Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
Chernobyl and Fukushima of course. You can say all day how irrelevant these are as examples for German reactors but they show what happens if anything goes wrong for whatever reason and the core melts.
But that's terrible logic. The Chernobyl reactor meltdown was exacerbated by the fact that the moderator used was graphite which proceeded to catch on fire when exposed to oxygen. Everything nowadays is light or heavy water.

And then you have the nuclear waste. Sure, the industry says it's safe and we can just dump it somewhere near or below our drinking water, forget about it and use fracking in the same region in a thousand years. Surely nothing could go wrong there. A lot of people see this differently though and think having to change containments every 100 years will also become really expensive in a thousand years. Just like destroying plants may not kill us now, but will probably reduce the oxygen supply for future generations. and then languages, signs and so on we use now are by no means guaranteed to survive the next few thousand years. So storage sites can be forgotten, signs become unreadable and future generations may make big mistakes around them, not knowing about the dangers inside.
A large storage facility is not needed for storage of nuclear waste. The current procedure in the US is to simply store it on site in pools and that has been working fine since the nuclear waste doesn't actually take up that much space.

Secondly, industry doesn't want to store it anywhere near water. Don't know where you got that idea. Hence, why a mountain in the middle of Nevada was chosen to be the storage location and not a swamp in Louisiana.

Thirdly, you don't need to store it that long. Things that have half lifes in the 100,000 or 1,000,000+ years are not that harmful. The dangerous elements are the ones with short half lifes that will decay very rapidly and thus pose a risk if in a concentrated form. But by their own nature, these elements decay in a matter of decades. Are you saying that it is impossible for humans to hold on to waste until 2100?



Because if you cannot supply it with electric energy any more for whatever reason, it blows up all by itself. I know there are safety measures and they do sound good, but it's still not an inherently stable design, it's a design that you have to keep stable through constant monitoring and other efforts in order to prevent a catastrophe.
Also not true. Control systems that can initiate shutdown when detecting any variations in normal operation have been around for a while. Also, another technical aspect, you can design reactors to have either a positive or negative temperature reactivity coefficient. I have personally visited a research reactor where the operator removed the control rods and just sat with us and watched the power level rise and rise...until it hit around ~250C (if I remember correctly) at which point the power level stabilized. This is because the system had a negative temperature coefficient, as the temperature increases, the reactivity actually decreases and self moderates for you.


Yes, Thorium sounds great and a lot more stable and safe.
I agree.