Oh the back story to this.. You owe me a new phone

You're confusing evolution with social Darwinism, which once again indicates that you still refuse to learn anything before you start typing.

We call you names and make fun of you because you are willfully ignorant. But we don't hate you. These threads will lose something if you ever crack open a basic biology textbook.

Would obama use his pen, or his phone to do that?

People think radiation is only man made. They have no fucking clue how much NATURAL radiation there is.

In fact, nuclear waste is usually less radioactive than alot of NATURAL background radiation level is in their very own city or stream.

You're just bananas.

I love how you keep changing your avatar hoping no one is going to recognize the dinosaur christian cultist.

Shouldn't Jesus be riding that dino?

tangentially related..

on Amazon Prime there is a movie called Uranium.  All about it.
Anyway, there is a young nuclear engineer PhD type who has designed a reactor that uses nuclear waste as it's fuel. Has no waste, and better than typical nuke plant ina  few other ways.

I learned a lot in the show.



by the way, pretty sure it said uranium decays into lead.

Thanks for posting this link OP.  I'd heard about this a little while and wanted to read more on it, this is a good article. The more I see different things the more I'm inclined to believe in George Carlin's view on environmentalism.  No matter what, the Earth will be just fine.

The question that remains for me, is, what would this look like if it was starting up today?  Assuming it was allowed to run on it's own, what would be the first indications this was happening.  Is there a chance that in some forgotten jungle or desert, or far beneath the ocean's floor, This is currently going on?  Would all our sensors designed to collect on nuclear events detect this now?

George Carlin also opined on religion.

Why do stupid people exist?

Also, billion yr old rocks are not strange, the age of the rock is not the age of the carving.

So you think people living outdoors, who understand that unfiltered water killed (hence they drank wine), who built settlements next to running water (still unfiltered and full of bacteria BTW), would mean they had to know about Germ Theory and microorganism. They knew very basic medicine too, did God also teach them physiology and biomedical science? They knew the importance of certain herbs and plants for medicinal purposes, did God teach the tribes of Israel in a Chemistry 101 class?

This thread is developing nicely, and has some potential.

No I am not confusing anything. One of the fastest ways to shut down arguments for evolution is to ask what TYPE of evolution is being referred to.

In person I use the pyramid on the back of a dollar bill to illustrate it. Each layer of the pyramid holds up the layer above it, and the top layer is something totally different than the rest (its an eye, not bricks), but it completes the shape and is held up by the layers of bricks. And if you kicked out the bottom layers, the thing on top would come crashing down. To illustrate the base, you have the evolutionary TIMEFRAME (billions of years, the Big Bang, etc). Above that, relying on the timeframe you have biological evolution, which contends we are just animals, that animals can change kinds over millions of years, survival of the fittest, etc. and finally at the top you have the SOCIAL implications that logically follow us being mere animals who ascended through survival of the fittest (social Darwinism, letting the sick and retarded die, eugenics, etc). Notice the bottom layers are made up of so-called scientific fields, but the top layer is again made up of something totally different. And if you get rid of millions of years, or macro evolution, the deceptions and agenda built on it come crashing down.

Global warming is the same way, you have the pseudoscientific study, then resting on that you have the agendas to restrict travel, meat, and all sorts of products to the elites and control businesses with carbon credit bribery.

 

Know the toe!

In my experience, one of the fastest ways to shut down a discussion about evolution is to display a staggering degree of ignorance, such that you come off as a lost cause, totally unwilling to learn anything.

Your pyramid thing falls apart in re evolution and cosmology. You ignore evidence because it doesn't line up with what you want to be true. Evolution has a very strong base of evidence. You just don't want to see it. Which is fine...This approach allows you to provide plenty of entertainment, even if it can be frustrating.

I dare you to try your pyramid approach to your own beliefs. But that would require you to be objective, look at evidence, and, *gasp* learn something.

As to your bit about social Darwinism...

"This is an example of the naturalistic fallacy -- the argument that how things are implies how they ought to be. But "is" does not imply "ought." Evolution only tells how things are; it does not say how they should be.

The source of social Darwinism was not Darwin but Herbert Spencer and the tradition of Protestant nonconformism going back to Hobbes via Malthus. Spencer's ideas of evolution were Lamarckian. The only real connection between Darwinism and social Darwinism is the name.

Diverse political and religious ideas draw upon evolutionary biology, including ideas advocating greater cooperation.

Evolutionary theory shows us that the long-term survival of a species is strongly linked with its genetic variability. All Social Darwinist programs advocate minimizing genetic variability, thus reducing chances of long-term survival in the event of environmental change. An understanding of evolution should then rebuke any attempt at social Darwinism if the long-term survival of humanity is treated as a goal.

Eugenics and social Darwinian accounts are more often tied to the rise of the science of genetics than to evolutionary theory." link

And, I hate to break it to you, but people ARE animals. Specifically, vertebrates, mammals, and primates. What did you think we were? Oak trees?

Why are you throwing that silly fact into the discussion?

Don't you know about all the people whose fragile psyches cannot accept this simple concept?

I believe I'm a vertebrate.

Damn typo

Intradasting...

Say what?

U 235 decays to Pb 207, and U 238 decays to Pb 206.

In a few years.

Yeah, don't wait around for it.

Which kinda makes it suck for a nuclear fuel.

What?

 

This thread should go well

I'm a man who realizes my limitations, be they natural or caused (tbi for the loss). I'd love to get more into the science behind reactors and such, but it takes so damn long for me to retain any new material.  I watch the hell out of science shows, like the Urnaium one I mentioned on Amazon Prime.  very cool.  I'll have to watch it a few more times in the next week to learn some stuff.

anywho, I read how they knew the "reactor" in africa was there. very cool. I even understood the process of on and off they described. I wonder if there are current ones right now running. maybe the cause of volcanic eruptions, steam vents, etc???

Science is elegant.

Keep plugging away at it, and understand it up to whatever your ability is.

That's what we all have to be content with.

It's this part in blue that has me mystified.

My addition

The concentration of U-235 in natural uranium is now too low for this kind of thing to happen anymore.

There may be some / a lot of fission going on in or around the core, possible even a type of fast breeder reactor, but not happening in the crust anymore.

I dont pretend to understand it. I just went back and re-watched that section.
Dr. Leslie Dewan (nuclear physicist)

"it uses a liquid fluoride salt as fuel"

Here she is talking about it.

Actually, the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor uses liquid fluoride salt as the carrier for the nuclear fuel.  LFTR's can use U-235, Th-232, Pu-238.  The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) used both U-235 and U-233.  The use of U-233 proved that Th-232 could be used a primary reactor fuel.

More on LFTR's:

Energy from Thorium

LFTRs'

Thorcon

I'm going to stop at the 7 minute mark and post some of my observations on her talk. This way, I will open my mouth and prepare to eat my foot with the latter portion of her talk.

I'm going to comment on 3 of her points with some ramblings of my own:

Fuel cladding limits it's use to 3 to4 years in the reactor:
-no, it's not the cladding; after 1.5x3 years (3 cycles of 1.5 years each), the fissile and fissionable nuclei remaining in the rods aren't enough to economically generate power in their current geometry

only extract about 4% of the energy in the fuel which is why the nuclear waste is so dangerous:
-not exactly; if it doesn't fission or breed into a plutonium isotope, it doesn't get radioactively "hot"; by using the 4% number, she has to be including the fissionable, but not fissile U238 - which for all intents and purposes isn't radioactive; U238 that breeds into plutonium isotopes, however, do become meaningfully radioactive, and problematically so - if I had to put a % to it using her metrics, this is a 1-2% type of problem.  The majority of the radioactivity stems from the fissioning of U235, which by itself isn't very radioactive, but the fission products are absolutely deadly, albeit shortlived with half lives on the order of 30-60 years (after 10 half lives, it's essentially gone).

radioactivity of 100,000 years vs 100 years:
-yes, that is largely true, but the nice thing about something that is radioactive for 100,000 years is that ... it's not as radioactive as something with a 100 year half life.  
However, the 1E4 to 1E5 year halflife sits at the [un]happy medium of being both biologically harmful, and very persistent in the environment;
Things with half lives in the 1E6 to 1E7 years, like U235 and U238, aren't biologically harmful from a radioactivity standpoint;
Things with half lives in the 10s of years, like cesium, strontium, etc, are tremendously biologically harmful, but disappear from the environment after 10 half-life periods. Plutonium, with 239 and 240 having half lives in the thousands and tens of thousands of years, sits in the uncomfortable median of being both biologically harmful and persistent in the long term.

So, now I'm going to watch the remainder of her talk, trying to figure out how we are going to fission off all of this U238, or whether we are just going to fission off the remaining U235 and Pu239/240/241 that was bread from the original uranium feed stock.  A molten salt core will give us a better geometry for fissioning off these lower quantities of fissile materials than the fixed geometry of a conventional pressurized or boiling water reactor (PWR and BWR, respectively).  

I'm confident that there is nothing that can be done about the cesium, strontium, etc, fission byproducts - there's no way this design gets rid of those. It's just that those only pose a 300-600 year storage problem vs the 60,000 to 240,000 year storage problem of plutoniums.  So, if this is a "no waste reactor" she really means its a no "millennia-lived waste" reactor.

Off to watch the rest ... and preparing to taste my foot ...

There, I fixed it for you.

More of my thoughts on the video posted by maggiethecat.  And, dude, thank you for finding that. It's a very interesting video.  I looked for "Uranium film/movie" and "Amazon" and came up empty when trying to find what you were referencing.


Thermal vs Fast "thermal produces power, fast reduces waste"
Ok.  But in breeding the U238 (which is what I'm assuming we are doing here given the wording and numbers in her talk), we turning a very low-level waste into a very high level waste - the higher level is plutoniums and possibly more fissile uraniums (very problematic wastes) - but these fissile products are typically fissioned by the thermalized neutrons (good) - but these fission products are very high level wastes (bad) but the half lives of this waste are one to two orders of magnitude less than their fissile parents (not good, but much better than before when viewed on certain time scales)

ZrH(ish) Moderator [the "ish" means I didn't catch the exact composition in the talk]
I've never thought of a ZrH as a moderator.  We use it in PWR/BWRs as fuel pellet cladding because of its neutron transparency. This one really threw me for a loop.  I'm wondering if the cross section of ZrH(ish) is highly nonlinear with respect to neutron energy, and is somehow less transparent at higher energies, thereby slowing them into the "thermal" region of neutron speeds, where ZrH(ish) materials are very transparent.
I don't know what's going on here.  I want to look into this in a lot more depth. I mean, there are lots of awesome things to do with ZrH, but I never thought this was one of them.

Walkaway Safe
Also means the primary safety mode has the potential to render the site useless - this presents a large capital risk for investors - which is a problem for all molten salt reactors.  This walkaway safe part is also what makes servicing molten salt reactors very problematic from an operational standpoint.  
In a loss of offsite power scenario in a conventional reactor, the level of effort to maintain the core in a safe and restartable condition essentially follows a decaying exponential.  In molten salt reactors in a loss of offsite power situation, there is a constant level of effort needed to keep the reactor in a restartable condition - if this level of effort can't be maintained, restarting the reactor could be very questionable - also the reactor risks going into its ultimate safety mode which is not good from a financial standpoint.

Cheap
Less expensive than coal isn't hard.  Less expensive than natural gas is.
The fuel costs for this type of reactor are nothing, which is awesome! Well, it seems awesome.
The odd reality is, however, that fuel costs for conventional PWR/BWR reactors don't even show up on your power bill when measured in USD.  Fuel costs are about 4/10ths of a penny per kWh (mining, enrichment, fabrication, core loading design and delivery).
The problem is the immense upfront capital expenditures in building a nuclear plant - compounded by changing regulatory and political winds that can grind the whole thing to an abrupt halt through no particular fault of the design.
With natural gas prices where they currently are - nuclear isn't happening - and unconventional nuclear is even less likely.

The Oklo reactors are amazing.  Nature stumbled into a condition that the brightest men on Earth struggled to design.  But, nature also cheated ... with the initial enrichments.  Nature also didn't care about the consequences.

What's ZrH? (just a short answer about the acronym is enough doesn't need to be too detailed)

I tried to google but just got tons of results about Zurich, as zrh is their airport code. "zrh nuclear" got results about a nuclear engineering program in zurich

Thanks

Zirconium hydride and related zirconium alloys.  The fuel assemblies in PWR/BWR reactors are made of these metal alloys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirconium_hydride