I'm not saying that this passive safety system won't work, or is a bad idea. It sounds great from the brief description. BUT. There's a terrible, terrible tendency of the pro-nuclear side to use bombastic language, and then sneer at those with doubts as ignorant and emotional rather than logical.

Pricing promises are another problem. "Power too cheap to meter" has been promised since the 1950s. It hasn't happened yet.

Be careful with your language.

A good initial design eliminates many of the complicated failure mechanism.

A molted salted liquid fueled Thorium reactor simply does not have these problems. Coming up with a scenario where it would fail at such a high level is hard to even imagine.

That's because you reply with things like this.

>sounds like something a supervillain would say.

Look, I'm actually pro-nuclear. But I think the arguments made for nuclear power are mostly awful, driven by techno-fetishism and wishful thinking rather than real logic. The "But I'm logical and you're just emotional!" argument is itself an emotional argument, a rush to claim a moral high ground (you'll see the exact same style and phrasing used in any political argument where privileged white guys are dismissing the points of women and minorities).

As others wisely pointed out in this thread, nuclear power suffers from a problem of feeling dangerous even when it's safe - and likewise, global warming feels safe even when it's an existential threat to civilization. If you want to make progress rather than score points, you need to take the emotional nature of the argument into account.

I didn't say your argument sounds like something a supervillain would say because I think the technology is bad. I said it because I think the phrasing is bad. Wise up.

No.

Modern reactor designs are actually designed in a way that makes it difficult to maintain the reaction. If you are not actively maintaining it, then it will stop on its own. This is opposed to the most common existing designs, where you need to expend effort to _stop_ the reaction.

This is not to say that they cannot fail in some novel ways.

So, then, they do not "completely eliminate" the possibility of failure. Your last sentence seems to contradict the "No." at the beginning of your reply.

I didn't say anything about "completely eliminating the possibility of failure". I said "completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown" which is in fact correct.

ThorCon plans on operating the plants about 100 feet underground, which will even mitigate a deliberate attack with an airliner. There is no way to make anything absolutely, 100% safe, but this approach is mighty close.

That is in contrast with fossil fuel pollution, which kills hundreds of thousands of people a year.

> New reactor designs completely eliminate the possibility of meltdown.

not necessarily of any failure, to which they were willing to accept that things can fail in novel ways, just not meltdowns in their view.

Not my argument, but the point is that comparing something to "what a supervillain" would say is an emotional, not logical, response. What supervillain introduces technologies that are immune to whole classes of failures?

>When you tell me something "completely eliminates" the possibility of failure in complex industrial design - you're being emotional rather than logical.

If someone proposes switching from coal powered plants to natural gas powered plants with the argument that it completely eliminates the possibility of coal dust as a byproduct, would you deride them as well?

Renewable are all nice and good, but currently we're still building fossil fuel power plants all over the world. It would be better if we instead built nuclear plants. Expanding renewables and nuclear are not opposites of each other.

Is that a rhetorical question? Because night time usage largely relies on battery storage for which economies of scale are also reducing the cost in a similar predictable fashion.

However I will say there are newer solar panels that I've read about being tested which can theoretically produce power by moon light. Granted it won't be anywhere near the amount during the day but generating energy via solar at night time isn't entirely impossible it just won't be generating the same amount by orders of magnitude.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux

It would be cheaper to do any number of things(battery storage, Nuclear, world power grid) than to build out more solar capacity to capture the pitiful full moon light once a month.

https://www.thenational.ae/business/dubai-set-for-world-s-ch...

China also says 10 years away for the LFR, but I've heard murmors of 5-7 years from a few articles... meaning they likely are finally starting to get some investment.

With the subsidies and research fund wind and solar have gotten we could have LFR easy by now.

Its also hard to sell nuclear when most nation want buy it, either because they can't, want to produce their own, or are against it.

The fact is LFR offer unlimited energy supply at minimal fuel cost, it is green, stable, reliable, controllable and safe. We could have had it 50 years ago, but since then the deck has just been stacked against it and its hard to revive it.

So yes, the company is probably more then 10 years away, but if this was part of a national energy strategy, things would happen pretty fast.

b) It's not so much that designs can't be safe, but the trick is realizing real systems based on the design, that actually are safe. Over time.

Never underestimate the power of human mis-management when it comes to corrupting perfectly sound pieces of engineering, especially when you need to plan for a 50, 100 or 250 year horizon.