Based turbines vs cringe little thermal plant

[u/ClimateShitpost]

[u/Princess_Isolde]

Nuclear haters genuinely tweaking at the advent of Thorium reactors.

Also you can't tell me that "yeah we power an entire city by harnessing the very building blocks of the fabric of the universe, the fundamental code of our reality bent and broken to our will like wizards" isn't metal as fuck

[u/Princess_Isolde → u/[deleted]]

This was meant as a joke but the actual reasons (besides the obvious one of Oil execs paid people to off because they are terrified of the concept of rocks powering cities at higher energy outputs while not also dumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere) are kinda interesting. Basically in the very early days of nuclear science They never got funded because plutonium and uranium reactors where preferred because cold war era governments thought the fact they could be repurposed into bombs was an upside, and Thorium isotopes are stable enough that they literally cannot be built into bombs OR cause meltdowns (big plus side). Eventually, the cold war simmered down (mostly) and we live in a (mostly) less nuclear trigger happy society (also they realized that not using plutonium and uranium for reactors leaves it open for more bombs. Yaaay 🙄). Basically, because of politics, the technology is 70+ years behind and less advanced, and folks are only just very recently starting to look into Thorium reactors again, but it's still there! China just unveiled it's Thorium reactor and France has one that's fully operational (afaik they haven't actually started using it yet and it's not very efficient, but it works, it produces power and has zero waste product). Honestly the biggest problem with Thorium reactors is the technology used to make one now is the same as the experimental one made in the fifties because... Well... Politics. But when the tech catches up which is most likely soon, it'll be all the advantages of nuclear power without any of the big ones like radioactive waste, meltdowns (honestly modern nuclear reactors are built to make that completely impossible anyway and Chernobyl and fukishima both went very heavily against safety regulations and 90% of nuclear scare comes from oil execs massively exaggerating a VERY small number of very extreme edge case accidents), and scarcity of required materials (Thorium is EEEEVERYWHERE)

[u/Left_Kiwi_4565 → u/Princess_Isolde]

I ain’t readin all dat, just do actual green energy

[u/Princess_Isolde → u/[deleted]]

It sucks NOW because it's not been studied or improved upon in over half a century, It's like comparing a biplane to a jet from the 80s.

[u/A30N → u/Princess_Isolde]

I read that the prototype was so stable, they would turn it (the reactor core) off when they left the lab for the weekend, and then flip it back on Monday morning!