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Friday, November 12, 2021

Thorium Nuclear Reactor


Thorium Lifters Could Power Civilization for BILLIONS of Years!
Tech for Luddites

Russia is using nuclear reactor on a barge to power a small town on the Arctic Ocean in northern Siberia. I was going to put up a post about it but I ran out of round toits, so we have this video instead.

This video has some pluses and minuses. On the plus side, our narrator is very attractive, if fact she is so attractive that she makes it a little hard to concentrate on the purported subject matter. Her accent and phrasing make some parts difficult to understand, but you can turn on the subtitles. They help. There is an annoying ad in the beginning (from the 1:45 mark to 2:45). Her manner is a little too much rainbows and unicorns, but she does run down through all the chemistry, which makes me think she might know what she's talking about. She might be an Indian (from India), and some of those people are pretty dang smart. Maybe even smarter than me. Of course you have to look out for smart people as well. Remember the shysters who were 'the smartest guys in the room'?

A while back I was reading something about the history of nuclear power in the United States. Our first priority was the nuclear bomb. The second priority was power for submarines. That focus on compact reactors for submarines kind of drove the development of using nuclear power to generate electricity, and it's kind of why nuclear power plants are so big, expensive and generate so much nuclear waste. But we've been mucking around with this for 70 odd years and now we have more people to think about this and they have come up with some better methods of using nuclear power to heat water.


1 comment:

xoxoxoBruce said...

Sounds like it's still theory at this point, and would take a lot of money + effort to prove it safe and efficient.
The anti-nuke crowd would be saddled and ready to charge before this could start to roll so I'd expect a battle for funding and permissions.(permits).
It seems the general attitude has shifted from try it and see if it works, to don't try it because it may be bad.