Thorium

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on December 03, 2006, 03:11 PM | #

“There is no doubt that this will work. What we don’t know exactly before we build the prototype is how much energy it will produce. We might get ten percent less than we expect from the beginning,” Lillestøl said.

A bold statement.  Let’s hope it’s true and the Norwegians build it.

Posted by Guessedworker on December 03, 2006, 03:57 PM | #

Boldness is par for the research begging-bowl course.  There is always more faith and hunches involved in execution than the beggars will let on to their purse-string prey.  Still, one of these days sufficient desire for a break with fossil fuel will exist, and then the beggars will get lucky.  It’s a matter of timing more than science.  Perhaps this is the time, who knows?

Posted by James Bowery on December 03, 2006, 06:01 PM | #

There are a couple of interesting dimensions to the Thorium breeders:

1) As GW points out technosocialism isn’t the way to get technology done so much as a way to extract public funds.  Governments are incredibly bad at risk management and picking technologies correctly but really good at investing in technocratic political structures that are terrified of real technological advances putting them out of business.  The best you can do with government-run technology development is in the military during war time where it is literally a matter of life and death to the bureaucrats so they won’t play their usual games.  The solution to this is then to either have more wars or make the private sector capital concentrations motivated to invest in more risky enterprises via something like a shift to net asset taxation away from taxes on economic activity.

2) Widely deployed nuclear technology would bring to a critical point the problem of border security.  If you can’t tell where the bomb came from you can’t retaliate and if you have border traffic then you can’t tell when some unknown entity is planting a nuclear weapon on your property.  Reciprocation is the only alternative to shared fate and kin-altruism to establish cooperation.  Shared fate is largely a matter of geography as is kin-altruism via consanguineous propagation of ethnies.

Posted by Retew on December 04, 2006, 09:26 AM | #

Here’s a forum set up to discuss the matter;

http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/

Although I’m not enthusiastic about nuclear power I think this is worth a try, but if it is adopted commercially on an international scale it should only be in conjunction with other measures to reduce our dependence upon fossil fuels.

I don’t think Norway’s keen on it either in the wake of the fallout they had drifling in from Chernobyl in 1986 (and they’d like to see our own Sellafield plant closed because its waste has leaked and ended up on their coastline), but they’re a country with very high per capita energy needs because of their geographical position and can obviously see which way the wind is blowing as far as energy resources are concerned.

Even if thorium based fissile technology is superior to uranium based, it remains true that the decision to proceed with a nuclear power station is one of enormous consequence for a country’s future because of the expense and the nature of the risks that have to be managed, it is not just another political decision.

Perhaps they could do what the Swedes did in the early 1980’s and put the nuclear power option to the Norwegian people as a referendum with all the major political parties expressing their views on the ballot?

In answer to JB, private business consortiums often demand public funding of a large scale infrastructure project before they will commit their own capital - see the history of the Trafalgar group’s interest in the Eurotunnel for an example. It’s not an either-or situation.

Posted by Alex Zeka on December 05, 2006, 11:32 AM | #

I wonder if it might be possible to get the greenies on board with JB’s proposed de-statisation of research. After all, gov’ts have an appalling record when it comes to conservation (think Chernobyl, China’s Great Leap Forward). It all rather depends on what proportion of them are watermelons (green on the outside, red within).

Posted by James Bowery on December 05, 2006, 05:13 PM | #

My opinion of greenies is basically they are virtually all green on the outside and something other inside. 

I used to be active in the Sierra Club until I realized how ridiculous it was.  Nowadays it is more obvious than ever to the casual observer:  Get huge donations from some Jewish guy to not oppose immigration and bingo—the Sierra Club is 100% behind population boom frying the planet.