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| User Info | UK About To Leapfrog US In Energy?; entered at 2012-03-04 00:09:36 | |||
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Swarf_maker Posts: 124 Registered: 2008-10-18 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada 
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Chris92346:Quote:However what would you say are other disadvantages of this technology? Lets play devils advocate. Beyond the fact that they do produce radioactive waste, even if only 1% of that of a PWR, there aren't a lot of disadvantages. First and foremost, there isn't an approved design yet - and that is no small hurdle. Second, LFTR breeds only about 10% in excess of its needs, so you need ten LFTRs of a given size running for a year to produce enough excess U233 to fuel an eleventh. The US has enough U233 to fuel one LFTR but has plans to denature this. LFTR can burn plutonium to start up but that means processing spent fuel from PWRs to extract the plutonium. (Or perhaps you could convince the military to part with some.) You are going to get a lot of resistance to that idea. Similarly, you could build fast breeder reactors to provide fuel to start LFTRs. Again not an easy sell politically. Third, because the U233 produced in LFTR is highly radioactive due to contamination with a small percentage of short half-life U232, it is not particularly good for making bombs. That said, it CAN be used to make bombs, particularly if you don't care about the welfare of the people you have handling it. Wind, solar and biofuels simply won't come close to meeting the demand for energy. Oil, Coal, and natural gas WILL run out. Demand for oil will soon exceed our ability to produce it, then it will start to get really expensive. This will feed into the general economy and you will see some huge price increases in food. (Waste?) Heat from LFTR could be used to power liquid fuel production for transportation and agriculture via the Fischer-Tropsch process. But note that F-T is by no means carbon neutral. Right now we have a problem. If we don't start working toward a solution very soon it could grow into a predicament - with no practical solution. Last modified: 2012-03-04 00:15:14 by swarf_maker
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