Nuclear engineering undergrad at NC State from 2009-2013. It's very easy to get overhyped about molten salt anything. Our groups senior design project presented at the ANS student conference at MIT was on a novel way to pyroprocess SNF to get only Uranium out one end and Plutonium & Radioactive Crap out the other, so it would be proliferation resistant. And continuous.
The theory and simulations all lined up. But we still were cautious about claiming any sort of breakthrough, because we needed empirical experiments to prove the theory. And the government doesn't just hand out SNF (as my Navy Nuke classmate learned when he asked the Pentagon).
The most exciting thing at the ANS student conference at the time was a presentation by a German Graduate student and her work on ceramic cladding of fuel rods. So, its an industry that doesn't naturally lend itself to hype.
It's good in that it gives you a very hard neutron spectrum (good for efficient breeding) without being chemically reactive. It still has potentially unsolved problems in corrosion, required pumping power (i.e. power density limits) and erosion. There's been some recent work on oxygen control that really helps with the corrosion issue.
Thanks, I was wondering the issues around corrosion and servicing were being addressed. It always seemed like the best hope for a balance between a good breeder reactor, and non-proliferation concerns to me.
Oh that's awkward. Worse than not being 75 times as efficient, and instead only twice, is this other quote:
In addition, it now specifies that the design “does not reduce existing stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel” or use them as its fuel source.
To me that was the most inspiring aspect of this idea. I'd still one day hope to have a nuclear reactor in my back yard, but to realise that dream we've got to keep the science as well as the engineering on point.
If nuclear scientists goof like this, it does not inspire confidence to the public and all we will end up is projects like Shoreham.
> If nuclear scientists goof like this, it does not inspire confidence to the public and all we will end up is projects like Shoreham.
To be fair, the claims were made by grad students. Good on them for experimenting, hoping, testing, and failing. The true calamity would have never been to test.
Their failure is not a reflection of their character, ambition, or talent. Well perhaps a little bit their talent. But they could've done like many (most, arguably) grad students and worked on some fundamentally useless but "safe" path to ongoing work in the Ivory tower.
So let's hope they keep trying to identify and test the hard problems whose resolution would improve life for humans, and do better next time.
>Smith thought the claims for the technology were bogus, based on the physics, notified the MIT hierarchy, and launched an inquiry. The magazine quoted him, “I said this is obviously incorrect based on basic physics.”
Grad students should know the basic physics of their respective subfields.
At the very least, if it doesn't match up with the basic physics, to do the legwork to show why they are right and the apparent contradictions with basic physics are incorrect.
Shoreham was a project with a lot of potential and a terrible outcome. Specifically, it was a nuclear plant on Long Island. It was a nuclear project that could actually pay for itself, even with the increased costs and safety concerns of the late 1980s.
Long Island is literally an island. Power generation costs are currently insane, and have always been insane, because it's expensive to move fuel onto the island. Nuclear really made sense, economically. (It's much cheaper to move fuel rods across the sound than to do the same with liquified gas.)
Because Long Island is also 100% completely impossible to evacuate in the event of a Fukushima-grade accident, NIMBYs killed the project. Unfortunately the project was killed after it was constructed. The entire construction cost is still being paid by electrical consumers today, decades later. It never served a single hour in revenue service.
Honestly, I don't think these two things detract from the idea that much. The cost and safety are, in my opinion, the biggest benefit. The amount of nuclear waste in the world is actually fairly small, and long term disposal isn't as big a problem as it's made out to be. The fact that these reactors could potentially be built cheaply and are immune to melting down is the real selling point.
The problem is with the psychology of this. If the scientists are incorrect on the fuel efficiency, what else are they incorrect on? Maybe it can melt down, maybe it can't be built cheaply. It's just fuel for fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Shoreham was closed because the oil industry spread propaganda to activate and empower a NIMBY crowd. It had very little to do with real risks.
I enjoyed the bit about "in MIT’s highly regarded magazine, Technology Review". I don't know anybody from MIT who doesn't think it's worthless (except for the alumni news bound into the back of the alumni editions they send out free. It's only connection to MIT is that they pay the alumni association for the right to use the name (and agree to send alumni notes out).
A friend of mine (also an alum) refers to it as "the magazine of things that will never happen".
Yeah, I LOLed at that line, and then came here to wonder if anyone had a contrary opinion. I have yet to read something in that, uh, "publication" that was worth my time.
Sigh. Claims made by a few people about a particular molten salt reactor design do not stand up to scrutiny. Molten salt reactors, on the other hand, are proven technology.
"Proven Technology" != "Many are currently in commercial use". Had I meant the latter, that's what I would have said. The initial theory behind MSRs was well-defined prior to the 1960s, and experimental reactors (notably the ARE and MSRE) demonstrated the viability of the concept 50 years ago. THE LFTR is one of the most interesting modern reactor concepts and is being explored by several countries (I'm personally more of a fan of the LMBR--if only because it's closer to full commercial viability (and would already be there had Clinton and Gore not murdered the project)---but that's another story). The failure of Gen IV reactors to gain widespread commercial usage (especially in the age of global warming) is about fear, politics and economic interests, not the viability of the technology.
Those are both liquid-metal cooled solid-fueled reactors (sodium-cooled fast reactors). Sodium in elemental form is a metal, not a salt like sodium-chloride. There has never been a commercial molten-salt reactor.
inally, who cares about reprocessing fuel? At this time naturally abundant U235 prices are so low and projected to continue to be low for this century that all this effort to recycle fuel and burn longer seems completely unwarranted on market principles, despite how cool and hip it sounds to "close the fuel cycle" or produce "100 times" less waste. Last I checked, fuel and disposal was a tiny fraction of the real costs of nuclear electricity, and certainly far smaller of an engineering problem than the public likes to believe.
I wasn't aware that anyone had solved the problem of spent fuel. last I knew there were thousands of tons of the stuff sitting around in swimming pools next to reactors all over the country/world. I don't recall the status of the project to bury the stuff under mountain in Nevada either, but I don't think that plan is approved.
WTF is wrong with breeder reactors that consume the otherwise spent fuel? Yeah, yeah, proliferation risk. If the stuff is that hard to contain then why all the waste sitting around?
Yeah, yeah, proliferation risk. If the stuff is that hard to
contain then why all the waste sitting around?
I think the concern about breeder reactors isn't so much the proliferation risk of the fuel and waste itself, but that a commercial market in breeder reactor technology will proliferate the knowledge and equipment necessary such that state actors will find it easier to build breeder reactors quickly and secretly.
But maybe that's just a misperception on my part.
Before Beowulf clusters, building supercomputers required tremendous expertise. The U.S. thought it could keep China from building supercomputers by controlling the export of supercomputers and supercomputing-enabling technology. But once supercomputing moved to clusters of commodity hardware, most of those export controls became useless almost overnight. China didn't spontaneously develop an expertise in chip design and fabrication; rather, because of the technological shift in the West, supercomputing know-how and equipment simply became impossible to contain.
Depends on the complexity and on our intelligence assets.
Because of our lack of intelligence assets, China and North Korean have done spectacularly well. Pakistan got away with selling nuclear plans for years without our knowledge. There's probably all manner of less complex projects underway that U.S. intelligence is oblivious to.
Like China and North Korea, Iran is something of an outlier. Israel has long had strong intelligence assets in Iran, and in addition to benefiting from those, the U.S. seems to have been able to beef up SIGINT fairly quickly with arguably better than usually results.
It's highly dependent on the technology and the country in question. Sure, at the end of the day it's impossible to keep the genie in the bottle. But the goal is never forever. A country's strategic interests always have an implicit time component. If you can suppress tech long enough for a "rogue" state to become a respectable player in the international system, then you've won. Long enough might be only a few years.
Conversely, if you can develop tech faster than the U.S. can learn about _and_ act upon it, you've won. North Korea won that race, and might have been able to win it even without China protecting it. And how did North Korea win that race? Largely with exogenous skill, importing Soviet talent after the fall of the USSR.
Also, need I remind anyone the intelligence disaster that was both 9/11 and the Iraq War? It's not so much that the intelligence community was wrong, but that there's rarely any certainty in their assessments. If you don't know for certain that something is true, how do you justify your policy decisions? It gets muddy very quickly.
> Because of our lack of intelligence assets, China and North Korean have done spectacularly well.
I don't think that's fair. Maybe China and North Korea have done well because there are knowledgeable and determined who live and work in those countries.
> Pakistan got away with selling nuclear plans for years without our knowledge.
I don't think that's fair. Maybe China and North Korea have
done well because there are knowledgeable and determined who
live and work in those countries.
No doubt that's true. There are many capable scientists in those countries. However, in the case of North Korea for example, from all available publicly known information North Korea had been trying to build both ballistic missiles and a nuclear program since the 1960s. But there appears to have been few significant advancements until the fall of the USSR and the immigration of some well-known Soviet scientists, after which their programs made significant advances over suspiciously short periods of time.
How do you know that?
I don't know, just like I don't know that Obama isn't a secret Muslim, that Trump isn't a Manchurian Candidate, or that you're not an extraterrestrial alien.
However, for whatever reason the Illuminati saw fit to disclose that Pakistan sold nuclear secrets to North Korea; which apparently went on for over decade before the initial disclosure; that many high-level U.S. officials (politicians, appointees, and civil servants alike) went [apparently] apoplectic upon disclosure; and that the fall-out seemed to be widespread and persistent.
We also "know" that South Africa had the bomb and Israel has the bomb. And despite official denials it seems clear that Israel, minimally, had the tacit approval of the U.S. if not outright assistance, and that South Africa's program was also under surveillance at the time. In other words, once details of these programs became publicly known it also became publicly known shortly afterward the extent to which the U.S. knew about those developments. In the case of the Pakistan sale of nuclear secrets, and in multiple situations wrt North Korea and China, by all public accounts the U.S. was and still is often readily taken by surprise. There are plenty other historical examples (including recent examples) of the U.S. being taken by surprise, although obviously not all were so strategically consequential.
There is no need for the scare-quotes around "know" - President de Klerk gave a speech in which he admitted that South Africa had built and subsequently dismantled a nuclear weapons program. There are public IAEA reports on the verification process following SA's accession to the NPT.
(An interesting insight into late cold-war politics is that it was the Soviet Union that tipped off the United States that South Africa was preparing to test a weapon).
What's not known is how much he was engaging in nuclear proliferation with the permission of the government, or which parts of the government were helping him. Pakistan's warring security agencies make the current US dispute between the CIA and FBI over Trump and the Russians look like amateurs.
Geo-strategic irony: Because everyone has a secret nuke lying around, nobody engages in conflicts any more- thus the usual social tension valve beeing unused, leading to civil wars instead of the conventional wars.
TL,DR; Iran vs SaudiArabia turns with nukes into, Iran <-> Iran and SaudiArabia vs SaudiArabia.
As far we know CIA analysts absolutely DID NOT believe that Iraq had a nuclear program or significant chemical weapons program. Rather, what the CIA institutionally believed was that it lacked any strong evidence to make an assertion one way or another.
The case for the Iraq War was made on the back of a single informant, an informant that most Western intelligence agencies (including Israel) believed not particularly credible. The CIA also, initially, didn't believe that informant very credible. However, Cheney & Co went hunting for evidence, dredged it up, packaged it, and sold it as a "slam dunk" to the previously incredulous Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet. It's only by dint of Tenet being Director can we say that the CIA believed the justification behind the Iraq War.
> Yeah, yeah, proliferation risk. If the stuff is that hard to contain then why all the waste sitting around?
It's harder to contain than to process from waste.
You need advanced expensive tech to turn the waste into weapons-grade material. If we don't create it, the nasty material doesn't exist and has lower security risk.
There have only been two molten-salt fueled reactors in operation, the Aircraft Reactor Experiment and then the MSRE you linked to. Neither was hooked to the grid.
You may be thinking about the Shippingport reactor which used solid Thorium fuel for a while. [1]
As for corrosion, molten salt reactor chemistry is complicated but we think we understand most of the key issues, at least with flibe salts. When an atom fissions, it becomes one of hundreds of different fission products, and that's why the chemistry gets tough. Only a few are really bad actors though, from a chemical standpoint.
It doesn't really have negative implications for MSRs in general. It's just one design out of many.
The debunked claim is just that they could get uranium fuel utilization comparable to a fast reactor, using a reactor operating mainly in the thermal spectrum. None of the other projects make that claim; either they actually are fast reactors (Moltex, Terrapower), they claim much lower fuel utilization (Terrestrial Energy), or they plan to run on thorium.
Your first-order mental model should be that (1) thorium requires breeding and that works in a thermal spectrum, (2) uranium doesn't require breeding if you're content with fissioning U235, and (3) you can have a breeding uranium reactor but that requires a fast spectrum.
They thought they had a breeder reactor I guess. Typical reactors burn mostly U235 and a bit of bred-up Pu239 for an average burnup of the mined uranium of roughly 10 MWd/kg. Breeder reactors, on the other hand (both Thorium thermal MSR breeders and Uranium-Plutonium fast breeders) can get up very near the theoretical maximum of ~930 MWd/kg. The latter figure really demonstrates the sheer magnitude of the nuclear force in atoms. What a wonder to behold!
This whole discussion is misplaced. Economically, the cost of fuel for a nuclear plant is almost negligible, about half a cent per kWh! Up-front capital costs are the vast majority of the total. That's where research and venture capital should be focused, not on squeezing down the half-cent.
> Up-front capital costs are the vast majority of the total.
How does de-construction cost and transport/storage cost for nuclear waste (including the remains of decommissioned plants) fare? I can't believe it's negligible.
I don't think waste is the biggest cost with nuclear power. At least over the short run of 50 years.
I remember some figure that coal fired plants cost about half as much to build as nuclear plants. I could be wrong. But if true there might not be that much fat to cut out of nuke designs in general.
Not a nuke guy -- if you slow/stop the reaction, and the salt solidifies in all the piping, how do you get it started again? Sure, the salt near the reactor becomes liquid again, but there's no flow through the pipes to the pumps & heat exchanger and all you have is convection flow in/near the vessel itself, and maybe the heat eventually works its way through the plumbing.
While doubling the efficiency is still great, I'm not sure we should trust people who make errors in such basic calculations to build a freaking nuclear reactor.
75x should have been the red flag from the first mention, it's such a huge figure. It's not like they are switching from fission to fusion.
It's actually feasible with fast reactors. Conventional reactors fission U235 and a little plutonium which gets bred from U238, but most of the U238 and plutonium just ends up as waste. Fast reactors fission the plutonium just fine, and ultimately can use up virtually all the U238. So they produce very little waste, most of that is short-lived, and they get up to 100x more power out of the same amount of uranium ore.
Right... "they're already melted!" as the adage goes. They do exhibit passive decay heat removal, which is a major safety advantage allowing for walk-away safety. The thing that has not been demonstrated at commercial scale yet though is whether or not the already-melted fuel can be contained properly without plating out all over the heat exchangers, etc. I'm sure it can be done. Just will take some patience.
I guess it sounds like there has been an accident if you read it with "claims" being the verb of the sentence. But that doesn't seem right... molten salt reactors don't exist (yet), so how could they melt down? Plus, why would a reactor be claiming that it's melting down? I dunno, very weird.
So, if you read it again, you can see that another way to parse the sentence is with "claims" as the noun and "melt down" as the verb. Now it's makes perfect sense because molten salt reactors are still in experimental form.
I dunno, seems like a fine title to me. Maybe you are not actually reading every word from the title?
> molten salt reactors don't exist (yet), so how could they melt down?
Yes they do.
> Plus, why would a reactor be claiming that it's melting down?
Maybe they were lying before? It's definitely confusing, but the title parses correctly that way, so it's not obvious that a different word is the verb.
Negative temperature coefficients of reactivity matter to keep an operating reactor stable and prevent rapid overpower accidents a'la Chernobyl. All modern reactors exhibit this characteristic. However, the vast majority of risk in reactors today is that the fission energy doesn't all come out at the moment of fission. Some of it (roughly 7%) comes out after shutdown as exponentially-decaying radiation of the fission products. This decay heat (as it's called) is the primary safety hazard of today's reactors because there's enough of it to breach the reactor vessel if something goes wrong (a'la Fukushima). The Fukushima chain reaction shut down perfectly after the earthquake. The decay heat removal systems failed after the tsunami came along. The decay heat melted the fuel and cladding without cooling.
MSRs and other advanced reactors have passive decay heat removal by making use of different coolants (molten salt, liquid metal, etc.) and natural circulation air heat exchangers.
"Melt down" has traditionally meant that the fuel has overheated and breached the primary containment vessel. I don't see how that definition would not apply here. Just because the primary coolant loop uses molten salt instead of water shouldn't much matter.
"meltdown" and "melt down" have different meanings in English. Skimming the title and seeing the words "melt down" is fairly clear about context. I found the title fairly straightforward, the title isn't very surprising as newspapers like to make plays on words like this.
Not native English speaker, but current title ("Molten salt reactor claims melt down under scrutiny") is fairly clear that claims melt down, not the reactor.
Apologies if the title has been changed since initial comments. Otherwise, probably the case of "mentally read beginning and end of sentence" :).
[and yes, journalists seem to have love of puns and 'puns' that others can only groan at... my favourite in IT is of course The Register, which can raise a stink in the room just by listing the headlines;-]
Correct, we both interpret the title the same way as there's only one proper interpretation of the title. It's not unusual for writers to make punny titles like this.
The title is a garden path sentence trying to be too clever with using "melt down" in the context of nuclear reactors. I had to read the first few sentences to have any idea what it was talking about. You don't need to question people's language skills for this. Regardless, it's easy to take "Molten Salt Reactor" as the name of a company, just as if you saw a title saying "Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant claims meltdown".
I'm just tired of people on HN complaining about misleading titles like if they were something that kicked your dog. If you are a native speaker that was familiar enough with nuclear power to know what a 'molten salt reactor' might be (the journal is 'powermag', after all), then for you to read that title as "omg! there might be a meltdown" is just being lazy.
Please don't demand the dumbing-down of content for everyone else because you want to be spoon-fed.
Your hostile tone is not lending any credibility to your argument.
I'm a native English speaker. In retrospect, I see how the title is supposed to read - but that is not how I initially read it - and it took me several times to actually realize that 'claims' was not the verb.
Two centuries of journalistic tradition disagree with you. Newspapers have always dones this, hence my comment on the native speaker. If you're a native speaker, you will have grown up with this kind of pun happening around you all the time.
And yes, my tone might be a bit aggressive, but people making trivial complaints about titles has been on the rise at HN recently. I've been hanging around here for years, and it's never been a problem before. You then talk about (horror!) having to read the first two sentences of the article to realise that it's not in fact a nuclear meltdown, though really you should have realised there wasn't a nuclear meltdown when it mentioned students a dozen words in.
Besides, reading it the way you're suggesting would mean that the supposed nuclear meltdown was caused by the scrutiny, which is just nonsensical.
This is what frustrates me into making these comments; that people prefer to be spoon-fed content rather than use their brain a little.
That's like saying "Bus stop claims transport strike under scrutiny" or "Jail cell claims long sentence under scrutiny" are natural-sounding sentences.
That only sounds weird because you made it so narrow. Bus stops and jail cells don't have their own staffs. But an entire jail or museum or whatnot most definitely can "say" things. Here are some headlines:
Reactors don't have staff either - and unlike bus stops or jail cells, they don't even have any kind of human in them when they're functioning. The equivalent to your jail or museum is a power plant, not a reactor. Yes, reactors have caretakers, but so do jail cells (and bus stops, in nicer places).
Many people would point at the entire facility and call it a 'reactor'.
Anyway you're getting really picky now. I've demonstrated that inanimate locations can "say" things by the standards of headline-writers, so I'm done. It was flat-out wrong to imply such a thing is a non-fluent mistake.
Also you should stop conflating "has a pun" and "is a garden-path sentence" in your other line of conversation, thanks. You're mostly arguing for the former there, other people are arguing against the latter, and they are totally orthogonal.
> Also you should stop conflating "has a pun" and "is a garden-path sentence" in your other line of conversation, thanks
Yeah, a niche journal targeting the power industry should be careful not to instill momentary panic in their specialist readership that way. They should definitely use the blandest terms possible.
It's just another reason why these complaints about titles are irritating - people demand titles for the general public from sources catering to specialists, implying that it's bad journalism to do otherwise.
> by the standards of headline-writers, so I'm done
If you were going by the standards of headline-writers, you wouldn't have started here. This kind of headline has been par for the course for almost as long as there's been headlines.
I like the pun. The pun is great. My dislike of the garden-path sentence has nothing to do with the pun. I do not want bland terms at all. Pun headlines are standard, garden-path ones are not.
If there had only been one claim then "Molten Salt Reactor Claim Melts Down Under Scrutiny" would be a great headline. Witty but not grammatically confusing.
Your abysmal attitude probably contributes a hefty amount to your feelings about this place. You basically just told that dude to go kill himself. What a nice guy you are.
no, theranos actively lied about their product, this crew got their stuff reviewed and has since revised their claims (which seems to still be pretty good improvements)
people need to end this ridiculous obsession with fission for energy. solar and wind. thats all we need. all the nuclear stuff should be limited to research. when fusion is ready then we can do that. solar, wind and batteries are here and ready to go. they are already rolling out. anything else is a complete distraction and waste of time. im so fucking tired of this.
The appeal of fission is really dead simple: each fission event releases 200x more energy than the equivalent chemical reactions. It would also take very large amounts of land to replace a single nuclear reactor with the equivalent in wind or solar.
I'm not 100% sold on nuclear as being a panacea, but it is hardly a waste of time.
You're right in sentiment. But by my figuring (which is energy per mass of fuel consumed), nuclear reactions release 2 million times more energy that chemical reactions. [1]
If you got 100% of your energy as an average American (transportation, electricity, heat, etc.) for your entire life, you'd consume 1.5 soda cans of nuclear fuel. The tiny footprint associated with this incredible resource is why nuclear matters.
Wind and solar are many times more destructive to the environment that safe nuclear reactors. And many times less cost-effective. That's why nuclear keeps getting revisited - it works so well.
no, actually they arent. and they dont produce radioactive waste that has be be stored for generations either. and the reactors are sometimes safe. and it only takes on bad one to do huge amounts of damage and kill tons of people. panels have never hurt or killed anyone.
Sure. The terrain under solar farms (by far the most prevalent installation) is like the surface of the moon - deprived of sunlight, square miles of ecosystem sterilized. Perhaps worse than strip mining.
You sound like a troll. But solar panels are dangerous (I.e. causes death) to install and the materials they are made of had to be mined, also dangerous (I.e. causes death).
uranium and plutonium dont have to be mined? if you think panels shouldnt be made because they contain elements that need to be mined then you probably also think we should stop making computers because they also contain the same element: silicon?
Uranium has to be mined, but only in small amounts. A conventional one-gigawatt reactor consumes a single 18-wheeler truckload of fuel rods in 18 months. If we switched to either thorium reactors or uranium fast reactors, we'd use a hundred times less fuel than that.
Some uranium mines now are little more than a pair of wells; one pumps water down to a uranium deposit, the other pulls back up water with uranium dissolved in it.
Because uranium is water soluble, it exists in vast quantities in the ocean. If we combined fast uranium reactors with seawater extraction, then nuclear would be a renewable resource with a very light footprint.
I'll skip over the 170 human fatalities and mention:
> Environmental damage (including bird deaths)
> 203 cases of environmental damage have been reported – the majority since 2007. This is perhaps
due to a change in legislation or new reporting requirement. All involved damage to the site itself, or
reported damage to or death of wildlife. 66 instances reported here include confirmed deaths of
protected species of bird. Deaths, however, are known to be far higher. At the Altamont Pass
windfarm alone, 2400 protected golden eagles have been killed in 20 years, and about 10,000
protected raptors (Dr Smallwood, 2004). In Germany, 32 protected white tailed eagles were found
dead, killed by wind turbines (Brandenburg State records). In Australia, 22 critically endangered
Tasmanian eagles were killed by a single windfarm (Woolnorth). Further detailed information can be
found at: www.iberica2000.org/Es/Articulo.asp?Id=3071 and
at: www.iberica2000.org/Es/Articulo.asp?Id=1875
> 600,000 bats were estimated to be killed by US wind turbines in 2012 alone. 1.4 million bird fatalities per annum are estimated if the US reaches it’s 20% target for wind generation.
> Unfortunately, though, anything that happens to wander too close to a boiling tower is very rapidly cooked by the focused sunlight. Workers at the Ivanpah solar power plant call these birds “streamers,” as they ignite in midair and plummet to the ground trailing smoke. Federal wildlife investigators said there was, on average, one streamer every two minutes — or hundreds of thousands of incinerated birds per year. Another expert estimated that the number is nearer 28,000 per year. BrightSource’s own estimate is around 1,000 roasted birds per year. BrightSource is reportedly looking to build an even-larger power plant, which wildlife officials say could be “four times as dangerous” to birds. BrightSource has offered $1.8 million in compensation for the expected bird deaths.
That's 170 human fatalities, ever (or since recording began in the 70s), including ancillary transport fatalities:
"69
were public fatalities, including workers not directly dependent on the wind industry (e.g.
transport workers).
17 bus passengers were killed in one single incident in Brazil in March
2012
; 4 members of the public were killed in an aircraft crash in May
2014
and a further three
members of the public killed in a transport accident in September 2014
."
That is, if people were workers travelling to a wind farm in the course of their employement, their RTA counts as a "wind farm accident".
(170 people is almost the exact number of fatalities caused by the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster, for scale)
even if you took away wind i still win the argument. concentration farms are a footnote, they are going to be phased out. it has nothing to do with panels. panels have no such drawbacks and will form the backbone of domestic energy production all over the world very soon.
Nuclear has many benefits over solar and wind. I'm not a nuclear proponent, but in certain scenarios (especially ones outside our atmosphere), nuclear makes sense.
There are other companies (FLIBE, Lightbridge) researching LFTR MSR that have promise. Just because some grad students made ridiculous claims, it shouldn't throw shade on the whole industry.
The theory and simulations all lined up. But we still were cautious about claiming any sort of breakthrough, because we needed empirical experiments to prove the theory. And the government doesn't just hand out SNF (as my Navy Nuke classmate learned when he asked the Pentagon).
The most exciting thing at the ANS student conference at the time was a presentation by a German Graduate student and her work on ceramic cladding of fuel rods. So, its an industry that doesn't naturally lend itself to hype.