Raymond Camden

Comment Threads

• Nojay commented on An Apology
  So how much actual fusion has Polywell, backed by the US Navy, demonstrated? Focus Fusion? Muon catalysis? The Joint European Torus (JET) ran a fusion campaign twenty years ago that yielded 22MJ of fusion energy in a 1.5 second burst with a Q of about 0.6 i.e it took about 35MJ of input to get that 22MJ of fusion energy out. The ITER tokamak is being designed to produce 500MW thermal output for 50MW of input, sustainable for thousands of seconds. That's a Q figure of 10 and a big step on the roadmap towards a commercial fusion generating station,...
• Nojay commented on An Apology
  The "vested interests" aren't interested in developing a fission reactor concept like molten-salt fuel transport because they want to spend their money building proven reactors that will produce electricity at about 5c/kWh for at least half a century. I notice you didn't, like most other folks who boost the molten-salt concept, conflate it with thorium breeding. Thank you. I've lost count of the number of people who have breathlessly told me that the US had a for-reals! LFTR working in the 1960s and it was the evull nuclear weapons people who put the kibosh on it for nefarious purposes. As...
• Mariner commented on An Apology
  Though a fully-functioning LFTR would be the ideal, I think you're correct about the difficulty of getting one developed, especially as the nuclear industry is dead set on building iterations of PWRs. For this reason, I know that some proponents of MSRs are promoting other designs such as the Denatured Molten Salt Reactor. Some of the benefits of an LFTR (chiefly in lack of complexity in comparison to some of the other Gen IV reactors and inherent safety due to operation at atmospheric pressure), but using Uranium along with Thorium and with no attempt to reprocess the fuel. The idea...
• Greg. Tingey commented on An Apology
  Must disagree ... The rabid anti-nuclear movement were not even half-discredited in this country until at least half-way through the coalition guvmint. And they are still out there, screaming & moaning, every time anyone even mentions the word "nuclear" Oddly enough Osborne actually understands technical investment for the future - the first chancellor to do so for a very long time - oddly enough, because of his family firm's business ... he understands that, even in a Paint-&-Wallpapers company, you need state-of-the art presses & industrial chemists & that you can't just turn the tap off & on at random....
• Nojay commented on An Apology
  Molten-salt reactors are actually much more complex than light-water, heavy-water, fast spectrum and other commercial reactors being operated and built today. In their case the fuel stays still and coolant is circulated around it, boiling-kettle steam-engine simple. The coolant (gas, water, steam, sodium, whatever) doesn't pick up any contamination from waste isotopes in the jacketed fuel and at the end of each operating cycle the fuel pins containing all the waste materials produced are removed and stored to be buried or reprocessed after the short-halflife actinides have decayed. At end of life the reactor structures are only slightly radioactive from...