Here is an entertaining and well researched video documentary from my friend John Coleman at KUSI-TV about the history of the Keeling Curve and its founder.
Watch:
From the YouTube description:
A great scientist named Roger Revelle had Al Gore in his class at Harvard and the Global Warming campaign was born. Revelle tried to calm things down years later, but Gore said Revelle was Senile and refused to debate. John Coleman documents the entire story and shows how our tax dollars are perpetuating the Global Warming alarmist campaign even though temperatures have not risen in years.
Thanks for this! :]
Have always like John Coleman, so down to earth. (odd to say about a meteorologist!)
I would like to see an index of this video. I’ll make one Friday if no one beats me to it.
Sorry to bust in here with a completely unrelated question, but I imagine you know the answer. Pilots are taught on the very first day that Standard Pressure is 29.92 inches or 1013.25 mm of Hg. Obviously 29 inches is less than a meter. What accounts for the difference?
[Reply: you are about to see the value of WUWT ☺. ~ mod.]
Bonanzapilot, 29.92 inches is ~0.76 m or 760 mm.
And that’s ~1 bar or ~1 atm. Your ~1013 is probably mbar.
@Bonanzapilot
It is 1013.25 10^2 Pa or 760mm of Hg or 10.33m of h2O
29.92*2.54=760
The 1013.25 is millibars.
Bonanzapilot see history – BIPM defined “standard pressure” in 1954 as
Note: = 740 mm Hg which
History:
How the Global Warming Scare Began……when NOAA initiated Doppler…and a career that was a previous laughing stock, elevated itself to a science
While the west has been on a suicide mission to impair its ability to secure its energy future, Russia has been steadily increasing its influence in Western Europe by making Western European countries more and more dependent on Russian energy. The result — Syria uses chemical weapons on its own people and Western Europe says, lets not do anything because we might make Russia made at us; Russia invades the Crimea and Western Europe says, lets not doing anything because Russia might get mad at us.
So perhaps it’s not the oil companies funding the skeptics, perhaps it’s been Russia manipulating the western left, turning them into climate alarmists, to gain Russian energy dominance in the world.
Remember during climategate when a Russian scientists put out a short, cryptic statement saying, “our temperature records have been tampered with”. We all assumed he was talking about the University of East Anglia. But think about it, who would have the motive and abilit to tamper with the temperature records of 10% of the world’s land area? And is it really a coincidence that “[a]verage warming for the Russian territory [as reported by … Russia] for the period 1907–2006 is estimated to have been 1.29C compared to 0.75C globally”? And then there’s Yamal …
Gore is just a convenient idiot doing Putin’s bidding.
One word, Excellent! Thank you Mr. Coleman. You are right about time silencing this scourge of global warming hysteria, that is being perpetrated on the people of this planet. Mother Nature hasn’t got the memo from Chairman Gore ye
Bonanzapilot,
29.92 inches is 76 cm.
If the column of mercury had a base of 1 cm^2 then the volume of mercury would be 76 cm^3.
The density of mercury is 13.534 g/cm^3
So the mercury would have a mass of 1029 g.
Hence 1029 millibars.
John Coleman provides eminently practical common sense with exceptional expertise.
1 atmosphere is 760mm Hg. maybe 1013.25 is in millibar ?
Thanks to Mr. Coleman for this. With his pertinent credentials, the provided information should have an enormous impact on the debate that is NOT going on. Will the MSM ever actually report the truth?
John Coleman will peg any credibility meter right at the top. Thanks so much for the heads-up and I’ll be re-distributing this exemplary presentation with considerable enthusiasm.
This is a good video. Well done Mr. Coleman. I like the good use of repetition – for example by repeating $4.5B to illustrate how well-funded the warmists are. I like his early affirmation that if he thought CO2 was damaging the planet, he would be campaigning with Gore. I thought it was interesting that Dr. Singer, in the 1990 interview, affirmed the probable existence of a negative feedback loop from clouds, that stabilizes the temperature – as recently asserted by Eschenbach here on WUWT. Around 5:30 when Coleman writes “principal” I think he means “principle.” The most interesting part is in the second half, where he explains Al Gore’s history. I hope warmists get that far, but I suspect many will bail near the beginning.
Thanks everyone. Watching the video too. Quite informative.
Bonanzapilot says:
March 13, 2014 at 11:22 am
Your answer is you are using the wrong units. the standard atmosphere of 1013.25 is milibars not mm of Hg. A Bar equals 750.062 mm of Hg.
A great lecture held by a fine, competent and professional gentleman of the old brigade. Al Gore is a cheating bungler, compared to him.
even though temperatures have not risen in years
February is certainly not giving these people anything to smile about. GISS dropped from 0.70 in January to 0.45 in February. Of the ones I am tracking, February is in for UAH, RSS, Hadsst3 and GISS. The rankings so far are 10th, 11th, 12th and 11th.
Bonanza pilot…
A standard atmosphere is 1013.25 milliBar. Not the same as mm Hg.
The pressure at the bottom of a 29.92 inch column of Hg is the same as 14.7 psi, where the ‘p’ is pounds force, which is the force required to accelerate 1 lb mass at 32 ft/sec^2. The millibar measurement is also based on the force equivalent of acceleration, but it is of a 1 Kg mass at 1 m/sec^2.
All of the above is dependent on the column of Hg being at standard temperature, which in some standards is 25C, some 20C, and some 68F. I think the equivalent for 29.92 inHg is based on 68F, or 20C.
Yeah, it’s confusing.
-BillR
The current CAGW university + government laboratory + government “national center for …. + government EPA + NSA + computer models and massive government super-computer labs with THEIR funding links and group-think association all grew from the initial “success” in their acid rain hysteria …
Speaking of money and power and influence … Today’s global circulation models are directly descended from the regional and city-sized 3D finite-element-finite differential equation methods used to model those smaller areas for the smog and aerosol studies of the acid rain groups – and then the “ozone hole” political-environmental-university-computer lab groups that successfully demanded the Montreal Protocol and acid rain rules!
101,325 is the sea level nominal pressure in Newtons/meter^2 known as Pascals. Millibars is 1/1000 units of 1 Bar or 1 atmosphere of pressure. 101,325 Pa is the equivalent of the English unit 14.7 pounds per square inch.
Pilots Beware (including them wot flyz Bonanzas) !
Units are important. Look up the Gimli Glider – a 767 that ran out of fuel mid Atlantic because the fuel uplift was in lbs when it should have been in kg. Or that Mars mission that went smack because of a difference between mph and kph. Anyway, as others have already pointed out, the ISO standard atmosphere is 1013 millibars (or “hectopascalls” as EASA now requires us to say :-((
So there’s nothing quite so dangerous as an undergrad with half a paradigm… and half a brain.
Coleman does a good job in this video. The Revelle-Gore story is important but it is only one of the factors that contributed to global warming (the social phenomenon).
Anyway, here are two Revelle quotes I dug up, that support Coleman’s position.
Revelle in 1988
And in 1977
Whilst recognizing the potential hazards and the need for technological improvement, Revelle supported nuclear power throughout his life. He died just as the anti-nuclear weapons movement was turning into the more general nuclearophobia scare campaign.
correction, the Bar is an oddball equal to 100,000 Pa or 100 kilo Pa. It is not the sea level value- hence the 1013.25 millibars value is the equivalent of 101,325 Pa which is the nominal sea level pressure. The only real benefit of MKS system of units is the simplification of the system to factors of 10 and the presence of all those prefixes like kilo and milli. The bar is an affront to this and it is not actually a part of the MKS system and evidently considered by NIST (our former National Bureau of Standards) to be unacceptable according to the Wikipedia article on the Bar.
– dcfl51 says:
March 13, 2014 at 11:52 am
Bonanzapilot,
29.92 inches is 76 cm.
If the column of mercury had a base of 1 cm^2 then the volume of mercury would be 76 cm^3.
The density of mercury is 13.534 g/cm^3
So the mercury would have a mass of 1029 g.
Hence 1029 millibars.-
That’s good explanation. Or 76 times 13.534 is 1028.584. Which is rounded to 1029.
Also if replace mercury with water with density of 1.0 g/cm^3 one would have
a column of water 1028.584 cm tall. Which is 10.28584 meter tall.
And 1 atm pressure is roughly equal to 10 meters of water depth.
So pressure of air above your heads at sea level is roughly equal 10 meter of something
with density of 1.0 g/cm^3. Or if liquified earth’s atmosphere the liquid would be a bit deeper
than 10 meters deep [as liquid nitrogen is less than 1.0 g/cm^3.
Liquid nitrogen being, 0.808 g·cm^3 and liquid oxygen is 1.141 g/cm^3.
I can’t help but compare Gore’s dismissal of Revelle’s inconvenient opinions as the product of a “senile” mind with the attempts of Chris Mooney (author of The Republican Brain); Prof. (moon-landing) Lewandowski, etc. to paint all climate skeptics as suffering from some mental condition.
http://aviationandaccessories.tpub.com/TM-55-1510-219-10/css/TM-55-1510-219-10_180.htm
Except at Standard temp of 68F the density might be a little different? And in any case is was established at 1013.25 and 29.92 at 68F at the 1954 convention referenced above?
I can see the confusion. Also, even though the setting window says “MB”, which now seems an obsolete measurement, pilots commonly say “millimeters of mercury”.
Gore may have gotten a D in the class, but the lessons he learned there seem to have been quite valuable to him, probably more so than to the top student!
-So there’s nothing quite so dangerous as an undergrad with half a paradigm… and half a brain.-
That about sums it up. The problem being, Al Gore is speaking to people who are as ill-informed
as Gore is. There a lot people who get D’s in the science classes they forced to take.
And climate science is so watered down, they might scrape by with a C to pass this kind of popularized “science”.
So CO2 emission could problem and over population could problem- city planners should be
somewhat aware of it. But it does not mean we destroy our civilization- outlaw energy production or try to rid of billions of people.
I am curious –
mpaul says:
March 13, 2014 at 11:44 am
While the west has been on a suicide mission to impair its ability to secure its energy future, Russia has been steadily increasing its influence in Western Europe…
I am trying to understand how this so off topic drivel wasn’t snipped by a moderator. Does it serve a purpose that I can’t fathom?
[Reply: you both get to make your comment. Neither one was entirely off-topic. ~mod.]
@ghailkie
And the reason large aircraft use pounds of kg is that a pound of fuel always has the same BTU’s and the volume of a gallon varies with T. Small planes unusually measure in gallons, although most of us still like to fuel in cold weather anyway. Happily, that’s easy to find these days.
Coleman is absolutely correct on his final point: Time and the steady flow of more data will refute the 25 years of model predictions of CAGW.
Still you gotta love the idiots like Billionaire Steyer so anxious and willing to part with truckloads of their money to support the GW jihad, as issued in the Climate Change Fatwa from their Mufti Al “Jazeera” Gore.
And here’s Maggie in 1989 at the UN:
Lest we forget.
Al Gore is not a climate scientist. He is not any kind of scientist. He got a BA with a thesis “The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947-1969” and wanted to write novels. Yet people view him as the ‘gatekeeper’ as to what is true or not in climate science? How that happen? Just because he says there is no debate why does that carry any weight?
Tom O getting comments you disagree with censored is a well-worn tactic of the Alarmists, but you’ll find it doesn’t work too well over here.
The topic of this post is given away by its title: “Documentary: How the Global Warming Scare Began”. I am arguing that while Roger Revelle might have gotten the party started, the real fuel for the Alarmism movement has come from a long term campaign initiated by the Soviets and continued by ex-KGB man Putin to manipulate opinion among the hard left in the West.
As the West has grown increasingly reluctant to develop energy resources (due in large part to Global Warming campaigning by the left), Russia has been using the development of its own energy resources to dramatically increase its geo-political influence. We are now in a situation where Russia’s ability to inflict damage to the west by simply cutting off energy supplies far out strips its ability to inflict damage with its nuclear weapon’s capability. While we were fighting the cold war, they were fighting an energy dominance war using the western hard left as their foot soldiers
Putin is using energy to shift geo-politics in his favor. The Western political left, whose tenancy is to “route, route, route for the away team” have been easily manipulated for Putin’s purposes.
mpaul says:
March 13, 2014 at 11:44 am
“The result — Syria uses chemical weapons on its own people and Western Europe says, lets not do anything because we might make Russia made at us;”
Please, not that old NATO story. You probably missed this one. Notice the date.
http://www.therightplanet.com/2013/08/breaking-turkish-police-seize-2-kg-sarin-nerve-gas-en-route-to-syria-from-al-qaeda-linked-al-nusra-terrorists/
inre: Russian Gas
Vaclav Klaus in a speech in Russia remarked: “I would pay a lot of attention to the oil and gas revolution connected with the new technological breakthroughs in shale oil and gas drilling. Many traditional producers continue believing in the paradigm of permanently rising oil and gas prices (as a long-term tendency), and expect that any relevant change will happen on the demand side of the oil and gas equation. That is not true. New technologies to tap shale oil and gas reserves make a revolution on the supply side, which can fundamentally change the oil market with a potential price collapse. The only solution is to diversify the economy as much as possible.
Let me conclude by expressing my belief that the Russian decision-makers are aware of all that. I read with a great interest the recent Valdaj speech made by President Putin which suggests a new approach to many of these problems. I wish you success in realizing the needed changes in your country.”
The anti-fracking activists are truly desperate to keep countries like Britain from developing their own gas. And like everything the progressives want, it comes out well for Russia.
But I would rather, as Vaclav Klaus recommends, see Russia diversify its economy as the new supply technology takes off. The fact is, energy prices do not have to double and triple with nuclear and wind, but could come down by 50% with this resource. That is what scares the greens.
I was VERY pleased that in John Coleman’s letter to “The Scientists and Organizations that Take 4.7 Billion Tax Dollars” said this:
Absolutely.
4.7 billion a year on thorium would charge us ahead of the Chinese, so that they don’t get the patents first. And what is thorium about? A new (actually old) version of nuclear power reactors, that have the following characteristics:
1. Safety – a completely no-explosion, no radioactive release system
2. Is 150 times as efficient for extracting energy from the fuel (99%+ vs 0.7%)
3. Known thorium reserves and in storage is sufficient for thousands of years
4. Will be used to use up (as in clean up, forever) the already existing nuclear waste
5. A ball of thorium the size of a racquetball contains all the energy for one person for their entire lifetime.
6. Reactors can be sized up or down – to small enough to power a small town or a medium-sized company.
7. Reactor construction costs of about $600 million (at current efficiencies) vs $20-40 billion (depending on cost overruns) for light water reactors.
8. Instant shut down – The pilot reactor was shut down on Fridays and turned back on on Monday mornings.
9. Non-proliferation, because of its own physics. The fuel cannot be stored in missiles for any length of time without irradiating and destroying the controls. The fuel also gives off so much radiation that it is impossible to hide the weapons. The military 50 years ago decided thorium was not usable for nukes.
What we are talking about with thorium is REAL nuclear power for civilian use ONLY. No more uranium of plutonium reactors. Damned near free energy. After all, how much can they charger for thorium the size of a racquetball? Especially when that much is probably under your bedroom right now.
And if we get free and unlimited electrical energy from thorium, we can shut down all the gas and coal-fired power plants. And we may be able to realize that THEN we can run cars on electricity, because electricity will be so much cheaper than gasoline. When the economics of it are so much in its favor, the world will change. And when we all have electric cars, not only will our power plants not emit CO2, but neither will our cars.
Even jet aircraft can get their energy from thorium. Not directly. They can use electrolysis to make hydrogen and switch over from jet fuel (kerosene) to hydrogen.
Everything else can be run on electricity from thorium. There are already plans for running water desalination plants from the excess heat from thorium LFTR reactors. Basically, that means fresh water – essentially free – anywhere there is a thorium plant along a coastline.
With thorium reactors in every town, we can get rid of unsightly and wasteful high-tension power lines and perhaps the entire electrical grid. When a new reactor costs about the same as a 30-story building, why can’t towns have backups for maintenance periods? Who needs the grid then? Think of all the copper wire that will come available. Not to mention steel from all the towers we won’t need anymore. Our countryside won’t have those long gashes across them anymore.
The question is: What will be a free energy world be like?
In addition to thorium, 4.7 billion a year could give us graphene that much sooner. And what does graphene do? Well, among MANY other uses, coating electrical terminals with them has been found to make recharging batteries more than ten times faster. It is also the strongest and hardest material by weight ever known. It is also the best non-friction surface treatment ever known – better than teflon.
But just in its battery charging application, graphene will probably reduce electric car battery charges from hours to a few minutes – making electric cars viable much sooner for long distance travel.
Personally, I can see cars getting charged while on the move on highways. I have at least two methods in mind. It might be possible to drive coast to coast without stopping.
Thorium and graphene together will usher in an era of real energy independence for every community on every continent. It may even usher in new modes of rocketry and a potential to get out to the planets very efficiently. When they can take a LFTR reactor with them, say goodbye to solar panels and other energy recycling methods on rockets.
Like how the advent of the car made buggywhips and saddles all but extinct, much of our present ways of doing things will change.
For the better.
By the end of the 21st century, life will be much different, energy-wise. MORE energy use per capita, not less.
For a guy approaching 80, John Coleman has an amazingly forward-looking perspective.
Bravo to Mr. Coleman. This story is the logical view of anyone who looks at the data. The conclusion that time favors the correct answer to a complicated question is spot on. There were a couple of minor mis-statements, such as the thickness of the northern ice sheet, but the important facts are good.
Good to emphasize that the “founder” of the global warming scare was smart enough to follow the data. He would be sad to see what has happened to climatology after the politicians and media started to make money off the issue.
Some day the globe will be falling into another ice age and history will record who was right. Politicians like Gore and Strong will also be remembered for what they are.
Keep up the good work.
Wonderful… and great plug for WUWT!
It’ll be a good talking point if 2014 falls out of the Top Ten at year-end.
March 13, 2014 at 11:44 am | mpaul says:
There is speculation that the Ukraine uprising is being bankrolled by Soros [ http://motls.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/george-soros-quantum-mechanics-and.html ] … maybe to undermine Putin’s gas advantage as he’s not one of the Cause? In which case, Gore is a useful idiot doing the bidding of Soros.
John was a TV weather man many years ago in Omaha, Nebraska. I remember him very well. please give him my warm regards.
Well, who could possibly argue with someone who’s been playing a meteorologist on TV for nearly 60 years?
I also hear Hugh Laurie was on the verge of a cure for cancer just before House was cancelled.
David Ross says:
If this is the evidence that supports his position, I’d hate to see the evidence that undermines it!
The 1977 quote is part of an article that begins “Highly adverse consequences may result from future reliance on fossil fuels, a panel of the National Research Council said Sunday. The council chairman Roger Revelle…” And the part that you’ve cherry-picked emphasizes that “In any case, conversion to other sources would require many decades. Similarly, finding ways to make reliable estimates of the climatic changes that may result from continued use of fossil fuels may very well require decades,” which might be interesting news if Revelle said it in 2014, but is hardly surprising given that he said it almost 40 years ago!
And, your second quote from 1988 says: “My own personal belief is that we should wait for another ten or twenty years to really be convinced that the green house is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways.” To put that in context, in 1988 we had had what was at that time a record-warm year for global temperature but now it has been 18 years since we had a year that cold! And, in 1988, when James Hansen said that he was confident that AGW was already happening, most other scientists thought such a pronouncement was premature. It was 2 years before the IPCC issued its 1st report and said, “The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect is not likely for a decade or more.” So, Revelle’s opinions in 1988 were well within the mainstream of scientific opinion at the time and there is no evidence whatsoever that if he were alive today, his opinions would now be far outside the mainstream and instead in line with the ardent AGW “skeptics”.
And, as near as I can tell, the YouTube description “Revelle tried to calm things down years later, but Gore said Revelle was Senile and refused to debate” is a deceptive sentence that puts two unrelated facts together to give the false impression that Al Gore refused to debate Revelle.
I can’t understand how you guys can take this video of Coleman’s conspiratorial rantings with any degree of seriousness.
Nice job Mr. Coleman!
Streetcred says:
March 13, 2014 at 5:32 pm
****
Whaat???
George Soros looting countries and forcing them abject poverty?
I am shocked, shocked that …..
You just won’t find that info at Puffington Host
Magma says:
March 13, 2014 at 5:46 pm
Well, who could possibly argue with someone who’s been playing a meteorologist on TV for nearly 60 years?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Who could possibly argue with someone who’s been playing a molten rock on the internet for nearly 2 years? In other words, Name That Fallacy.
M Paul, actually Russian scientists were one of the first to have promoted a coming ice age, and Ukraine’s politicians voted to annex with Russia. Since when has Russia ever agreed with the west?
There is a good book ” Ice not Fire’ – Al that will kill us. Written years ago. Having studied archaeology and palaeoanthropology, the pattern of our global climate changes seem to indicate we are in for a cooling episode but it may not actually come to a full glacial period for a long time.
And it may not involve all the globe, the Northern Hemisphere will probably be most affected, but we are smart we should be able to do something about this before it becomes catastrophic.
Have you read Colleen McCullough’s ‘Creed of the Third Millennium’. Not one of my favorite books, but did she do a good job, describing what a Northern hemisphere ice age was like.? She had scientific advice on this one too. Worth a read.
joeldshore says:
March 13, 2014 at 5:54 pm
To put that in context, in 1988 we had had what was at that time a record-warm year for global temperature but now it has been 18 years since we had a year that cold!
= = = = = = = = =
The constantly revised, adjusted, homogenized and pasteurized mathematical abstraction called “global average temperature” apparently has no relationship to what’s happening on the ground.
For example, your gurus from the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research told us, only 14 years ago, that “snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” As you probably know, that is the most widely read and laughed at report on the Independent website to date! But it wasn’t just the predictions from Hadley:
Do you know what happened just 7 months later, Joel? From the same newspaper…
Here are some headlines to drive home the point..
Coral Bleaching as Record Cold Hits Reef – The Australian (2007)
Melbourne shivers through coldest December in years – The Age (2008)
‘Quiet’ sun could mean cooler days – The Age (2009)
Quiet sun puts Europe on ice – New Scientist (2010)
Coldest December in Sweden 110 Years – The Local (2010)
Army on Standby in Coldest December for 100 Years – DailyMail (2010)
Argentina Has Colder Winter Than Antarctica – Bloomberg (2010)
Winter may be coldest in 1000 years – DailyStar UK (2010)
Pythons, citrus and iguanas perish in Florida frost – CNN (2010)
Alice Springs: coldest day on record – Telegraph UK (2010)
Tuesday coldest day ever recorded in Ireland – Irish TImes (2010)
Brace yourselves for a ‘mini ice age’: This winter set to be coldest in 300 YEARS – DailyMail (2010)
Video: Heavy snow grips northern China – Telegraph UK (2010)
Welcome to the frozen wastes of… Cumbria: Freezing sea creates an eerie wilderness – DailyMail (2010)
Coldest May on record for Darwin – Sydney Morning Herald (2011)
Darwin chills out in coldest June on record – Australian Broadcasting Corp (2011)
Summer snow storm at Falls Creek – Australian Broadcasting Corp (2012)
+
the very chilling MET Office News Archive for 2010 – feast your eyes on the headlines:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2010
Can you find reports like those from 1988?
The AGW scam had its start with Margaret Thatcher. Just Go ogle it.
Steve Garcia says:
March 13, 2014 at 4:42 pm
(a lot of misinformation about Thorium)
Many years ago I was a qualified nuclear engineer, much technology has changed but not the basic physics (which was pretty much determined by 1947 along with the many proposed reactor basic designs)
You can NOT build a reactor out of thorium (just like natural uranium). You could have a mass of thorium the size of the Earth and it would not go critical (you would get a whale of a lot of heat from the alpha decay but fission would be an extremely low order probability)
What the idea behind a thorium “reactor” is that a normal reactor (fueled with U235 or Pu239) surrounded by a Thorium (naturally Th232) blanket would generate U233 via neutron capture. The U233 would then be the fuel in a reactor . Notice that there is very little difference between this blanket that generates U233 and a U238 blanket which transforms to Np239 decaying to Pu239.
If you let the U233 sit in the reactor it can fission (just like Pu239) or it can add a neutron to form U234 which like the counterpart Pu240 is basically nonfissionable. In fact with a little more neutron capture you can end up with evil plutonium , the bugaboo of all the antinukes.
So you have to have a uranium reactor to get thorium to form uranium to serve in your reactor.
Now as to the claims of no bomb making ability. Totally false. U233 makes a poor bomb, but as scientists and engineers demonstrated at Yucca Flats, with a bit of careful engineering you can get a nice big atomic bomb blast (which is the core of any hydrogen bomb). And since you would have a 99+% U233 available with only chemical separation instead of isotope separation you actually have a greater risk of diversion of nuclear fuel into weapons production. Never underestimate the creativity of engineers, especially those who have a CAUSE.
The radioactive daughter products of a U233 fission are pretty much identical with those of a U235 fission (a bell curve of just about every neutron proton combination with peaks around Strontium and Iodine plus various numbers of free neutrons and delayed neutrons). So the radiation effects and contamination problem would be the same (as they are with U235 and Pu239 systems). So the antinukes will get their lawyers up in arms and increase the cost of your power reactors far beyond simple engineering costs.
The 9 points you mention are totally false or irrelevant, any competent physics student should be able to point out the mistakes, so it is obvious that you are either spreading false information or do not know anything about nuclear engineering.
:
1. Safety – a completely no-explosion, no radioactive release system.
False, you can make a bomb using thorium just like you can a reactor – you just have to convert it to uranium.
2. Is 150 times as efficient for extracting energy from the fuel (99%+ vs 0.7%).
Only if you ignore the U238 which can be changed to Pu just like Th goes to U.
3. Known thorium reserves and in storage is sufficient for thousands of years
And Uranium reserves are larger.
4. Will be used to use up (as in clean up, forever) the already existing nuclear waste
So can any reactor if you add enough reactivity. (but that does not eliminate non fission fragment radioactives like Cobalt 60)
5. A ball of thorium the size of a racquetball contains all the energy for one person for their entire lifetime.
And a similar sized ball of Uranium has even more energy.
6. Reactors can be sized up or down – to small enough to power a small town or a medium-sized company.
Yep. and the only reactor to kill an American (SL1) was a “portable” Army reactor that suffered a control rod removal prompt criticality steam explosion that killed the 3 operators.
7. Reactor construction costs of about $600 million (at current efficiencies) vs $20-40 billion (depending on cost overruns) for light water reactors.
Until the lawyers get active.
8. Instant shut down – The pilot reactor was shut down on Fridays and turned back on on Monday mornings.
Almost all reactors have the instant shutdown – it is called the SCRAM switch. The problem is that the daughter fission fragments continue to produce about 7% power levels from delayed neutrons so you can not just walk away (unless you have zilch power history) And Thorium has the same daughter fission fragments as Uranium or Plutonium.
9. Non-proliferation, because of its own physics. The fuel cannot be stored in missiles for any length of time without irradiating and destroying the controls. The fuel also gives off so much radiation that it is impossible to hide the weapons. The military 50 years ago decided thorium was not usable for nukes.
Remember that U233 bomb at Yucca Flats. Sure you may have to have the control components separated to have safety and long life. But a similar safety problem existed on our Mk45 nuclear torpedoes. The way we armed them was to open a hatch, pull out a control block, turn it around, then reinsert it. You could just have the control block stored separately and take a couple extra seconds in the arming process. (and the military decision was not that U233 was not usable, it was that Pu239 was cheaper and U235 and Pu239 were better materials)
If you wanted a safe reactor system I would suggest a look at the molten salt SUB critical designs. The same high operating temperature to achieve high thermal efficiency, but designed to be sub critical always. It is forced to criticality by the addition of massive amounts of neutron provide by a set of high energy neutron generators. (powered by the reactor). These gigavolt neutron generators tip the condition into critical and allow powerup. They effectively act as additional control rods with the difference being that they must be operating to allow criticality rather than poisoning the reaction like inserted control rods). Safer since it is better since you WILL have shutdown without the extra neutrons compared to SHOULD have shutdown with control rod poisoning.
Even jet aircraft can get their energy from thorium. Not directly. They can use electrolysis to make hydrogen and switch over from jet fuel (kerosene) to hydrogen.
Ever look at the density of hydrogen? We can’t even efficiently use it for ground vehicles let alone mass sensitive things like planes. The problem is not H mass, it is the mass of a gas tank. And hydrogen likes to slip through cracks and weld joints, with liquid hydrogen being even more evil.
In addition to thorium, 4.7 billion a year could give us graphene that much sooner. And what does graphene do? Well, among MANY other uses, coating electrical terminals with them has been found to make recharging batteries more than ten times faster. It is also the strongest and hardest material by weight ever known. It is also the best non-friction surface treatment ever known – better than teflon.
I later worked as a high energy chemist. One of our products was Graphite Monofloride. (CFx ) A much cheaper and better lubricant than Teflon, and considering its structure, probably than grapheme. (and has been around for about 50 years). It was shown that a small amount added to a grease provided much better coefficients than the best high temperature molybdenum disulphide grease.
Industrial inertia overcomes better science just about any day!
Tom O says:
March 13, 2014 at 2:12 pm
I am curious –
I am trying to understand how this so off topic drivel wasn’t snipped by a moderator. Does it serve a purpose that I can’t fathom?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Personally I think it is very topical. Think in a world view, and where the power shift is. Read “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” then think about what is happening with the BRICS countries and what that alliance might mean down the road given they don’t really buy in to the AGW meme. That means they focus their resources elsewhere – on economics, health, pollution, energy, resource development AND even their versions philanthropy (with strings tied of course, but no different than the western powers for the last 100 years). The shell game and where is the pea requires distraction and AGW certainly provides a distraction – at least for me since I read this site regularly. But some people devote their lives to AGW and I often wonder what their motivation is. Even if it is benign, it gives other countries an opportunity so it is relevant if you look at the “big picture”. We have some governments telling us “Climate Change” is the number one concern while most of us are worrying about food on the table and a roof over our heads. Who has their eye on the ball – the IMF or the BRICS countries? I am not sure, but I do think about it. (Darn those John Grisham, John Le Carre, Frederick Forsyth, Chrichton, and a host of others. But so much fun 😉 )
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
Thanks to WUWT for posting this presentation.
There are a few minor imperfections but the overall information, science and conclusions are fully substantiated by the contents.
It is a telling point that the scientist who basically initiated the scare of CO2 being significant in affecting global temperature, later recanted and tried to redeem himself, only to be labelled as senile. Typical instance of the documented truth being swamped by rhetoric and blatant lies.
Then the issue of funding – CO2 influence and carbon trading skeptics are criticized as being funded by vested interests, yet the whole global warming scare empire was built up and is still sustained by mega financing from governments. Strange how, again, truth is squashed by untrue misinformation.
Anyone wishing to debate the validity of this presentation is invited to comment with sensible and logical questions or refutations.
Thanks for the effort, Mr Coleman.
@Earl Smith –
Oh, Keerist, I’ve got to go through this point by point. . .
To say that a thorium reactor is not a thorium reactor is like saying that bread eaten is not fuel for the human body because it doesn’t enter the bloodstream as bread crumbs. Ignorant point. I did not think it necessary to spell out every step of the LFTR process. No, the throium is not the actual fuel in the core. But it is the material we take out of the ground and enter into the beginning of the process, to irradiate it so that in a month’s time it turns into U-233, which is the fuel actually driving the core. But because bread sits in the stomach for a good while does not make bread a non-fuel for the body. In the same sense liquid gasoline is not the fuel for cars. Only in the vaporized state does it become volatile. One does not pull up to a gas station and buy vaporized gasoline. Your point is pedantic.
Earl, just because you worked with light water reactors doesn’t mean that you know what is going on with LFTRs unless you’ve educated yourself about LFTRs – specifically.
Yes, the core has to deal with radiation and contamination. Duh.
1. No, the energy producing SYSTEM cannot be exploded. You are talking about something other than the reactor. You are making up a straw man argument. Not even what I said.
2. Yes, 150 times the energy extraction of Thorium out of the ground vs U-238 out of the ground. You have a habit of twisting my words in to straw man arguments and “proving” something wrong that is not what I said. Nor what the facts are.
3. Uranium being more abundant than thorium? Not even. ONCE AGAIN, you’ve twisted my statement – which in this case didn’t even MENTION Uranium. In terms of reserves right now, yes, more uranium – in terms of weight or volume. Yet with only 0.7% accessible energy out of U-238, those U-238 reserves don’t deliver much energy vs even the lesser thorium reserves. As to abundance in the earth’s crust, look it up on any chart of abundance of elements in the earth’s crust – more thorium than uranium, and the vast bulk of the uranium is U-238 – USELESS as a fuel, but the raw material for U-235. There are also vast areas of the Moon that are known to have thorium.
4. Using LFTRs to burn up existing nuclear wastes – “So can any reactor if you add enough reactivity.” So, the question is, then, why are we not “adding reactivity” to light water reactors instead of filling up Yucca Mountain? LFTRs will – WILL – burn up our nuclear wastes, once they come on line – and get more energy out of them than we got the first time around in light water reactors. Are you going to say that is a BAD thing???
5. “And a similar sized ball of Uranium has even more energy.” WHICH kind of uranium? And if it is true about U-235, why are we not extracting 99%+ energy out of it? Why do we have such large quantities of nuclear waste now? You, being a nuclear engineer, must know that the ONE big negative about light water reactors is the nuclear waste and what to do with it. Wouldn’t you WANT those wastes used up instead of contaminating the planet? Why can we not USE more energy. It isn’t how MUCH energy, it is how much USABLE energy. Don’t be comparing U-235 with a ball of thorium. Compare a ball of U-238 to the ball of thorium – and it is no contest.
6. Re sizing reactors up or down: “Yep. and the only reactor to kill an American (SL1) was a “portable” Army reactor that suffered a control rod removal prompt criticality steam explosion that killed the 3 operators.” Mein Gott, your logic fallacies know no end. So ANY small reactor is more dangerous, is that your argument? And no reactor in Chernobyl ever killed anyone, right? We can only include American reactors? Is that your argument? The SL1 meltdown could not have happened with a LFTR. PERIOD. Educate yourself on LFTRs and then get back to me.
7. Re reactor construtcion costs: “Reactor construction costs of about $600 million (at current efficiencies) vs $20-40 billion (depending on cost overruns) for light water reactors.
Until the lawyers get active.” Is that supposed to be a rebuttal? Why don’t you just say, “My dad can beat up your dad”? Or “Your mother wears combat boots”?
8. Re instant shutdown: “Almost all reactors have the instant shutdown – it is called the SCRAM switch. The problem is that the daughter fission fragments continue to produce about 7% power levels from delayed neutrons so you can not just walk away (unless you have zilch power history) And Thorium has the same daughter fission fragments as Uranium or Plutonium.” 7% still putting out power – is that your idea of being shut down? WOW. As you said, “The problem is…” NO. These guys shut the reactor down and went HOME – no worries about meltdowns or 7% still cranking. If my 140 mph car is shutdown to 7% it is still going 10 mph. Is that being “shut down”? Not in any book I know.
9. No, Pu-239 was not cheaper. And IS not cheaper than U-233. When the first LFTR since the 1960s is built, it will make more U-233 in weeks than the amount of Pu-239 that has been made in over 60 years. It took a LOT of processing to even make the FIRST plutonium. Think Hanford. What you mean to say is that, having MADE the Pu-239, it was lying around and more available. And that took the entire Hanford processing plant – which cost HOW many billions of dollars in today’s dollars and how much energy expenditure?
With umpteen countries working on FTRs and not even the Americans really putting effort ONE into SUBs, lets make a bet as to which is online first.
There ARE no control rods in LFTRs. Get control rods out of your head. They are yesterday’s tech. Weinberg saw the advantages of liquid nuclear fuel way back in the ’50s. He just couldn’t out vote the military, so none of this has seen the light of day until the Chinese visited Oak Ridge by the thousands, and the world had to ask what is it that the Chinese see that we don’t?
Whether you and your American nuclear engineer buddies want it or not, or fight it or not, it is out of your control.
LFTRs are coming. You guys should be the ones volunteering before Congress to get an American one up and running. I wish to hell you all WOULD.
Steve Garcia says:
March 14, 2014 at 12:26 am
@Earl Smith –
Oh, Keerist, I’ve got to go through this point by point. . .
Similar expressions of exasperation from me.
To say that a thorium reactor is not a thorium reactor is like saying that bread eaten is not fuel for the human body because it doesn’t enter the bloodstream as bread crumbs. Ignorant point. I did not think it necessary to spell out every step of the LFTR process. No, the throium is not the actual fuel in the core. But it is the material we take out of the ground and enter into the beginning of the process, to irradiate it so that in a month’s time it turns into U-233, which is the fuel actually driving the core. But because bread sits in the stomach for a good while does not make bread a non-fuel for the body. In the same sense liquid gasoline is not the fuel for cars. Only in the vaporized state does it become volatile. One does not pull up to a gas station and buy vaporized gasoline. Your point is pedantic.
We differentiate between uranium fueled reactors and Plutonium fueled reactors (and mixed fuel reactors). So even though the fissile material comes out of the ground as uranium (235/238) and is then converted into U235 and plutonium239, by your logic it should all be classified as a uranium reactor. Make up your mind and lets be consistent.
****
Earl, just because you worked with light water reactors doesn’t mean that you know what is going on with LFTRs unless you’ve educated yourself about LFTRs – specifically..
After my work with the Navy I was back in graduate school where I specialized in high energy chemistry — which just happens to include the molten salt reactors. We had a very extensive library on the research results of the molten salt breeder programs., as well as our own work on molten fluorides. I have read more primary research reports than you have even seen (I know because a lot of what I read was classified)
********
1. No, the energy producing SYSTEM cannot be exploded. You are talking about something other than the reactor. You are making up a straw man argument. Not even what I said..
Part of the design with the molten salt reactors is an on site reprocessing facility which would allow concentrating the U233. The U233 can then be used to make your bomb. Simple and efficient. Actually more efficient that the Plutonium separation at Hanford because there is no need to chop up the fuel rods and dissolve them in acid. Any nuclear engineer knows that a functioning nuclear reactor can not be made to yield a nuclear explosion (but you would be surprised how devastating a mere 2000 % power excursion can be). But we all know that you can take a military reactor (using weapons grade uranium235) chop it up and make a number of nuclear weapons from the fuel. Your “thorium” reactor has much larger amounts of what could be classed as weapons grade U233. The detonation of the U233 weapons proves it can be done.
*******
2. Yes, 150 times the energy extraction of Thorium out of the ground vs U-238 out of the ground. You have a habit of twisting my words in to straw man arguments and “proving” something wrong that is not what I said. Nor what the facts are.
The point is that the U238 is discarded solely because of political decisions. (and only by the US — other countries have reprocessing facilities) Until Carter put a stop to it we had promised the electric companies that we would construct and operate a repossessing facility to make use of all the energy in all the isotopes. The failure of the government to keep its word is why we have all the high level waste just sitting around (and why the nuclear industry is so uneconomic)
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3. Uranium being more abundant than thorium? Not even. ONCE AGAIN, you’ve twisted my statement – which in this case didn’t even MENTION Uranium. In terms of reserves right now, yes, more uranium – in terms of weight or volume. Yet with only 0.7% accessible energy out of U-238, those U-238 reserves don’t deliver much energy vs even the lesser thorium reserves. As to abundance in the earth’s crust, look it up on any chart of abundance of elements in the earth’s crust – more thorium than uranium, and the vast bulk of the uranium is U-238 – USELESS as a fuel, but the raw material for U-235. There are also vast areas of the Moon that are known to have thorium.
The critical issue is available reserves. Any geologist can explain that overall crustal abundance does not equate with extractable reserves. The Naval reactors Facility in Idaho is sitting on one of the worlds largest thorium deposits. It has never been developed and frankly it was a major pain, giving off enough radon to trigger our alarms several times a week. (those alarms are sensitive, I once followed a shipyard worker who caused a major radiation leak evolution. He had a unburned Coleman lantern mantel in his wallet which set off all the alarms. Culprit was the small amount of Thorium salts to increase the brightness once burned)
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4. Using LFTRs to burn up existing nuclear wastes – “So can any reactor if you add enough reactivity.” So, the question is, then, why are we not “adding reactivity” to light water reactors instead of filling up Yucca Mountain? LFTRs will – WILL – burn up our nuclear wastes, once they come on line – and get more energy out of them than we got the first time around in light water reactors. Are you going to say that is a BAD thing???
Nope, you just ignore the fact that politics says that “THOU SHALT NOT HAVE REPROCESSING”. Without that commandment the uranium 238 is back in the game. (and you get to have your own reprocessing as part of your reactor)
*********
5. “And a similar sized ball of Uranium has even more energy.” WHICH kind of uranium? And if it is true about U-235, why are we not extracting 99%+ energy out of it? Why do we have such large quantities of nuclear waste now? You, being a nuclear engineer, must know that the ONE big negative about light water reactors is the nuclear waste and what to do with it. Wouldn’t you WANT those wastes used up instead of contaminating the planet? Why can we not USE more energy. It isn’t how MUCH energy, it is how much USABLE energy. Don’t be comparing U-235 with a ball of thorium. Compare a ball of U-238 to the ball of thorium – and it is no contest.
See the issue with reprocessing facilities above.
********
6. Re sizing reactors up or down: “Yep. and the only reactor to kill an American (SL1) was a “portable” Army reactor that suffered a control rod removal prompt criticality steam explosion that killed the 3 operators.” Mein Gott, your logic fallacies know no end. So ANY small reactor is more dangerous, is that your argument? And no reactor in Chernobyl ever killed anyone, right? We can only include American reactors? Is that your argument? The SL1 meltdown could not have happened with a LFTR. PERIOD. Educate yourself on LFTRs and then get back to me.
The problem with SL1 was the fact that a single man, manually lifting a totally inserted control rod was able to insert enough reactivity, AND RATE OF CHANGE IN REACTIVITY to give prompt criticality. This was not a problem with the basic uranium issue, it was a problem of the reactor being so SMALL that a small change in reactivity was capable of a massive percent change. SMALL is ultra dangerous.
**********
7. Re reactor construtcion costs: “Reactor construction costs of about $600 million (at current efficiencies) vs $20-40 billion (depending on cost overruns) for light water reactors.
Until the lawyers get active.” Is that supposed to be a rebuttal? Why don’t you just say, “My dad can beat up your dad”? Or “Your mother wears combat boots”?
Talk to any expert on reactor economics, the actual construction costs are minor. The problem is getting through all the permitting steps, and that is where the lawyers live. Naval reactors are expensive because of their small size, but are not even in the same league as power plant costs per MW because of the lawyers.
*********
8. Re instant shutdown: “Almost all reactors have the instant shutdown – it is called the SCRAM switch. The problem is that the daughter fission fragments continue to produce about 7% power levels from delayed neutrons so you can not just walk away (unless you have zilch power history) And Thorium has the same daughter fission fragments as Uranium or Plutonium.” 7% still putting out power – is that your idea of being shut down? WOW. As you said, “The problem is…” NO. These guys shut the reactor down and went HOME – no worries about meltdowns or 7% still cranking. If my 140 mph car is shutdown to 7% it is still going 10 mph. Is that being “shut down”? Not in any book I know.
Sorry to educate you but the issue is not the source of the fuel. It is a matter of the fission fragments. Your U233 fission and a U235 fission produce the same fragments. It is the 7% of neutrons that are delayed that allow you to differentiate between a nuclear detonation and a controllable reactor. It is the difference between reaction times having to be 10E-12 seconds and several seconds. So your thorium reactor will have the same delayed neutrons (and consequent 7% power level) as any other reactor. These fragments rapidly decay so after a day you are no longer at measurable power levels, but the decay can take decades to reach near zero levels.
At a 2MW power level the heat conduction through the walls would be enough to prevent any temperature rise. Research reactors (such as current thorium systems) and Power reactors have different engineering problems.
*********
9. No, Pu-239 was not cheaper. And IS not cheaper than U-233. When the first LFTR since the 1960s is built, it will make more U-233 in weeks than the amount of Pu-239 that has been made in over 60 years. It took a LOT of processing to even make the FIRST plutonium. Think Hanford. What you mean to say is that, having MADE the Pu-239, it was lying around and more available. And that took the entire Hanford processing plant – which cost HOW many billions of dollars in today’s dollars and how much energy expenditure?
It takes one absorbed neutron to make U238 go to Pu239. It take one absorbed neutron to make Th232 go to U233. A U233 fission produces LESS neutrons than a U235 (or Pu239) fission. So QED a thorium/U233 reaction is more expensive than a U238/Pu239 reaction simply because it takes more fissions to produce the same amount of new fissile material
**********
With umpteen countries working on FTRs and not even the Americans really putting effort ONE into SUBs, lets make a bet as to which is online first.
I will grant you that with zero effort in nuclear reactors the US is going to fall far behind, the Environmentalists are killing US. But please note that all these great programs are being carried out with reactors that are only rated at 2 MW, just a little bit higher than the power used by our LiBr salt air conditioner on my sub.
*******
There ARE no control rods in LFTRs. Get control rods out of your head. They are yesterday’s tech. Weinberg saw the advantages of liquid nuclear fuel way back in the ’50s. He just couldn’t out vote the military, so none of this has seen the light of day until the Chinese visited Oak Ridge by the thousands, and the world had to ask what is it that the Chinese see that we don’t?
Get Murphy’s law firmly in your mind. Yes I know that you can use thermal expansion properties to control power levels. My first reactor did just that. But you may be interested in what we called … [details trimmed. 8<) Mod] … Similar exercises are left for the ingenuity of future nuclear engineers on a thorium system.
And then I suggest you look up the issue of plating / chemical hide out in multi salt systems. Much like your hot water heater you can form deposits of salts on surfaces. Interesting effects occur if those salts happen to be fissionable. We are not talking about going boom, just melting critical components (which are already stressed by high temperature corrosive salts). Homogeneity is a problem with just about any salt system with cycling temperatures. Look at eutectic salt heat storage systems that fail after a few hundred cycles.
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The world of engineering is not simple. Wishes do not necessarily come true. And note we have been working on molten salt reactors for over 60 years, publishing our research for all to read. Just like the Soviets were able to build nuclear weapons after reading our research notes (still classified) in just a few years and the Smyth report which pointed out all the missteps we made, the world has the chance to take all our efforts and produce a working system, maybe.
[Trimmed. Mod]
(Why? —mod)
Perfect delivery.
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Earl Smith says:
March 13, 2014 at 8:57 pm
***
Thanks — interesting post. Any opinions on a safer, next-generation commercial nuclear reactor?
I want submarine-sized reactors for Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. That way we can have all the electricity we need, and retrofit the dams for better fish migration, flood control and irrigation purposes. We could bring Snake and Columbia River waters to many more places and substantially increase food production if it were not being used for power generation.
@Earl Smith –
“So even though the fissile material comes out of the ground as uranium (235/238) and is then converted into U235 and plutonium239, by your logic it should all be classified as a uranium reactor. Make up your mind and lets be consistent.”
Except that the U-238 is never EVER introduced into the reactor at all. Thorium IS. Your logic says that the bread into the body is first taken and refined and refined and refined and refined externally for weeks and months before being eaten as some other material. As I said, pedantic point.
“We had a very extensive library on the research results of the molten salt breeder programs., as well as our own work on molten fluorides. I have read more primary research reports than you have even seen”.
Any of it relating to thorium?
“Part of the design with the molten salt reactors is an on site reprocessing facility which would allow concentrating the U233. The U233 can then be used to make your bomb. . . . Your “thorium” reactor has much larger amounts of what could be classed as weapons grade U233. The detonation of the U233 weapons proves it can be done.”
From footnote 6 in Wikipedia article on U-233:
Yes, everyone needs nukes that may pre-detonate.
2. “The point is that the U238 is discarded solely because of political decisions. (and only by the US — other countries have reprocessing facilities) Until Carter put a stop to it we had promised the electric companies that we would construct and operate a repossessing facility to make use of all the energy in all the isotopes. The failure of the government to keep its word is why we have all the high level waste just sitting around (and why the nuclear industry is so uneconomic)”
And if you had your way, what percentage of the available energy could and should be extracted? You are saying that, though some “high” level could be extracted, we are just throwing several times of the energy down the drain? And this wasn’t happening in the 25 or so years before Carter? And Reagan and Bush and Carter, etc., never undid Carter’s decision? And how much re-processing did this entail? How much cost? With how much reduction in net energy?
Thorium’s “re-processing” happens simply by flowing in a jacket past the core and then removing the Xenon, and then essentially letting it sit while it re-processes itself. Oversimplified here, but essentially that is it.
3. “The critical issue is available reserves. Any geologist can explain that overall crustal abundance does not equate with extractable reserves. The Naval reactors Facility in Idaho is sitting on one of the worlds largest thorium deposits. It has never been developed…”
Of course overall abundance is not in itself sufficient. But when India and the U.S. and China have large identified it means they specifically know where to go to get it. And the fact that thorium has so far been considered waste byproducts and we are sitting on it, that means that we DO know where to go. Extractable? Yes. They are sitting on it WHY? Because thre currently is no use for thorium. Of course, when LFTRs and other types of thorium reactors come online, thorium will no longer be a waste material. Not only that, thorium reserves will grow as it becomes a non-waste commodity – because the geologists will go out looking for more. That is what happens with oil (and happened with uranium); there is no reason to think that won’t happen with thorium.
For a U.S. thorium deposits map see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NAMrad_Th_let.gif
4. (Re: Burning up existing nuclear waste in LFTRs) “Nope, you just ignore the fact that politics says that “THOU SHALT NOT HAVE REPROCESSING”. Without that commandment the uranium 238 is back in the game. (and you get to have your own reprocessing as part of your reactor)”
What does that have to do with thorium LFTRs being able to use up wastes? If they’ve chosen to do or not do something with U-235 in the U.S., what does that have to do with thorium LFTRs being used all around the world? U.S. decisions on U-235 – a moot point as far as China and India and others are concerned.
From the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) page at Wiki: “Additions of uranium and plutonium to the salt during operation were quick and uneventful…” In other words, as far as things stand right now, my statement stands un-rebutted.
5. Re: a ball of thorium having more or less energy than (an E.S. unspecified type of) “uranium”: First of all, it doesn’t rebut the orignal attatement that that sized ball of thorium is a lifetime of energy for one person. The U-235 or U-238 points you make are tangential, at best.
You don’t rebut my point. You just run off in your pro-uranium direction, which is entirely beside the point. And what is the point? That LFTRs are coming, and there is NOTHING that is going to stop them – unless it is some as-yet-uncovered insurmountable technical problem with thorium LFTRs themselves. Is that problem going to happen? Possibly. So far, nope. Reading several more things on LFTRs today, it sounds more and more like getting from here to there is “merely” hands-on development and engineering. I say merely because it is still going to take many man-years to get the first one up and running. But there really are no technical problems, just developing pilot reactors (for hands-on) and then sizing them up to full scale (multi-GW).
6. “The problem with SL1 was the fact that a single man, manually lifting a totally inserted control rod was able to insert enough reactivity, AND RATE OF CHANGE IN REACTIVITY to give prompt criticality. This was not a problem with the basic uranium issue, it was a problem of the reactor being so SMALL that a small change in reactivity was capable of a massive percent change. SMALL is ultra dangerous.”
I take your point. Yet that reactor was capable of a meltdown – which is what happened. A LFTR is not. If it overheats the reactions slow down due to expansion and even from planned overflow. IN ADDITION, there is the freeze valve. If you don’t know what that is, look it up.
You are pointing at, for example, a tree sloth and arguing that horses can’t run. Apples and oranges. Or maybe a better analog would be internal combustion engines versus diesel. Problems with one do not necessarily translate to the other. And in this case, I argue that your point is moot.
7. Costs: Tens of billions versus <$1B – you minimize this apparently simply because you are so pro-uranium. You just keep raising bars and lowering bars, depending on which favors uranium (and the career you have invested in uranium). Like billions don't matter if they are spent on uranium. It's called "Confirmation bias" – in which anything favorable to your side is given an easy pass, and everything favorable to the competitor (thorium) has the bar raised as high as you need it to, in order to tell everyone it will fail.
You've got a sliding standard, Earl. And nothing you've said argues that thorium is not going to be coming down the road.
ALL technologies get replaced in their time. The horse and buggy, propeller airliners, 8-track tapes, VHS, CDs, steam automobiles. So don't hyperventilate about light water reactors eventually going extinct. Do not imagine that light water reactors will always be the end-all and be-all of nuclear power. In its time thorium will possibly be replaced, too – though with only three elements capable of being the fuel for reactors, maybe not. Or perhaps LFTRs (as opposed to thorium) is what will be replaced eventually.
8. "Research reactors (such as current thorium systems) and Power reactors have different engineering problems."
There ARE no current thorium LFTR systems. As to different problems, I've worked as an engineer in R&D (7 years) and on many full-bore production machines, and this principle is true, not just for nuclear plants. However, if you read up on the MSRE, you will see that they didn't just sit on their hands – they ran experiments and trials to identify problem areas for upscaling to full size. Yes, other problems will come up – but they are, by and large, engineering problems, meaning that the science is proven and it is up to engineeers to work out the technical details. Will they have problems along the way? OF COURSE. How many problems came up in developing light water reactors? The will existed to push through those problems and to solve them. Such will be the case with LFTRs, too.
But you have to remember this: It is not the U.S. working on this. The other countries will solve the problems, and then the U.S. will have to buy the technology. You and your cronies have no say in this.
"It takes one absorbed neutron to make U238 go to Pu239." That is why it takes the gazillion dollar Hanford plant to make plutonium, then? To add one neutron?
"It take [sic] one absorbed neutron to make Th232 go to U233." That is obvious, yet I quote from above: “Separation of the uranium-232 from the uranium-233 proved to be very difficult and not practical.”
****
“There ARE no control rods in LFTRs. Get control rods out of your head.”
Actually, that was a misstatement on my part. (I immediately started talking about liquid fuel, so you can see that I got the two rods juxtaposed and wrote the wrong one down.) There ARE control rods in LFTRs – or at least there were in the MSRE. It is the fuel rods that I meant to point out. My bad. They are not going to use the expansion-cool-down as a primary control. That would not be good engineering at all. They want positive controls, not passive. Even if the molten salts make the reactor more-or-less self-controlling. I certainly wouldn’t count on it. Not without years of experience behind such a decision.
I don’t disagree with your caution about Murphy’s Law, which is why I favor positive controls always. Don’t just start up a LFTR and expect it to manage itself. That would be stupid. I personally DO have a lot of faith in nuclear engineers, that whatever is necessary for good control, they will deal with it and solve it.
And perhaps there IS a minimum sized LFTR, below which the reactivity is too touchy. Good! Then designs will give some wide service factor on size and go no lower. However, the 7Mw MSRE was not, apparently, too small, and that would make an awfully small online reactor. The $600M price tag above was based on a 1Gw reactor. Between 1Gw and 7 Mw is a wide range for smaller reactors.
At the same time, look at how consciously and intentionally you had to TRY to sabotage your S5W.
* * * * *
“And then I suggest you look up the issue of plating / chemical hide out in multi salt systems. Much like your hot water heater you can form deposits of salts on surfaces. Interesting effects occur if those salts happen to be fissionable. We are not talking about going boom, just melting critical components (which are already stressed by high temperature corrosive salts).”
Good points, and ones I have not read up on as much as I would like. However, let’s let Wiki speak here (footnotes removed but available on the Wiki page for MSRE):
“A low chromium, nickel–molybdenum alloy, Hastelloy-N, was used in the MSRE and proved compatible with the fluoride salts FLiBe and FLiNaK. All metal parts contacting salt were made of Hastelloy-N…
…At the time that design stresses were set for the MSRE, the data that was available indicated that the strength and creep rate of Hastelloy-N were hardly affected by irradiation. After the construction was well along, the stress-rupture life and fracture strain were found to be drastically reduced by thermal neutron irradiation. The MSRE stresses were reanalyzed, and it was concluded that the reactor would have adequate life to reach its goals. At the same time a program was launched to improve the resistance of Hastelloy-N to the embrittlement.
An out-of-pile corrosion test program was carried out for Hastelloy-N which indicated extremely low corrosion rates at MSRE conditions. Capsules exposed in the Materials Testing Reactor showed that salt fission power densities of more than 200 W/cm3 had no adverse effects on compatibility of fuel salt, Hastelloy-N, and graphite. Fluorine gas was found to be produced by radiolysis of frozen salts, but only at temperatures below about 100 °C.
Components that were developed especially for the MSRE included flanges for 5-inch (130 mm) lines carrying molten salt, freeze valves (an air-cooled section where salt could be frozen and thawed), flexible control rods to operate in thimbles at 1200 °F (650 °C), and the fuel sampler-enricher. Centrifugal pumps were developed similar to those used successfully in the aircraft reactor program, but with provisions for remote maintenance, and including a spray system for xenon removal. Remote maintenance considerations pervaded the MSRE design, and developments included devices for remotely cutting and brazing together 1½-inch pipe, removable heater-insulation units, and equipment for removing specimens of metal and graphite from the core…
…One unexpected finding was shallow, inter-granular cracking in all metal surfaces exposed to the fuel salt. The cause of the embrittlement was tellurium – a fission product generated in the fuel. This was first noted in the specimens that were removed from the core at intervals during the reactor operation. Post-operation examination of pieces of a control-rod thimble, heat-exchanger tubes, and pump bowl parts revealed the ubiquity of the cracking and emphasized its importance to the MSR concept. The crack growth was rapid enough to become a problem over the planned thirty-year life of a follow-on thorium breeder reactor. This cracking could be reduced by adding small amounts of niobium to the Hastelloy-N.”
All in all, I am glad to have this discussion with you. You have not really rebutted any of my original points, though you may think so. You diverted to straw man arguments, and then when it came down to brass tacks, all you did was make confirmation bias arguments in favor of uranium and tried to nitpick against thorium. I still see nothing ahead but development and engineering to be done for LFTRs – and no even slightly insurmountable problems.
The closest you came IMHO was on the proliferation issue, but the U-232 contamination issue simply shoots that down. No one in their right mind would make a nuke that might pre-detonate.
@Magma
could you please try posting something of substance for a change?
In general those who call any new energy source “free” are activists, and are playing very fast and loose with their terms. Real engineers and planners would blush to make such a claim.
The second test for an activist is the insistence on getting rid of coal and oil as a necessary step in bringing a new technology into use. There is no reason why energy, transportation, shipping, and home use should come from one source. For example, placing cars and trucks as a new demand on the electrical grid is on its face undesirable, unreasonable, and full of unforeseen consequences and costs.
Energy sources should be diversified further, and include coal and gas. The electrical grid is far too vulnerable to be relied on for transportation and shipping. The greatest danger to the grid is government control through remote access and smartmeters, rationing, and instabilities introduced by “renewables.”
TonyG says:
@Magma
could you please try posting something of substance for a change?
Agreed. Look at Zeke’s post, for example. That is substance. None of Magma’s come close.
=======================
joelshore says:
I can’t understand how you guys can take this video of Coleman’s conspiratorial rantings with any degree of seriousness.
Joel Shore: always the odd man out.
Steve Garcia says:
March 14, 2014 at 9:07 am
(continues the sermon)
What you seem to ignore is the fact that I was working on the issues associated with Molten Salt Breeder Reactors 40 years ago. What do you think my work in fluorine systems was directed towards? You seem to think that the issues of corrosion etc were solved. They were NOT. They were merely reduced to an “acceptable” level that we HOPED would prevent the formation of large holes in the reactors. (the problem was not Thorium or Uranium – it was the salts themselves NaF and KF are nasty at high temperatures)
I am in favor of both Thorium and Uranium/Plutonium reactors.
What I was pointing out is Thorium is NOT the Holy Grail.
The biggest idiocy in the Acolytes of Thorium is their insistence that it is bomb proof, proliferation proof, and a panacea.
As you noted U233 as a weapon was hindered by the presence of U232. U233 from Thorium would be (relatively) free of U232 so it would be a better source for the fission core of a thermonuclear device. Thorium would make the risks even greater than they are today.
********
“We had a very extensive library on the research results of the molten salt breeder programs., as well as our own work on molten fluorides. I have read more primary research reports than you have even seen”.
Any of it relating to thorium?
Of course, idiot. Nuclear engineering is not limited to only studies of Uranium.
*********
Yes, everyone needs nukes that may pre-detonate.
Actually having pre detonation problems would mean that you only have a fizzle not a boom. Much less damage experienced. From a non military point of view squib yields are nice.
*******
And if you had your way, what percentage of the available energy could and should be extracted? You are saying that, though some “high” level could be extracted, we are just throwing several times of the energy down the drain? And this wasn’t happening in the 25 or so years before Carter? And Reagan and Bush and Carter, etc., never undid Carter’s decision? And how much re-processing did this entail? How much cost? With how much reduction in net energy?
Who said Reagan and Bush were good guys? In fact I would class them as more evil, simply because they pretended to want to halt the Socialist progress while actually compromising They all just acquiesced to the enviro nuts who wanted to kill ALL nukes (as well as coal, natural gas, and hydro). Reprocessing would allow full use of the U238 being converted to Pu239.
*******
Thorium’s “re-processing” happens simply by flowing in a jacket past the core and then removing the Xenon, and then essentially letting it sit while it re-processes itself. Oversimplified here, but essentially that is it.
Xenon is not a problem it is a feature. No removal system would ever be designed to handle the 24 hour poison, you simply burn your way through it. Costly in neutrons for a breeder budget but that is life. The same “simple” reprocessing can describe a U238 /Pu239 process. you could just use the molten salt system, or remove the fuel rods for a month. The complications only occur id you want to separate the Pu239 / U233 for weapons use.
******
Engineering is the art of taking scientific discoveries and moving from the bench scale to pilot plant to prototype to commercial. Thorium and molten salt systems are still at the bench scale, and have been for over 60 years. We are just a little bit ahead of fusion plants which have been in the works for the same period, with roughly the same success. The same promise of “FREE” energy is made, they just neglect all the extra problems like radiation effects on the plants. (Fusion produces more radiation not less per MEV of energy produced)
******
6. “The problem with SL1 was the fact that a single man, manually lifting a totally inserted control rod was able to insert enough reactivity, AND RATE OF CHANGE IN REACTIVITY to give prompt criticality. This was not a problem with the basic uranium issue, it was a problem of the reactor being so SMALL that a small change in reactivity was capable of a massive percent change. SMALL is ultra dangerous.”
I take your point. Yet that reactor was capable of a meltdown – which is what happened. A LFTR is not. If it overheats the reactions slow down due to expansion and even from planned overflow. IN ADDITION, there is the freeze valve. If you don’t know what that is, look it up.
OK, you have a mass of molten salt that is undergoing out of control excursions. And you actually expect a freeze plug (at the bottom no less) to make a timely melt to spread the components all over the floor (oh what a radiological mess) It is like expecting the oceans to heat up the deep waters from their 4C temperature by heating the surface. Hasn’t happened in 4 billion years.
********
“It takes one absorbed neutron to make U238 go to Pu239.” That is why it takes the gazillion dollar Hanford plant to make plutonium, then? To add one neutron?
Yep. Transmutation of the elements is not cheap when you have to scale up by an Avogadro factor.
***
“It take [sic] one absorbed neutron to make Th232 go to U233.” That is obvious, yet I quote from above: “Separation of the uranium-232 from the uranium-233 proved to be very difficult and not practical.”
So you ignore the danger associated with proliferation associated with isotope separation U233 and prefer lower cost Thorium transmutation U233 that would no longer have the drawbacks associated with a U233 bomb.
****
“There ARE no control rods in LFTRs. Get control rods out of your head.”
Actually, that was a misstatement on my part. (I immediately started talking about liquid fuel, so you can see that I got the two rods juxtaposed and wrote the wrong one down.) There ARE control rods in LFTRs – or at least there were in the MSRE. It is the fuel rods that I meant to point out. My bad. They are not going to use the expansion-cool-down as a primary control. That would not be good engineering at all. They want positive controls, not passive. Even if the molten salts make the reactor more-or-less self-controlling. I certainly wouldn’t count on it. Not without years of experience behind such a decision.
You obviously do not realize that control rods are at best a TERTIARY control and probably a Quaternary control.
First you have the delayed neutrons effect which moves you out of the nano second reaction time zone.
Secondly you have the thermal protection effects of expansion in both water and salt systems
Thirdly you have the physical dispersion effect of not allowing a concentration of fissiles to occur (China Syndrome)/ Fukushima
Fourthly you have the installed neutron adsorbing rods
and Fifthly you have total system poisoning with Boron.
You best have all five available or you are tightrope walking without a safety net.
*********
I don’t disagree with your caution about Murphy’s Law, which is why I favor positive controls always. Don’t just start up a LFTR and expect it to manage itself. That would be stupid. I personally DO have a lot of faith in nuclear engineers, that whatever is necessary for good control, they will deal with it and solve it.
Oh ye of great faith. Experience will teach you that the most dangerous phrase is ” I have taken all eventualities into consideration” Engineering is advanced by massive disasters and many dead bodies.
*******
At the same time, look at how consciously and intentionally you had to TRY to sabotage your S5W.
No, that was just the funniest way to sabotage. There were many much quicker methods that were mentioned in my qualifications exams. Together with the one they had not anticipated. The life of a reactor operator is hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror. And the most dangerous words an officer can say are “:I relive you, sir”
Since this is a CO2 related board I will give you an example of deadly effects of that horrid gas. My sub was only a couple years old when we discovered that we were only a short time away from a monumental disaster. The CO2 on a sub is removed by an amine extraction system and then dumped overboard. We discovered just a couple years after launch that the CO2 we were dumping into the exhaust of a sea water cooling system was altering the pH enough that the piping was already eaten 50% away. And this was after 6 decades of designing and building submarines and working for the safest systems possible.
* * * * *
“And then I suggest you look up the issue of plating / chemical hide out in multi salt systems. Much like your hot water heater you can form deposits of salts on surfaces. Interesting effects occur if those salts happen to be fissionable. We are not talking about going boom, just melting critical components (which are already stressed by high temperature corrosive salts).”
Good points, and ones I have not read up on as much as I would like. However, let’s let Wiki speak here (footnotes removed but available on the Wiki page for MSRE):
You are ignoring the issue. I gave an example of the Glauber Salt crystallization problem. (Homogeneous mixture of Na2SO4 decahydrate) after a number of freeze cycles it separates into components which no longer provide the thermal fusion properties. Molten salts do no maintain a homogenous characterization when undergoing temperature cycling and especially crystallizations. You nice uniform mix of NaF KF and (Ufx / ThFx) will not stay uniform after a few crystallizations (shutdown/ cool down) . You will end up with undissolved concentrations of fissionables in the worst places.
*****
The closest you came IMHO was on the proliferation issue, but the U-232 contamination issue simply shoots that down. No one in their right mind would make a nuke that might pre-detonate.
Repeating. The U232 issue only applies to natural uranium sourced U233. Thorium sourced U233 is free of U232 and thus makes a better bomb. (still not a good bomb, but better than available). Blowups Happen.
It is the general case that in these videos denying global warming that no actual climate scientists are ever involved in their making. While it is true that In The Last Year Of His Life, Roger Revelle’s name was attached to a paper that had already been written and published By Fred Singer downplaying global warming, to leave the story there is entirely misleading.
Revelle’s daughter wrote:
“…Roger Revelle—our father and the “father” of the greenhouse effect—remained deeply concerned about global warming until his death in July 1991. That same year he wrote: “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.” Will and other critics of Sen. Al Gore have seized these words to suggest that Revelle, who was also Gore’s professor and mentor, renounced his belief in global warming. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Readers can read the rest by typing in key words and doing their own Google search.
You deniers always have to twist facts and quotes a little to make your case. How come?
[Reply: you are new here, so you get one (1) free pass. The pejorative “denier” and all similar insults are not allowed, by written site Policy. ~mod.]
The History of the Global Warming Scare
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
Don’t be lazy, present it here. Why the heck should I search for something to confirm your beliefs? My time is my time not yours. Everything your say is assertion otherwise. Garbage in fact.
The global warming scare has always been with us. It just comes and goes. Same with global cooling.
Now please pay attention Barbra & Jack Donachy, this is how it’s done. I don’t ask people to simply Google something I assert, well not 97% of the time. 😉
All I see on your blog is FOOD, FOOD, FOOD and a few icicles. Alaskan temperatures have been trending down since 2000. Please get out of your tent and have a life. Sheesh! A few days of a warm January is not unusual or a sign of global warming. Did you complain during the last Alaskan winter. Brrrrrrrr.
Alaska weather and climate.
http://www.livescience.com/25907-alaska-climate-pdo.html
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html
Well, I should have said the winter of 2012 2013.
dbstealey says:
That’s because Coleman is preaching to the choir here. It is kind of sad that you guys have no ability whatsoever to be skeptical of nonsense that happens to dovetail with your belief system.
Enter your comment here… Not being a trained Scientist, I’m still very interested in the LFTR debate.
It seems to me that the LFTR is still an improvement on safety over the current system of nuclear fission reactors.
I’m glad to see the subject under discussion.
G.S. Williams
joelshore says:
That’s because Coleman is preaching to the choir here. It is kind of sad that you guys have no ability whatsoever to be skeptical of nonsense that happens to dovetail with your belief system.
No, that’s because you are the ‘odd man out’. Emphasis on “odd”.
Very odd.
Joel Shore is like the kid with his mother, watching the military parade where his dad is marching: “Mommy, why is everyone else out of step?”
In fact, Joel is out of step with everyone else, as we can see in all the comments. Earth to joel: it isn’t everyone else who is wrong. Look in the mirror…
…so go peddle your runaway global warming nonsense elsewhere. There are plenty of fools who will eat up that pseudo-science. But folks here know better: catastrophic AGW has zero scientific evidence to support it.
Now, I challenge YOU to post verifiable, testable scientific evidence that supports your crazy belief system. Understand that neither papers, nor computer models fit the definition of ‘evidence’. Rather, they are assertions.
So go ahead. Post your evidence. Show verifiable evidence that X amount of CO2 causes Y degrees of global temperature rise.
Take your time, we can wait…
dbstealey says:
March 14, 2014 at 9:11 pm
++++++++
Thank you dbstealey… I needed to read something where someone sets things straight, Basically tell them to go ahead find evidence, present it, and then put the so called evidence under scrutiny…
Now look in the mirror. Have you seen your side’s nonsense?
Thanks again for the information everyone. Today I’m travelling from LAX to Managua. I’ll let you know if the climate changes between here and there.
To mod: I do indeed see the site’s value. Thinking of asking the same questions at one of the gaia sites. 🙂
There are three components to the global warming fraud; political motivation well expressed in Tim Ball’s new book “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science, how Climate Science was corrupted as brilliantly portrayed by John Coleman in this masterful video, and the actual scientific fraud that has yet to be made public.
In Hansen et al 1981 Hansen states that
“The most sophisticated models suggest a mean warming of 2° to 3.5°C for doubling
of the CO2 concentration from 300 to 600 ppm (6-8).” (SCIENCE, VOL. 213, 28 AUGUST 1981)
This is an outright lie because General Circulation Models are essentially weather models and are completely incapable of “suggesting” global temperature with the sort of accuracy claimed and predictions are limited to periods of weeks not years.
What Hansen did was to project a CO2 increase into the future and then convert this projected CO2 increase to temperature projection using a fabricated CO2 forcing parameter and contrived climate sensitivity factor to do so.
In Hansen’s June 23, 1988 presentation to Senator Wirth’s Committee scenario “A” is a projection of atmospheric CO2 concentration based on a 1.5%/year increase.
To hide the smooth curve created from this Hansen superimposes jitter created by his climate model projections.
If you remove the smooth CO2 curve all that is left is jitter centred around a zero value.
So in fact climate models never predicted global warming from CO2 emissions it was just a Hansen fabricated warming curve modified artificially by climate model to give the false impression of scientific validity.