Comments by "David Elliott" (@davidelliott5843) on "Is Thorium Our Energy Future? | Answers With Joe" video.

@tonychen76 Those people would have never got thyroid cancer if the USSR had admitted there was problem and issued iodine tablets. They didn't so people absorbed radioactive iodine and eventually got cancer. At least they were treated early so survived. Molten salt reactors don't release radioactive iodine 131 or caesium 137 or any of the volatile isotopes because they form stable salts within the reactor. You "could" remove the lid and apart from neutrons and radiation being emitted there is no nasty gas or dust release. Put the lid back and the emissions stop. I'm not suggesting that's a great idea, but it illustrates how safe and stable the core of a molten salt reactor is. The Oak Ridge MSR was shut down every Friday night and restarted it on Monday morning. They didn't fuss about power control because the thing was fundamentally load following. Reducing the heat demand causes the salt to warm up, the reaction slows down d the heat in/out rebalances. All within the safe operating range. Imagine doing any of that with a PWR. Oh yes they did - at a place called Chernobyl.
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@talltroll7092 New Scientist says - Chernobyl will have caused about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 cases of other cancers, compared with several hundred million cancer cases from other causes. My words - Not trivial but certainly not as bad as "experts" predicted. We do not know how many resulted in deaths. Even the satff who suffered acute radiation sickness (ARS) during the accident were not all killed. Some are still alive.
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@texmex9721 They were stunningly brave and we all owe them far more than we realise. On the other hand their lack of dying shows that the human body is better adapted to radiation damage than we realise. Too much of anything will kill, but maybe we are more scared of ionising radiation than we need to be.
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U233 in a LFTR would not leave the power plant and might not even leave the reactor, it simply remains in the fuel salt where it's burnt. There's no need to handle it. It's very high radioactivity makes it useless as bomb fuel.
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Coal and oil do huge damage to the planet regardless of global warming. If they were not so cheap they'd have gone long ago. If LFTRs really could make energy as cheap as Sorensen suggests, fossil fuels, windmills and solar panels would die overnight. I suspect that's the real reason that politicians are not interested.
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@zigzagduck952 Check out "Radiation and Reason" by Wade Allen.
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India has spent many years working on a thorium solid fuel and so far failed. Thorium was dropped in favour of uranium by the USA exactly because it wont work well in solid fuel systems and the fissile fuel (U233) is too radioactively hot for bomb material.
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Solar power is not much use on the Moon with its 14 day nights. On Mars, the panels need to be twice the size because the sun is not so strong. All info discussed by Sorensen on other channels.
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A big advantage of molten salt reactors is they don't produce pure iodine and caesium which exit a PWR meltdown as gaseous products. They would simply make their own salt in a LFTR (which can'y boil away).. The Neutron poison Xenon135 is simply sparged away and stored until it's decayed to low levels. Hydrogen isotopes are not discussed but as there's no water in the core is it a problem?
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The nastiness of nuclear bombs was seriously played up by all governments. They wanted the populace to be scared so they'd support a huge military to keep them safe. Im not suggesting nukes are nice but governments really over played their hands. They also used power plants to make bomb fuel (UK's Magnox for example). Then they chose inherently risky power plant designs that cost a fortune and go pop even few years. It's no surprise that nuke power has a bad press. Some environmentalists want to use energy scarcity to force central control of all energy use. They don't say so but that sounds a lot like communism. It failed last time and however it's packaged will fail again.
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Sorenson made the point that many transuranics are very useful so chemical processing is needed. He's also points out that the chemical processes are easy to do in spite of them being radioactively hot. Carbon is used in the British AGR solid fuelled gas cooled rectors. These run with steam conditions of 565 degs C so the gas (and carbon) has to be a lot hotter. The graphite core is there for the life of the reactor. This http://www.formatex.info/energymaterialsbook/book/761-768.pdf suggests a beryllium liquid moderator instead of graphite.
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Sadly there are so many rigid opinions Solar = good Nukes = bad. Explain molten salt and thorium to an anti nuke protestor and they wont listen. Explain it to a traditional nuke engine and all they can think is how its not what they are used to. A presenter from Atkins (different vid) said it would be at least 50 years before thorium comes on stream. Why so long?
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One of the many problems with PWRs is that radioactive Iodine and Caesium are both released in gaseous forms and both are toxic to life. A molten salt reactor cannot do this as the Iodine and Caesium will produce their own salt within the reactor core.
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Thorium will only work in liquid fuelled reactor. It's a waste of time in solid fuel plant and why it was dropped when they were making solid fuel for bombs.
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