always wonder how he has managed to misrepresent the numbers this time.

This time he has pointed to the low spot price of uranium, and declared the nuclear industry dead. Using this logic the coal industry is also dead. One only has to look at all the new high power reactors and HELE coal plants coming on line to see that we are looking at the most nuclear and coal fired power running than at any other time in history.

With regards to nuclear power, the number of reactors being built will take this another 50% higher in the next decade or so.

So why is uranium so cheap? There are a number of reasons:
1 The expectation of many more reactors lead uranium producers to over invest in production capabilities.
2 More countries are now reprocessing the waste which means that much of the spent fuel and plutonium can be re used, reducing demand and waste.
3 Larger new reactors are far more efficient producing more power for less fuel.
4 Fast breeder (incl thorium) and hybrid reactors are "breeding" fissionable fuel, again producing vastly more power per unit of uranium.

Jim Green should stick to reading tea leaves.