Musk redpilling the world on radiation scams and how politics is in the way of nuclear power
(media.communities.win)
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That is PR stuff from an industry that doesnt actually do it. Including Bill Gates pushing for 'clean' nukes.
What is theoretically possible (and debatable as the people pushing it are also evil) - it doesnt change the massive amount of infrastructure already installed all over the world, and already a massive storage problem. Even past the fuel - the water used to cool it becomes radioactive and has to also be stored. Fukushima had so much water on site they started just dumping it into the ocean after a few years - fisheries complained etc but didnt change the fact that 100 tons a day of radiactive water was being dumped into the ocean. Estimates were it will take 40 years just to be able to plug the site up because it is too hot to even get robots in there.
The robots they were sending in would be fried within 30 seconds from the massive radiation being emitted from the piles even years later.
Elon Musk claiming he will go eat food off of that shit is pure twitter theater, or if he did he would be faking it.
Also as someone else posted in here - nuclear plants only exist due to massive, massive government subsidies, they are not economical at all. And when they reach end of life, the costs to either extend or decommission plants runs into the billions again.
Just burn coal - its dirty, but the pollution from that is far easier to manage than radioactive waste - but still better in every way than nukes, and massively cheaper too.
Thorium is a waste byproduct of mining (especially coal) and we produce a metric butt-ton of this stuff. It's like the 41th most abundant material on earth so there's a lot of it around. From a "radioactive materials handling perspective" it's already regularly dealt with in abundance so safe transport and movement of this material is already established.
I'm not suggesting that we switch to thorium exclusively as I love my gasoline and hot-rods, but the powergrid infrastructure of the USA is one of the most vulnerable targets here. The 2003 power outage on the east coast shows what could happen if there were problems with the transfer stations....those transfer stations are "protected" with what? a chain link fence and no one talking about their locations. you can google maps them and and see their locations.
In my opinion, the infrastructure should be switched to community based LFTR microreactors maybe on the county level or something... small reactors, really efficient and essentially removing the risk of large scale destruction from a single point like in 2003. this would produce real cheap energy and provide a lot of jobs as well.
There are ways to handle this material safely and this type of reactor is much safer than the RBMK, PWR, BWR, AGR, LWGR, FNR, etc. reactors. What's really neat about these is that the water would not be in direct contact with the radioactive material which greatly reduces the risk of ionizing or contaminating water.
As with anything, if these are built properly they'll be a wonderful alternative to what we are currently utilizing.
If you're bored and want to read more, this website is a pretty good start: https://www.thmsr.com/en/