Reply #28: Reducing waste volume to 1 kg per MWhr, and it's dangerous life span... [View All]

...to just a few centuries seems to me to be a pretty fair facsimile of a solution to the waste problem. This is doable with a liquid salt thorium cycle reactor.

Two inherrent parts of the liquid salt design are aimed at making human error a non issue. The first takes advantage of thermal expansion of the liquified thorium salt to move it into thin shielded tubes and automatically damp the neuclear reaction. And a last ditch defence will automatically melt plugs in the bottom of the reactor vessel if the core overheats and gravity separates the fuel into portions too small to sustain a reaction. Human error of course can not be completely eliminated, however threats to the community at large are more than managable. Spills and incidents onsite are no more or less significant than spills of chemical poisons or pathogens in a lab, or white hot metals in a foundry.

A further advantage of the thorium fuel cycle is that it breeds at a rate only a few percent better than break even. It would take the total output of a 1GW reactor for 8-10 years to make enough material for one bomb. With even the most basic international oversight, diversion of enough material to be dangerous would be a very difficult task.


Yeah, micro nukes which come with a power switch and no other controls. Suitable for virtually any industrial application in the megawatt range. And each containing so little fuel that about 1000 of them would have to be broken open and looted just to get the starting materials for a single bomb. Which would then have to be subject to some very esoteric and expensive processing to extract that small portion that can be made to go boom. Refueling is a matter of swapping out a lead lined steel box. Done under seal with proper oversight, diversion is not an issue.

As for the terrorist threat. It's way, way overblown. Any attempt to use a nuclear weapon in the name of an ideology would invite such a backlash that it would be self defeating. Even someone as obviously insane as Kim Jong Il understands that. A nuke is not a weapon of beligerance for the little guy, it's power lies in being the ultimate "Fuck you Charlie!" and the big nations don't like it, not because of the threat the bombs represent, but because they make invading the possessor a non-option.

It's one reason why there is such a push for an assault on Iran right now and an attempt to shut down its nuclear enrichment program. Because IF Iran is working towards building a bomb, it's now or never.