Re: The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout

On 10/06/2025 19:23, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 11/06/2025 2:32 am, David Brown wrote:

On 10/06/2025 16:16, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 10/06/2025 5:21 pm, David Brown wrote:

On 10/06/2025 07:01, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 10/06/2025 6:44 am, Liz Tuddenham wrote:

Carlos E.R. <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
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On 2025-06-09 21:54, Don Y wrote:

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OTOH, we're sticking with other technologies (fossil fuels -- coal -- and
nukes) despite obvious and yet to be solved problems INHERENT in their
technology.  Adding "inertia" synthetically to a network is a considerably
more realistic goal than sorting out how to deal with nuclear waste or
the consequences of burning carbon.

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Technically and economically, dealing with nuclear waste is many orders of magnitude easier than dealing with the consequences of burning carbon.

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Nuclear fission waste is mixture of isotopes. Some of them are very radioactive and decay fast, and keeping them safe until they've mostly decayed is technically demanding. The less radioactive isotopes are easier to handle, but some of them stay dangerously radioactive for upwards of 100,000 years, and keeping them safely isolated for that length of time is an as yet unsolved problem
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We all know that, I believe.  There are two ways to handle the waste - bury it deep enough, or use reprocessing/recycling to reduce the worst of the waste.  (Of course a better idea is to use more advanced nuclear reactors that produce more electricity for less waste.)

 There aren't any. If you fission U-233 (which is what thorium reactors do) you get slightly different proportions of exactly the same isotopes as you get from U-235 which pose essentially the same problems.

Estimates by proponents of molten salt thorium reactors are between a hundredth and a thousandth of the levels of the more problematic waste materials for the same generated electricity.  No doubt they are overly optimistic, but they are still massively more efficient.  For the long-lived transuranic radioactive isotopes, the thorium cycle in a molten salt reactor gives about 5% of the quantities you get from standard light-water uranium reactors, and the waste is in a form that is easier to separate and recycle.  Conventional uranium reactors use less than 1% of the uranium for useful energy production - the rest is wasted.  With molten salt thorium reactors, close to 100% of the thorium is used.
Even with uranium fuel rather than thorium, breeder reactors and higher temperature molten salt reactors can greatly reduce the worst parts of the waste while generating power.

 You don't get any Pu-239 from neutron capture in U-238, but that's a feature rather than a bug.

The problem with the nuclear industry is that it was viewed as a bug, not a feature.  That is why thorium reactors where pretty much abandoned in the race to build bigger bombs.  Priorities have changed since then, and lots of countries are working on thorium and molten salt breeder reactors.

 Nuclear fusion is more promising and hydrogen-boron fusion doesn't produce any neutrons at all - or wouldn't if anybody could get it to work.
 

Nuclear fusion has /always/ been promising.  I am sure it will be achieved eventually, but if we wait for it to be a commercially realistic source of a substantial proportion of the world's energy production, we will already have lost the ice on Antarctica, flooding the homes of about a quarter of the world's population, and raised the temperature of the homes of another quarter to uninhabitable levels.