China announces thorium reactor energy program, Obama still dwelling on "Sputnik moments"

It would seem the US is only interested in “Green” perpetual motion Energy, thusly tilting at the windmills in bliss.

History repeats itself, Japan in the 50’s and 60’s was cast as the copy cat low quality manufacturer that could only copy and never innovate, now look at Japans reputation for quality and engineering skill. Where Japan have been the Chinese will follow, only difference will be their Govt will take a more active role in deciding where they will focus on instead of leaving it to the free market.

Richard S Courtney says:
January 31, 2011 at 3:28 am
Thank you.

There are three reactor designs who can use thorium, which are in an very advanced state of development.
-CANDU 6
A heavy water reactor of which a dozen have been build around the world. This can operate on thorium, but not very efficient. It can also be used in a dupic fuel cycle. Here the used nuclear fuel out of a normal light water reator is used in the CANDU reactor. For the US this is a interesting option.
-ACR1000( advanced CANDU reactor)
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) has finished Phase 3 of the Pre-Project Design Review of this reactor.
http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nuclear_power_news/archive/2011/01/31/acel-reaches-design-review-milestone-for-the-advanced-candu-reactor-acr_2d00_1000-013103.aspx
It has the same options as the normal CANDU reactor. It should be less costly to build such a reactor.
– PBMR (pebble bed modular reactor)
This reactor was developed out of the THTR-300 which was especially designed for using thorium.
The development of the molten salt reactor costs at least a decade.

Well I already had my own personal Sputnik moment; either sputt-nick; or spoot-neek, as you wish; way back in 1957.
Using an ordinary communications short wave receiver (at 20 Megacycles), and a stop watch; along with some ionospheric prediction tables; we managed to guess about where the orbit was, just by listening to it when it was above the radio horizon.
So when the Auckland Star reporter called at lunchtime to the Radio-Physics Department; to ask, when people could go outside and see the satellite, stupid me- just blurted; go out at 8 PM tonight and look up and it will go overhead.
OOOoops !! really bad move; the early evening edition of the star said on the front page, that “The radio-Physics Department ” had predicted that Sputnik, would go ovehead at 8:00 PM tonight (that night).
Well tens of thousands of people drove up to the top of nearly all of Auckland’s 60 volcanoes to watch. Not me, I was off to bed for a good night’s sleep after listening to that blasted beep for two days.
So I had to go out the next night to see it for the first time. As for the previous night; well it went dead center straight over the city at 8:00 PM. I don’t think I’ve been right on anything ever since; but I never talk to reporters any more either.

JohnH says:
January 31, 2011 at 10:42 am
“History repeats itself, Japan in the 50′s and 60′s was cast as the copy cat low quality manufacturer that could only copy and never innovate, now look at Japans reputation for quality and engineering skill. ”
Some posts here reminds me of the japanese invasion of Singapore.
The british general and most of the leading Brits was not afraid of the Japanese because, they said, the Japanese had bad eyesight. Look at the glasses they are using, they said.
In the mean time the Japanese bicycled into Singapore via the back-door. So much for bad eyesight. It is funny how a myth can be taken as a fact by the ruling classes.
At the same time as some say they cannot “be inventive”, “they can only copy” and all that. Let me tell you, that can be turned around very quickly. As the japanese did.
Dont you worry about that.
And, additionally to all this, some here seem to think that the U.S. should have some kind of monopoly on having a high-tech industry, to be a leader of the world, to be number one, and so on.
Well, I think that time has passed. It was nice as long as it lasted, but, you know, the world moves on.
Why be so afraid of getting a developed friendly China filled up with techno-freaks and mobile phone lovers? With a free marked? Instead of a gang of Pol-Pot’ers? (There are a couple of Pol-Pot’ers in Washington now.)
As you all know Milton Friedman went to Chile well aware of that a dictatorship has a hard time surviving a free marked.
It seems to me the leadership of China nowaday is slowly introducing free markeds in a steadily growing area in China. We should welcome that, I think. I think this will result in a more and more democratic China. A China that prefers to do trade with its neighbours, instead of war. They have seen that this brings much more prosperity than commanding millions around with spades in the countryside.
The talk about intellectual ownership (or whatever) reminds me of the jet-liner “Comet”. The British shared all the technology from the Comet project with the Americans. When the Brits asked for something back from the americans, the answer was; “Sorry,its classified”. And then came the Boeing.

Not that I am a fan of “authority,” Richard, but certainly the phrase “ignorant” does not apply to you w.r.t. biofuels, eh? Hence my point above regarding irony, and, more importantly, the benefit of education even for those that think they are already educated. You never know what you might not know.
Mark

FTA: “The scientific goal is to use 20 years or so, developed a new generation of nuclear energy systems, all the technical level reached in the trial and have all intellectual property rights.”
So they will respect IP rights when it is their ideas? Lets just steal it from them like they steal our DVD’s.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8&w=300&h=255]

Jeremy says:
January 31, 2011 at 10:18 am
eadler says:
January 31, 2011 at 6:41 am
I don’t see the justification for Obama bashing with respect to nuclear power. One of the first acts of his administration was to launch a loan guarantee program for nuclear power reactors.
That was lip service. The bashing is fully justified because while Obama did do those loan guarantees, they are meaningless because the problem with Nuclear in America is that no one wants the waste stored anywhere near them. The solution was Yucca Mountain. Obama Killed the Yucca mountain project just before it was set to open. With no national storage area for the waste to make sure that NIMBY doesn’t kill a project, those loan guarantees are meaningless. Any local government will block a nuke plant because the locals will thoroughly oppose the storage of nuclear waste near their homes. This isn’t new to Obama or any administration, pay lip service while backstabbing those projects your allies dislike.
So yes, bashing Obama for his failure to encourage nuclear power is fully justified. In fact he is helping to kill off nuclear in this country.
A lot of people want to praise Obama for his human spaceflight funding too. The problem is this, The shuttle is due to retire this year. There is no replacement. Obama killed off the Orion project (as bloated a piece of federal pork as it may have been), and has offered no replacement. As of next year, the United States, unlike China and Russia, will have no manned spaceflight. Now some praise this and say, “well NASA is a bloated federal agency, not the nimble organization of motivated nerds it once was.” And they are correct to state this. However, NASA occupies less than 1% of the federal budget and its endgame represents the future of humanity. When was the last time any rational responsible parent spent less than 1% on their children’s future?
Obama = Just another politician, spineless in the face of requested political favors.
It seems that your opinion is uninformed.
Yucca Mountain was not a slam dunk as a safe site to store nuclear waste.
The coup de grace was a previously undiscovered fault line in 2007 which bisects the storage facility. None of the research on the safety of Yucca Mt. considered the fault.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/sep/25/usa

DaveS says:
January 31, 2011 at 12:58 pm
“I think from the physics, its abundance and its potential it deserves to have a serious research program, even a test plant. Its deserves this as much, if not more than solar, wind, algae and bio mass. I think we have capabilities and technologies today that did not exist in the 60s. The realization of cheap energy for a millennium would be Obama’s greatest legacy. Lets see how much vision the guy has.”
Oak Ridge National Laboratory designed a 7.5 megawatt LFTR research reactor and operated it from 1964-1969. It simply didn’t win the competition for which reactor designs were chosen for commercial use. The main interest in it was for use in nuclear powered bombers as it had the greatest power-to-weight ratio of anything else. A different design was chosen for nuclear-powered submarines which have an infinite supply of cooling water and lesser restrictions on reactor weight. LFTR is old hat for the United States but only for the United States as the ORNL reactor is the only LFTR reactor ever built. The putative reason given by overly excited LFTR pundits why LFTR never went anywhere is that LFTR doesn’t produce as much plutonium (read fissile material for nuclear weapons) as the winning designs.

Dave Springer says:
January 31, 2011 at 4:55 pm
“Oak Ridge National Laboratory designed a 7.5 megawatt LFTR research reactor and operated it from 1964-1969. It simply didn’t win the competition for which reactor designs were chosen for commercial use. The main interest in it was for use in nuclear powered bombers as it had the greatest power-to-weight ratio of anything else. A different design was chosen for nuclear-powered submarines …..”
The submarine LWR designs were already in-service by the time LFTRs were prototyped. The commercial reactors used the LWR proven military technology because it was the low risk approach (and because it produced a lot of plutonium, desirable at the time by the military). This was in-spite of the fact that LFTR was an inherently safer technology (no fuel rods to melt and no high pressure water to burst). Safety was not given the same priority in the 60s as it is today. Today’s reactors are very safe but the safety has been “bolted on” at great expense. The biggest problem with LWR nuclear today is cost. LFTRs significant cost advantage (competitive with coal) is one of it’s strongest advantages.
http://energyfromthorium.com/timeline/

Richard S Courtney says:
January 31, 2011 at 10:47 am
Who died and left you the authority to determine who can say what on this thread?
I quite agree that ethanol from corn is a non-starter. In fact you can search uncommondescent.com back a few years ago when I was writing articles for it and I also predicted the same things you did. It was painfully obvious. Corn has too much value as a food crop to divert for ethanol and the process of converting corn starch to alcohol is inefficient – it’s basically just a scaled-up moonshine operation . We appear to be talking across each other. I’m not disagreeing with you about about current biofuel production and you’re just not moving beyond that to what I’m actually talking about.
Biofuel is going to come from genetically engineered organisms designed for the sole purpose of producing liquid and gas fuels with very little interference directly from sunlight, water, air, and nutrients. No such organisms exist in nature because there’s no survival value in it – no selection pressure for evolution to produce such organisms. The organisms being used now produce only small quantities of what we want and they produce it as a metabolic byproduct. When we take what nature has produced as a starting point and mix/match (genetic cut & paste) metabolic function so those byproducts become the primary metabolic product the result will be virtually free fuel that can seamlessly replace all existing fossil fuels. GM organisms don’t have to survive in the wild competing against other organisms because we supply them with a suitable environment while excluding their competitors in various ways so the GM organisms can happily devote all their metabolic resources to producing biofuel for our use whereas in the wild they’d die out fast because they’re devoting all their energy to producing something totally useless to their own survival.
Let’s look at fungi for an example. There are fungi which can digest ligneous (woody) plant matter and produce carbohydrates as a primary metabolic product. These are primarily mushrooms and other colonial fungi that grow on wood or woody soil detritus. There are different fungi, primarily yeasts, which can digest carbohydrates and under anerobic conditions produce ethanol as metabolic byproduct. There is no fundamental reason why synthetic biology can’t produce an organism that digests ligneous materials to produce carbohydrates then proceed to produce ethanol from the carbohydrates. That would be one great leap in biofuel production technology. But it doesn’t stop there. There’s no fundamental reason why the same organism can’t be made to skip the need for ligneous feedstock and simply go straight from sunlight, air, water, and nutrients straight to biofuel as a primary product of metabolism. All these capabilities are extant in nature today but they aren’t all incorporated into any single organism because there’s no evolutionary pressure to produce such an organism. But as our capabilities in synthetic biology grows we will eventually be able to build an organism that does exactly that for us. This will mark the beginning of the next great technological revolution. Just the beginning. The engineering oppotunities represented by custom designed microorganisms building macroscopic things with molecular precision are mind boggling.
The advances being made in synthetic biology are proceeding at a pace that reminds me of Moore’s Law for semiconductors. Just ten years ago it cost the US goverment a billion dollars to fully sequence the first human genome (Francis Collins led the effort). At the same time a private individual, Craig Venter, produced a full human genome sequence for $200 million with a proprietary technology call shotgun sequencing. Today a human genome can be sequenced for $10,000 and there’s an X-prize waiting for the first company to do it for $1000 dollars. Meanwhile Venter hasn’t been sitting still. Venter circumnavigated the global ocean taking samples of microorganisms from various depths and he had the vessel equipped with a shotgun sequencing lab and he built a gene library containing millions of unique genes found in the microrganism survey – sequencing them right on the ship literally going from water sample container to genetic sequencing machine. Back on the farm the Venter Institute a few years ago became the first (and only) lab to produce an artificial organism. Venter took the simplest complete genome known (microplasm genitalium, a human gut bacteria IIRC) and stripped it down until there was nothing left but what was absolutely required for basic metabolic and reproductive function. He then took that minimal artificial genome sequence and built it up from mail-order DNA snippets perfecting the process of producing an error-free DNA molecule with tens of thousands and base pairs and hundreds of gene sequences all using a sequence map in a computer database feeding into a gene splicing machine. Then he tested it by gutting a different species of bacteria (removing its native DNA) and inserting his artificially produced genome in the empty shell. The new bacteria, with an artificially produced synthetic genome, came to life and grew out in a culture plate to become the first synthetic organism in the world.
Venter’s first stretch goal, all along, has been to produce a synthetic organism that produces biofuel and with the gene library he has it won’t be long before he’s figured out how to make bacteria build all the things that natural organisms can build only do it under program control. There’s no fundamental reason why a wooden house has be constructed from milled lumber when in principle you can program a hoard of bacteria to make the wood on-site in the form of the house. Various other organisms produce all kinds of structures from materials like calcium, transparent proteins, and just about everything you’d need for a livable dwelling directly from materials on-site and all of it powered by the sun. Nature served up these biological capabilities to us on a silver platter. The only thing we have to do is reverse engineer what nature produced and modify it for our own purposes. This is the future and it is approaching at an accelerating rate as synthetic biology emerges from its infancy. Meanwhile someone is going to waste their time and money on obsolete bulk construction technologies like nuclear power plants and about the time they get the next generation up and running the Venter Institute (or someone else) is going to announce a synthetic organism that produces refined liquid and gaseous fuels at such a low cost that nuclear power generation has no remote chance of being able to compete in cost.