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Andrew Yang Wants a Thorium Reactor By 2027 256

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: To transition the United States from fossil fuels to green energy, [Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang] wants the government to invest $50 billion in the development of thorium molten-salt nuclear reactors -- and he wants them on the grid by 2027. "Nuclear isn't a perfect solution, but it's a solid solution for now," Yang's climate policy page reads. It calls out thorium molten-salt reactors in particular as "a technology we should invest in as a stopgap for any shortfalls we have in our renewable energy sources as we move to a future powered by renewable energy."

Thorium molten-salt reactors were first invented 60 years ago, but Yang appears to be the first presidential candidate to campaign on their promise to make nuclear energy safer, cleaner, and cheaper. Like all molten-salt reactors, they eschew solid rods of uranium-235 in favor of a liquid fuel made of thorium and a small amount of uranium dissolved in a molten salt. This approach to nuclear energy reduces proliferation risk, produces minimal amounts of short-lived toxic waste, and resists nuclear meltdowns. As in a conventional nuclear reactor, splitting the nuclei of a nuclear fuel -- a process known as fission -- produces heat, which gets used to turn a turbine to generate electricity. But the Cold War arms race meant the US was already in the business of enriching uranium for weapons, so nuclear reactors based on solid uranium took off while liquid reactors stalled. No country has built a commercial molten-salt reactor. As a result, many practical questions remain about the best way to design a thorium liquid-fuel reactor. Foremost among them, says Lin-Wen Hu, director of research and irradiation services at MIT's Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, is finding materials that can contain the corrosive molten salts. Furthermore, figuring out how to extract unwanted elements produced as thorium decays -- such as protactinium-233 -- from the fuel remains a major technical challenge.
"The main advantage of thorium is that the waste has a half-life on the order of dozens, rather than thousands, of years," the report adds. "From a power-generation perspective, the better option for Yang and other Democratic candidates may be to invest in advanced uranium-based technologies. This includes molten-salt reactors, but also solid-fuel systems like next-generation fast reactors, which are safer and more efficient than previous nuclear reactor designs. In some designs, next-generation reactors can even use preexisting nuclear waste as fuel."
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Andrew Yang Wants a Thorium Reactor By 2027

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  • by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Monday October 21, 2019 @07:16PM (#59333180) Journal
    is all fun and good news until the molten part fails.
    Then its a working reactor with a lump thats stuck.
    Have fun getting that fixed by contractors.
    • huh? what do you mean?

    • Re:Molten (Score:4, Informative)

      by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Monday October 21, 2019 @09:14PM (#59333490)

      There are all kinds of ways of heating a reaxctor whose salt has "frozen." The huge advantage of molten salt over water as a heat transfer fluid is that its boiling point is so much higher than water that it won't need to be pressurized to function efficiently. This means safer, less complex plumbing. And the high working temperature means that reactors using rivers and lakes as a heat sink will no longer need to be turned off when the water gets warm in summer.

      • Re:Molten (Score:5, Informative)

        by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseerNO@SPAMearthlink.net> on Monday October 21, 2019 @11:26PM (#59333762)

        And the high working temperature means that reactors using rivers and lakes as a heat sink will no longer need to be turned off when the water gets warm in summer.

        The need to shutdown the reactors when rivers and lakes get too warm has nothing to do with the operating temperature of the reactor.

        The reason they shut down the reactors is to keep from cooking the fish in the water. They could have avoided this by using cooling towers as a heat sink, and only used the river for making up for water that evaporated away. As a cost saving measure they used the river instead, knowing full well in advance of even breaking ground that there was a possibility to have to reduce power or shut down temporarily during heat waves. At the time this was considered acceptable. What they didn't know, or underestimated, is that this design choice would be used as leverage against them by the anti-nuclear people.

        With a molten salt reactor the temperatures are high enough that the air is a useful heat sink, even in hot and arid places like Arizona. Even then we see Arizona being able to manage keeping their water cooled reactors running in all kinds of heat. That's because they use cooling towers, and lakes that don't have fish in them.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • by Uecker ( 1842596 )

          "... that this design choice would be used as leverage against them by the anti-nuclear people."

          This is a design choice which causes several Nuclear reactors to be shut down at once every time there is a heat wave in Europe. I do not see what "anti-nuclear" people have to do with is.

          • Re:Molten (Score:4, Interesting)

            by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseerNO@SPAMearthlink.net> on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @03:32AM (#59334190)

            This is a design choice which causes several Nuclear reactors to be shut down at once every time there is a heat wave in Europe. I do not see what "anti-nuclear" people have to do with is.

            The anti-nuclear power people are involved because they use the heat induced shutdowns as an excuse to call nuclear power unreliable, unsafe, and damaging to the environment. They are petty, dishonest, and ignorant, willing to use any minor detail in their effort to get nuclear power plants shut down permanently.

            If they were sane, honest, and informed, then they'd be asking that the nuclear power plants have their cooling systems upgraded so the river water temperatures would not cause a shutdown. Or, simply recognize that nuclear power is quite safe, very reliable, has minimal impact on the environment, and these heat induced shutdowns happen maybe once every 10 to 20 years. These shutdowns might be inconvenient, expensive, and generally disruptive, but as these events are rare they should not be cause for any drastic changes to their operation or the energy policy as a whole.

            With prominent people like Andrew Yang talking about nuclear power in a sane and rational manner this anti-nuclear fear mongering will be more difficult to spread.

        • Cooking fish? I'm sure there are cases where power plants, nuclear and otherwise, have had this problem, but I'm talking about Carnot efficiency: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency). Any thermal power plant operates more efficiently as the differential between the heat source it uses to create turbine steam and the heat sink at the turbine's output is greater. Higher efficiency can be achieved by finding a colder heat sink or by raising the temperature of the thermal output.

          The current genera

      • Wait, safer?
        Floride and Uranium salts are corrosive beyond words and you're calling this "Safer"?
        No.
        • Those are all contained during the process,

          Learn how the thing works, it's not a half baked idea like your post was.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Of course the huge downside to molten salt is that it corrodes and destroys everything. The reactor casing itself tends to suffer premature wear too and becomes high level nuclear waste.

        Just check the history of thorium reactors, every single one has been some kind of disaster.

        • Just check the history of thorium reactors, every single one has been some kind of disaster.

          Check the history of anything and you'll find a lot of disasters. There's a very cute video from SpaceX showing all their early failures in trying to land a rocket. Every single one has been some kind of disaster. That is until they weren't.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

          It's only a failure if nothing was learned from the experience. We learned a lot about thorium reactors, because of these "disasters".

      • Re:Molten (Score:4, Informative)

        by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @06:27AM (#59334422) Homepage

        > boiling point is so much higher than water that it won't need to be pressurized to function efficiently

        I love reading posts like this. It's standard fare from the pro-LFTR web pages that gets parroted around which simply demonstrates that the poster has no idea what they're talking about.

        Free clue: there have been all sorts of high-temperature/low-pressure reactor designs over the years. All of the oil-cooled designs, various heavy water designs, gas-cooled system, the liquid metal designs, etc.

        Every one of the failed economically. In spite of the LFTR advocate's claims about how much cheaper everything will be because of this, in every actual design that's been built the opposite turned out to be true. The reason we use light water designs is that they are the most economical. There is no other reason, no matter what conspiracy theory you wish to invoke.

        Here:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superphénix
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_nuclear_reactor
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WR-1

        And, of course, this entire story:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gas-cooled_Reactor

  • I would also like a Thorium reactor by 2027.

    As to what I'm going to do with it uhhhh none of your business!

    • by Entrope ( 68843 )

      My presidential campaign slogan is "A chicken in every pot, and an arc reactor on every corner". Gotta have somewhere to charge up those electric vehicles until we get superconducting long-distance transmission lines.

  • by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Monday October 21, 2019 @07:17PM (#59333184)
    Problem is, for the last 50-60 years research has been going into Uranium reactors. Why? Because you can't make Thorium go boom.

    I'm a math major, not a physics PhD, so whateves. That said, I've wished for 20-30 years now that somebody with a few billion $$$ to toss around took a look at Thorium reacters.
    • by taiwanjohn ( 103839 ) on Monday October 21, 2019 @07:47PM (#59333276)

      I'm just glad to see a "high visibility" politician talking about this. Yang was able to drag UBI into the mainstream discussion, maybe he can do the same with Gen-IV nuclear. It's about time somebody did.

    • by epine ( 68316 ) on Monday October 21, 2019 @08:10PM (#59333346)

      Thorium reactors are breeder reactors. But it doesn't breed quite what you want, so people have declared that the thorium cycle is proliferation resistant. Unfortunately, it's proliferation resistant in much the same way that WEP was once regarded as secure.

      Thorium power has a protactinium problem [thebulletin.org] — August 2018

      The half-lives of the protactinium isotopes work in the favor of potential proliferators. Because protactinium 232 decays faster than protactinium 233, the isotopic purity of protactinium 233 increases as time passes. If it is separated from its uranium decay products a second time, this protactinium will decay to equally pure uranium 233 over the next few months. With careful attention to the relevant radiochemistry, separation of protactinium from the uranium in spent thorium fuel has the potential to generate uranium 233 with very low concentrations of uranium 232 — a product suitable for making nuclear weapons.

      Just like you can hack WEP, you can also hack the fuel cycle.

      Now it's mainly politics that keeps the old view circulating. Rumors surrounding the intrinsic safety of the thorium cycle are greatly exaggerated. That said, I'm not particularly opposed to the thorium cycle, but enjoined on sober evaluation, rather than political simple-mindedness.

      • by Sethra ( 55187 ) on Monday October 21, 2019 @08:45PM (#59333438)

        It's not quite that simple. You need the U233 you are producing in order to transmute more Th232. If you're removing all the U233 from the cycle then there is no longer anything to actually create it. Th232 alone does nothing at all, it's half life is longer than the age of the universe. In fact, a new thorium reactor requires a fission source to get it started - like making sour dough.

        Additionally, the amount of fissionable U233 you produce in an LFTR is too small to be a source for weapons grade material and U233 itself is far less efficient in a weapon than plutonium. That's why it's considered proliferation resistant. If you're after a weapon you're going to stick with a plutonium breeder. LFTR's are only good for plentiful power generation.

      • by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseerNO@SPAMearthlink.net> on Monday October 21, 2019 @09:45PM (#59333566)

        Just like you can hack WEP, you can also hack the fuel cycle.

        You do that and you destroy the ability of the reactor to produce energy. That will be far more noticeable than other common means of producing weapon grade material.

        The process described in the Bulletin article is a process that is taking the fuel from the reactor that is necessary to maintain its function. They are effectively removing neutrons from a very delicate balance of neutrons consumed to neutrons produced. These neutrons would have to be restored with energy intensive processes like a particle accelerator, or gas centrifuges. If the people have gas centrifuges to separate heavy and light isotopes then they have the ability to produce weapon grade nuclear material without the thorium reactor.

        This is another example of the Bulletin spreading weapons grade FUD on nuclear power. There are far easier means to produce weapons than a molten salt reactor.

        The thorium cycle is indeed inherently proliferation resistant. This is because the ability to produce weapon grade nuclear material is available to anyone with an understanding of chemistry and physics on the level taught to first year college students. After that it's just having enough money to build machines that can dig up uranium and build some other machines that can separate U-235 from the other stuff. Any process more difficult or expensive than that, such as molten salt reactors, is inherently proliferation resistant.

        • by Uecker ( 1842596 )

          I does not seem you understood the issue with proliferation. The idea is not that some rogue state develops a Thorium reactor itself instead of using centrifuges. The idea is that it *buys* a Thorium reactor for energy production and then secretly builds a nuclear weapons program on top of it.

          • by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseerNO@SPAMearthlink.net> on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:51AM (#59334110)

            I does not seem you understood the issue with proliferation. The idea is not that some rogue state develops a Thorium reactor itself instead of using centrifuges. The idea is that it *buys* a Thorium reactor for energy production and then secretly builds a nuclear weapons program on top of it.

            I understand just fine.

            To get a thorium molten salt reactor to produce weapon grade plutonium requires the use of weapon grade uranium. I've seen the math on this. The reason a solid fuel reactor doesn't need weapon grade uranium to produce weapon grade plutonium is because the fuel is kept separate from the target material. In a molten salt reactor this is difficult to impossible.

            Maybe they can run the reactor in a batch process. This is setting up the right mix of isotopes for fuel and target material in the reactor fuel salt, then running it for a bit, then dumping the core, and running the salt through a chemical process to get the plutonium out. This use would be highly obvious as the reactor would produce no useful heat for power. This is also a process that any power reactor could be put through to produce weapon grade material, the use of a molten salt mix will add steps to the process making this slower and more expensive than other options.

            Maybe the processing could be done continuously but this would require EXTENSIVE modifications, and using chemistry very different than what it was designed for. It would also likely still require highly enriched fuel, fuel that is weapon grade or very close to weapon grade already.

            Maybe if the design calls for control rods in the core then the reactor could be modified for putting target material in the core instead of a control rod. This would be highly dangerous, a modification that would be highly obvious, likely requires enriched fuel (though perhaps not weapon grade), and require running the reactor in a kind of batch process to install and remove the target.

            This is not a molten salt reactor but a kind of thorium reactor, it's possible to use a heavy water reactor to burn thorium and breed plutonium. This has been experimented with many times but heavy water reactors are losing favor because they have a "feature", much like the RBMK at Chernobyl, that can lead to thermal runaway and then a steam and/or hydrogen/oxygen explosion. There are safer designs to use, and so building any kind of heavy water reactor would look suspicious. Being able to buy a heavy water reactor today is highly unlikely because of the issues of safety and potential for use in weapon production.

            There are simply far easier ways to get weapon grade material than from a thorium molten salt reactor. The most useful means to get a thorium reactor to produce weapon grade material is to power gas centrifuges. The whole point of a thorium reactor is that it does not require centrifuges to enrich the fuel. Someone with centrifuges would be under suspicion of producing weapons.

          • by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:53AM (#59334116) Journal

            And how is that relevant? North Korea is an overall bad guy at the moment and they still get their grubby paws on weapons grade fissionable material it seems.

            It seems to me that we are completely inept at stoping a motivated party from gaining nuclear arms as it stands. Adding a Thorium reactor to the mix won't change a damn thing about that but just might provide a pretty safe alternative to coal and oil plants.

  • Excellent (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pyrrho ( 167252 ) on Monday October 21, 2019 @07:21PM (#59333194) Journal

    Gen IV Nuclear is the answer, in fact, it's the long term answer and all we'll need for the next few thousand years.

  • by Berkyjay ( 1225604 ) on Monday October 21, 2019 @07:29PM (#59333230)

    Yang sounds like a Slashdot user who somehow was able to become a presidential candidate.

    • by fred911 ( 83970 )

      No, the preponderance of ''stories'' that has somehow been accepted as ''News for Nerds.. Stuff that Matters'' reads more like compensated ''news'' offerings than ''Stuff that Matters''.

  • ... politicians are even more strange than usual. It is more spectacular this campaign season because each of the many (oh so many) Democratic candidates is struggling to be noticed. So teach one comes up with a more "out in left field" headline-grabbing ideas. It is really weird when you think about it.
  • Honest question (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Monday October 21, 2019 @08:03PM (#59333328) Homepage Journal

    Does Andrew Yang own this website?
    I feel like I tuned into an infomercial for the Yang campaign on today's /. feed.

  • The article mentions protactinium-233, but doesn't state why that is a problem. With a half-life of 29 days, it turns into Uranium 233, a weapons grade nuclear material. No one has made much U-233, so information on how to construct a weapon is limited. But it is certainly possible. Most Thorium reactor plans envision the U-233 to be used in other, uranium reactors, which just brings us back to the same problem.
  • How much electricity storage capacity, e.g. battery, can we get for $50 billion? Might be worth looking into & may have a greater chance of success than trying to meet the technical challenges of implementing & maintaining thorium-based reactors. Just a thought.
    • A trillion lead-acid batteries might help solve the storage problems with solar, but it won't solve its duty cycle and distribution problems. Solar is not the panacea you seem to believe it is.

      This is the problem. Too many people in the world are bad at engineering. That is the real reason we are not going to solve the AGW problem. It isn't Big Oil conspiracies. It's people like you who try to solve engineering problems in your head without even trying to be realistic about it. If your answer to AGW is sola

  • by soft_guy ( 534437 ) * on Monday October 21, 2019 @08:39PM (#59333420)
    My daughter is a nuclear engineer who has worked on molten salt reactors. She thinks they are great. There are multiple advantages of molten salt reactors. It eliminates the inherent problem of highly pressurized water. But the big advantage is being able to access the fission products and extract each isotope for use. Instead of calling it all nuclear waste and burying it in Yucca mountain you can use it for all sorts of things. There is a probability curve (a double humped curve) that predicts what fission products are made. The fission products can be sold which yields another revenue stream for the reactor operator and is a supply of medical isotopes which otherwise have to be specifically made and rare earth minerals which would otherwisr need to be mined. The main advantages of Thorium over uranium are that the Thorium fuel does not yield plutonium or other transuranic elements. Also, Thorium is very abundant compared to Uranium. The second one isn’t such a big deal right now because Uranium is currently so cheap, but will be Important in the longer term. Also, since Thorium reactors can’t make plutonium you have less of a chance of plutonium being diverted for a nuclear weapon - though that is a lesser concern in my mind because an energy reactor is a poor way to make fissile plutonium.
    • Chances are the fact that it doesn't make plutonium was seen as a downside by the warmongers.

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        Like Erdogan? Sez Turkey should have nuclear weapons. The MidEast clearly doesn't have enough issues to screw themselves with.

    • Also, since Thorium reactors can’t make plutonium you have less of a chance of plutonium being diverted for a nuclear weapon - though that is a lesser concern in my mind because an energy reactor is a poor way to make fissile plutonium.

      So poor a way that no nation has joined the Boom Boom Club using plutonium made in a power reactor.

      One (1) "device" was detonated using power reactor plutonium by the Carter administration back in the 70s, as a propaganda stunt to justify shutting down reprocessing of wastes and recycling the plutonium. By all accounts, it wasn't easy. The "device", to get around the problems of all that Pu240 and Pu242, apparently had to be physically large... Very large. As in not deployable in any sort of weapons prog

    • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @04:23AM (#59334262)

      Instead of calling it all nuclear waste and burying it in Yucca mountain [...] Also, Thorium is very abundant compared to Uranium. [...] Also, since Thorium reactors canâ(TM)t make plutonium you have less of a chance of plutonium being diverted for a nuclear weapon - though that is a lesser concern in my mind because an energy reactor is a poor way to make fissile plutonium.

      Note that these are all intertwined. The reason reactors using uranium have a "nuclear waste" problem is because we stop using the fuel even though it still contains more than 90% of the energy. That large amount of remaining energy is why the "waste" stays radioactive for tens of thousands of years. There's a simple way to tap the remaining energy - run the "waste" through a breeder reactor. In addition to extracting energy from the "waste", it converts it into a form which can be used as fuel in regular reactors. This eliminates the need to bury waste in Yucca mountain, as well as the potential shortage of uranium in the future (since we'd be extracting over 10x as much energy from the same amount of uranium).

      The reason we don't do this (or at least the U.S. doesn't do it) is because breeder reactors also create weapons-grade plutonium. Carter banned reprocessing of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors in the 1970s for nuclear non-proliferation reasons. So in that respect, the "nuclear waste" problem is a political problem, not a technical one.

  • Instead, the DNC will run someone who has never had an honest job ever in their life, and promises unlimited (rather than limited, like Yang's "freedom dividend"), amounts of "free" shit to everyone.

    • That would be a pity. Yang is the one candidate who might tempt me to vote Democrat this time.

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      Now now, Warren is going to have a wealth tax. The first job will be to figure out where outside the U.S. rich people stowed it all so she couldn't take it. The second job will be to explain that the free shit won't be coming anytime soon because they cannot find the money. The third job will be her speech congratulating the new Republican eunuch the American people elected to replace her, having not learned their lesson with the current eunuch.

  • What about the slow wave nuclear reactors The Gates Foundation has been trying to make? It uses liquid metal cooling, has virtually zero chance of catastrophic failure, and doesn't need enriched uranium.
  • There are a wide range of engineering issues in reactors from stability (number of delayed neutrons, consumable poisons, bubble coefficients etc), to materials corrosion, gas generation etc.

    I'm a physicist which puts me just far enough on the Dunning Kruger curve to realize that I don't know enough to have an opinion on whether thorium reactors are a good idea. I suspect that most of the people discussing their advantages don't know a lot more.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, the German 300MW experimental THTR (Thorium High-Temperature Reactor) was a complete failure. They never could get it to work reliably and always had issued.

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Ask West Germany :) They put a lot of cash into lots of strange and new nuclear ideas.
      It works until it gets non molten again ....
  • While it's fair to say that the dangers of radiation are often exaggerated, nuclear reactors have worst-case failure modes a lot worse than, say, a solar panel, or even a gas turbine. Nor can you tweak and modify said prototypes in the same way you could, say, a new smartphone design.

    As such, a lot more design work needs to go into building a nuclear reactor than most other large power generators or other industrial-scale engineering systems, and that design work needs to be approved by regulators.

    Doing that design and engineering work for a novel reactor type and building up sufficient regulatory expertise to approve said design and building the first grid-connected version in six years? All in the face of likely protests and court challenges throwing sand in the gears? Not going to happen.

  • The biggest impediment to nuclear power (according to a talk I just listened to from EPRI is the construction, and to some extent operating cost.

    I like nuclear, I really do, but it just doesn't seem cost competitive.

  • It's nice to finally see nice things said about molten salt reactors on Slashdot. I guess all it took was a Democrat politician to break the ice on that.

    What bothers me about Yang's proposed timeline is the lack of a milestone within what would be his first term in office. The first milestone is near the end of his second term, and everything after that is then just wishful thinking of the next president agreeing with his plan.

    People believed JFK when he said we'd put men on the moon because that was something within his power, both as something the President had the authority to do and as a goal within his term in office. I believe Elon Musk will put people on Mars, or die trying, because he has the authority within his company to set goals and no term limits to cut this short.

    I'm quite convinced that Yang wants molten salt reactors to come to market, and believes them to be a vital part of a carbon neutral energy sector. What I'm not convinced about is his own ability to bring that to be as POTUS. He'd be more convincing as a private citizen, like Musk. Or, be more convincing by setting goals that are within his first term.

    I've seen good things said about the future of nuclear power from President Trump and Secretary Perry. They don't make much noise about it, or at least the news outlets don't report on it often. For those that are paying attention, like myself, there is a bright future for nuclear power from the current administration.

    I'd like to see Yang nominated. Regardless of who wins the general election we get more clean and abundant energy. Energy that is home grown, which will free us from some international entanglements. The debates would be most enjoyable, it will force news outlets to report on nuclear power and politicians in office having to go on record being for or against nuclear power.

    When people start talking about nuclear power then it should be far clearer that we need nuclear power in the future. Solar, wind, and batteries will not run our economy, or send people to Mars.

  • If Yang won, he would become president in November 2020, leaving just over 6 years for the reactor to be designed, approved, and built--a timeline which is highly unrealistic. It would take a few years at least just to design the new nuclear reactor. An NRC approval of a new design often takes longer than a decade. At present, the lead time for nuclear reactors which are already designed and approved is more than 14 years. Presumably, Yang wants to streamline some of these things, and a thorium reactor coul
    • We choose to build a thorium reactor in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard!
      • Sure, but there's a difference between hard and unrealistic. Even if Yang initiated a massive research and development program, it would be several years before it even got going in earnest.

        Also, engineering projects do not necessarily go faster just by throwing money and resources at them. There are still unsolved issues regarding thorium reactors.

  • I don't agree with everything this guy says or all his ideas (like UBI, which I think is the worst idea ever) but I can agree with him on this, and for all the same reasons he states. Let's do it while we still have options open.
  • Tagging futuristic nuclear energy technologies as a significant part of his platform can only fail Mr. Yang - because it makes too much sense. As Yang has said, new nuclear technologies are great stop-gap solutions while we ramp up renewable energy sources. Thorium and modern uranium reactors are indeed much safer and cleaner than "classic" fission reactors, and if fully developed could certainly help us replace fossil fuels.

    Unfortunately, the technical understanding of the average voter is not great eno
    • by spth ( 5126797 )

      Tagging futuristic nuclear energy technologies as a significant part of his platform can only fail Mr. Yang - because it makes too much sense. As Yang has said, new nuclear technologies are great stop-gap solutions while we ramp up renewable energy sources. Thorium and modern uranium reactors are indeed much safer and cleaner than "classic" fission reactors, and if fully developed could certainly help us replace fossil fuels.

      No. New nuclear technologies are useless as stop-gap solutions. Renewables can be ramped up much quicker than new nuclear could be developed and installed.

      As a stop-gap solution it makes sense to keep exisitng nuclear plants running for longer, and maybe build some based on proven technology, such as third-generation reactors, not develop new technologies that won't be ready for decades (that2027 target seems very unrealistic to me).

  • $50 Billion?
    I think we flew to the Moon for less.

  • by spth ( 5126797 ) on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @01:47AM (#59334006)

    Quick action to fight climate change is needed now.

    Developing new nuclear reactors (be it thorium, or fourth generation uranium reactors), with a hope of getting them on the grid by 2027 (an IMO very unrealistic timeframe, I'd expect at least a decade of delay) won't help in time.

    IMO, the only reasonable action now is to use proven technology to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, such as solar, wind, small-scale hydropower (I don't think there are lots of suitable places for large scale-hydropower left in developed countries), third generation nuclear reactors. Improved insulation on houses to reduce the need for heating; better public transport to reduce emissions from transportation (also try to keep rail freight alive).

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