NASA Engineer: Virtually Unlimited, Cheap And Clean Nuclear Power Can Be Had Now With Thorium
 

from youtube

Interesting.

Fact is we will burn fossil fuels until the end. There are over 2000 years of coal supply here in the US and coal can be converted into a liquefied form.
We will probably avoid coal however as it's too damaging.

If there were no fear of nuclear bombs or terrorism just using breeder plants would be the way to go.

various people have been saying that about thorium for years. but, no one has built a prototype yet. so, we dont really know.

India is supposedly building one.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...-nuclear-plant

and china http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/c...h-thorium.html

but, thorium reactors, IF they work, do still have the same endgame result as most of the alternatives to fossil fuel - we all have to switch to an electricity economy, rather than our current liquid fuel economy. and that's a slow and multi-trillion dollar switch.

Do some searching on Thorium plasma batteries... have been invented, prototyped etc... all inventors killed in the last few years.

Energy
 

I have a machine that runs on ONLY air. Send me all your money and hopefully I can get it to the people before THE GOVERNMENT & BIG OIL find out.


Are you people really that fucking stupid??

Yes.

Just send me all you're money

See, I just saved you from a rambling 20 minute video, of how you'll make money & get energy Independence, only to be billed $29.95 for life.

This....:helpme

water fusion

seems like a good idea

A thorium plasma battery the size of a shoebox could power an entire house for a year. Prototypes have been built. The U.S. government has been using eminent domain to take over patents and applications. Several scientists have been killed after talking about these batteries. If thorium plasma batteries became available on the market, clean energy would be abundant, but the U.S. government does not want that. They get over 35% of their income from taxing old energy technologies.

its just never a good sign when you do a search on what should be a science topic and the first few hundred results are all political or pop culture websites.

thorium as a reactor fuel is not theoretical, they are sure enough that it will work, but it has it's problems, like needing a bit of plutonium to trigger the fission, and what may be a challenging reactor design.

the article about india is kinda interesting, they want to make little reactors, 300mw, and india has lots of thorium so they will sell the fuel and reactors to electricity hungry emerging countries.

all that depends on perfecting a reactor that doesn't use plutonium as the trigger.

I'm not sure, i'm waiting for paul markham's opinion on this topic...

Any links to this? The Science sounds interesting. And anyway, I don't see why any of the big power companies couldn't just purchase the technology and keep power bills flat if it is true.

which part?

I didn't find any legitimate links to "thorium plasma batteries".

There are a lot of potential problems with thorium reactors, which in theory will work, but in practice have a number of problems yet to be solved.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...ar-renaissance

so far, we can only start the thorium fission with plutonium as a trigger - and there are huge problems with plutonium, even tho one of the possible future energy systems is a plutonium economy with breeder reactors, the risks of plutonium are pretty major.

some extra links

http://www.americanscientist.org/iss...t-with-thorium


http://www.popsci.com/science/articl...-thorium-dream

http://www.forbes.com/sites/williamp...fire-possibly/

Power companies rely on limited competition to increase their profits. Thorium plasma batteries eliminate the need for a power grid. This leads to more competition and also screws up their plans to sell telecom services based on smart meters and collect data on consumer habits using smart meters.

lol, links like that just really dont help your argument.

it's a weak pop culture website, and the sources referred to are all other pop culture websites. jesus there's even an angelfire link referenced.

really. bad article, bad source, bad references. you should look for better.

I went to a couple of the bigger better regarded popular science sites like phys.org and scientific american - not a thing. That suggests there is not enough reality to it for scientific commentators, always looking for things to write about, to even debunk it.

especially with science stuff, you have to consider the quality of the source.

Ive been working since 1995 on a Palladium based cold fusion reactor.

I have created a small electrolysis device using heavy water with deuterium and a palladium electrode

And the results aren't that bad. The deuterium in the water is attracted via the electric current running through the water to a paladium/tungsten/platinum electrode, which sucks the deuterium into the electrode at a molecular level. This results in a compression so hard that the individual deuterium molecules fuse to the electrode. "Fusion".

The main issue now is to make it a stable reaction - to somehow ensure that you get a stable excess heat out of the process.

It will be called "The ARC Reactor" catchy name ?

What does Paul Markham have to say about this?

Yes, because I trust a website promoting the concept of peak oil production. They must be trust worthy.

it's a crap website, but the idea of peak oil is not in question, so you invalidate your argument with the rhetorcal fallacies of straw man and false equivalence.

So you're the only smart guy on the NASA channel. All respect to you, broski! I knew I saw you somewhere...

I'm sorry, he's busy in his lab right now:pimp

hmmmm :anon

Well, got something different here.......I just wanna say, good luck to NASA................

the problems of thorium are pretty significant, but, if it can be made to work, it's product, U233, would be far safer than the plutonium produced by standard fast breeder reactors.

And, there are much much larger amounts of thorium than of uranium.

it really could be the basis of a fairly long lasting electricity economy - if the current bugs in the reactor designs can be worked out.

There are two problems - first, you need to perfect the thorium breeder reactors that use "trigger" plutonium to convert thorium into fissionable uranium 233.

Then, you need to perfect reactors that can use the U233 as fuel.

So far all the test reactors ended up producing electricity that is significantly more expensive than reactors using U235.

So it's not starting out as the next 'killer app' of electrical generation. Wind and solar are cheaper.

I disagree. Figures on peak oil is based on data that is ten years old. Methods more commonly used today didn't factor into their data. Improvements in fracking has greatly improved in the past ten years and opened up entire new fields of oil. Then factor in that electric cars are becoming more common and the entire concept of worrying about peak oil will be pointless. Before we reach peak oil our oil usage will start to decline.

In 15 years it will be cheaper to use solar panels than to remove the coal from the ground and burn it for energy. Even then the panels will probably not be %100 efficient. I'd say we will stop using fossil fuels somewhere between 20-30 years from now but by then average temperatures globally will be up substantially.

Add to this the new nuclear reactors that are x100 safer than what we use now that are being developed by the Chinese. They aren't thorium though.

you are either confusing, possibly conflating, peak carbon and peak liquids with peak oil, and social activist positions with geology.

understandable, you dont really care about the geology, your position is political.

peak carbon is pretty far away. Most people expect peak liquids around 2040, but, like you just said, those curves seem to be based on projections that we will just start to use less, so who knows, it could be 2080, thats what I expect personally.

As for peak oil itself, that is, peak crude petroleum, geology and industry opinions vary, some say it has already happpened, for example here(sciam, natire, and petrogeologists) and here(eia.gov, government economists),. Personally I think when the iraqi fields are finally brought online it may happen soon enough that the declines in other fields is matched, so we might see it in another 10 years.

But, the EROI on liquids (bitumen distillates, synthetic crude from oil shale kerogen) is much lower than the EROI (energy return on investment) from petroleum with current technologies, so, the energy profit margin is much lower. So, the available energy profit to drive our economy is going to be lower. Maybe we can adapt to that, we shall see.

Anyway, peak oil, that is peak petroluem extraction, is a matter of geology. It will happen. We will be able to turn coal and bitumen and kerogen and natural gas into liquids, but petroluem extraction will hit a peak and will decline. It's a finite supply and a finite supply gets extracted at a rate that will give us a bell curve pattern, (or maybe a sawtooth curve, we dont know), and such a curve means there will be a peak.

Peak oil is not in question, only what it will mean, and when we will know the decline has actually begun.

I'm glad people are becoming aware of this. I've been saying this for years. Clear, safe, and abundant nuclear power.

Fracking involves using huge amounts of energy and potable water. It is much less efficient and has much smaller margins of utility when resource costs are taken into account. Same with biodiesel.

You guys forget piezonuclear fusion:

http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/07/it...tion-research/

For conspiracy theorists: government is cutting funds to researchers saying it is bullshit:

http://www.nature.com/news/italian-s...search-1.10823

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencein...s-brakes-.html

By the way if China+India+Russia will NOT make a working alternative reactor, then USA+West Europe can NOT make either.
Math olympiads winners ranked by country:

http://www.imo-official.org/results_...rds&order=desc

1) China, 2) USA, 3) Russia, trend is: China wins all next years (a specific school in shanghai wins all). China produces more new engineers per year than rest of world's universities conbined. China govt is full of cash.

About India: phisics olympiads is win by them often, see this indian girl:
http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/m...rom=rightpanel
"Akanksha Sarda knows how precious this medal is and she refuses to take it off." :)

Don't forget the greatest auto-didact mathematician of all times, Ramanujan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

Born in a poor Brahmin familym he demonstrated a natural ability, and was given books on advanced trigonometry written by S. L. Loney that he mastered by the age of 12; he even discovered theorems of his own, and re-discovered Euler's identity independently.

About Russia that's obvious as they sent man in space before of NASA, but just a recent example Grigori Perelman (obviously Jew surname):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman

"On 18 March 2010, after solving the Pointcare Conjecture, it was announced that he had met the criteria to receive the first Clay Millennium Prize [US$1,000,000 prize] for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. On 1 July 2010, he turned down the prize."

TV news was made because he refuse 1 million dollar cash, not because math, but ok:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=06Q3G2XNYeU

He's a local hero now, even there's t-shirts "Perelman: We don't need your money":
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0jO9Ai9ECUQ
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NEVWCBOBIXM
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9Y8Wtt8xwnw

Songs about him being made LOL:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_ntro_P0RNc

Anyway I think it is possible to get energy from other dimensions (you may know there's a few extra dimensions out there), but I will not elaborate now.

The government would never allow this to happen even. The whole world economy is based on OIL. They will not allow any of these things until the oil has run out.

Well Oil = war and assassination for sure :)
To the dismay and displeasure of the Seven Sisters (the principal oil multinationals), Enrico Mattei of italian petrol agency, in 1950's expanded his operations also into the Middle East and Africa, leaving 75% of profits to the local arab countries, eventually too much (more than Seven Sister), so since he was independent from Italian government (power powerful than, at the time) he was assassinated with help of Mafia via a plane "accident" in 1962, form Sicily to Milan (sabotage taken place in Sicily airport).

More:
http://annalsofunsolvedcrimes.blogsp...co-mattei.html

There's a very good (an unknown) movie about this story:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068346/

One of the journalists who searched information for the movie it was assassinated too:
http://www.lagazzettadelmezzogiorno....Notizia=421738

And this is not conspiracy theory, this is actual deaths :(

equals...no profit or social and class division....even if it is true.. you will never see it

Crock of shit, talk to Bob Lazaa or Bob Lzaar or Bob Lazaar

Hi, I'm Bond......James Bond.......... well get you fucker....I'm Robert..........Robert Lazer !

Not at all.

Again, the problem with the entire concept of "peak oil" is that we are still discovering more oil and new methods of getting to it. How can you predict when we've peaked out when we continue to discover more oil, and now with new methods of oil collection all of stats about peak oil are completely off. While oil consumption continues to rise, in our lifetime we'll see it drop off dramatically. Electric cars are coming on line and once that because main stream - and we aren't too far away from that - our oil consumption will drop to nearly nothing.