In the reactor setup, the sodium in this case and pressurized water in the case of a PWR are in a closed loop to prevent exposure to the atmosphere. The heat is passed via a heat exchanger with cool water on one side of a metal wall and hot water or melted sodium on the other. The nuclear reactor heated medium be it water or sodium does NOT make contact with the cooling medium, usually water. Think of it like a cooling block for a water cooled computer. The coolant passes through my cooling block, over the metal and takes the heat from the processor on the other side, and water never touches the processor.
Or to explain it like your car, your cars cooling system is pumping coolant around the outside of the cylinder and not inside the cylinder. The heating action of the cars combustion is cooled via conduction of the heat through the metal engine block to the coolant and to the environment via the radiator.
The vents on the steam turbine and cooling towers is non irradiated cooling water dropped into the tower, allowing it to condense into water and be reused at the bottom and excess heat floating out the top as steam. You can build a nuclear tower style cooling system for water cooled pc’s, I’ve done it in the past. Use a y connector with a 4” fan to blow air into and up the “tower”, use a shower head on top of the tower to drop the water like rain, and pump the collected water in the bottom through your water cooling setup. It’s possible to run the computer slightly under room temperature with this setup, and can be built rather cheaply.
And for your car, check for coolant leaks around your heater core, hoses and radiator. If there’s no visible coolant leak you’ve probably got a head gasket blown. Get that shit fixed before you ruin your engine. I’ve got a 1977 New Yorker that still doesn’t leak coolant to this day with original hoses on it. Losing coolant ISNT normal.
I didn't imply coolant was leaking only that an engine emits as it is in use, and the coolant level constantly needs topping up. Hence the constant run off of further resources needed in energy production and machine use. What amounts does it need to sustain its energy?
It is more energy efficient, because it using more resources. These are supposedly more environmental because it is sodium burning hotter and cooling quicker.
They are currently working on refining thorium salt reactors to reuse much of the molten salt. Some will be, for lack of better common terms, “burned up” in the reactor, and will need to be replenished or topped off. How much is up to several factors like efficiency, purity, reactor output etc.
Once mining and refining facilities are set up and streamlined, keeping them running will be a matter of cost. One of the major benefits of a thorium salt reactor is the short half life of the materials involved. Instead of spent nuclear fuel rods sitting around an area that needs guarding and shielding for thousands of years, the half life is around 50 years. It’s been a while since I’ve read up on experimental thorium salt reactors so my details may be less than perfect but they’re a good step forward.
The environmental damage from mining and shipping the reactor materials is minimal when compared to the large scale damage of open pit mining of coal, and the radiation released from the smoke stacks as coal is burnt. Fun fact, coal plants emit more radiation than nuclear plants. Strip mines for rare earth metals and cobalt for electric cars are far more damaging but you seem to know that from other posts of yours. A lithium ion battery electric car for me is no deal but a nuclear powered vehicle I can make a switch for. Probably won’t happen in or lifetime due to boomers fear of people making dirty bombs with the materials, damned fools.
Thanks again. I think it has more servicing is that angle. Always an angle. It needs the extracted products. Yes at the same time it offers some environmental benefits. Although it still has nuclear waste.
Coal emits true. But it emits less than the woodchip burners creating electricity off incineration all over America, being sold as renewable and green because they recycle scrap wood. But they aren't only burning the wood, they're burning paint, some are burning rubber chips off tires. Wood burning is far more emitting than coal, green wood wet wood sap and lichen. The oxymoron is largely in the mining of coal, but mining uranium is an ugly business. Copper mining is very bad for the environment and so is almost all mining especially rare earth minerals and gems, stripping mining, and the toxic run off created from metals like copper etc. Strangely nobody complains about cooking, it is super emitting. But they will use biofuel, ethanol, it is worse than diesel and is thicker. Nevermind the impact of growing sugar cane or plants turned into ethanol just to burn as it emits twice as much. Diesel was less. Until somebody profited more off recycling for even more emissions.
EVs have almost nothing to do with the environment they're simply the next upgrade costing you more. What they don't emit out of their exhaust they emit in their consumption. Their ridiculously expendable lifetimes. Everything electric breaks quicker. Nobody can repair it either, because it is cheaper just to buy a new one. As we are left with mountains of ewaste putting plastic, acids, and batteries and toxic alloys everywhere. More plastic and ewaste in electrics. Now they control you completely, it is all on the same source, inflation, hacked and monitored. Sure they offer hydrogen as well. It is astronomically more expensive and the hydrogen fuel cells deplete much quicker than EV batteries. Like they need servicing every so many refills. EV batteries lasting about 7 years. Well not when you recharge them more and more because everything and your robot dog is plugged into your car.
You are correct in that there is no free lunch. Everything costs and everything has downstream impacts. Solar is hard on the environment to produce panels and they wear it quickly and are hard to recycle while solar collecting strays to heat water for steam are basically an invisible death beam to flying creatures. Wind is unpredictable and kills birds and bats en mass and the blades aren't recyclable, plus they need petroleum in their generator part. Hydro electric seems nice until one looks at the damage to eco systems. Plus dams get old and fail. Geothermal is an option, in some areas more than others but require expensive installation and even using an active volcano for the heat requires good plating to handle the sulphur. Coal is dirty to burn, radioactive and bad to mine. Electric batteries ruin the earth to produce. Nuclear requires resource mining and has radioactive waste. There IS no perfect solution yet.
The best we can do is do minimal harm while we work on newer safe and clean technology. We will get there someday, but for now, efficiency wise nuclear IS our best provider. Highest output for lowest damage of environment, when one has a suitable storage area for the waste figured out.
To help in the future we should start building waste energy plants near major cities. Burning plastics returns almost the same energy used to create them in the form of heat. Burning the plastic to heat water, drive a turbine and produce electricity to power the station and run electric vehicles on site for sorting and moving the material, maybe even charging the vehicles used to bring the waste to the site.
We can add in further usefulness by adding a double water reservoir with turbines similar to those used in Britain. They have to regulate their power carefully and can actually time increased consumption to commercials on popular televisions shows. IE everyone runs to put the electric kettle on for tea while the program is on commercial and they have a noticeable spike in electric demand. They have a large reservoir that turbine/pumps fill with water when electricity is put into the turbines, and on demand, they can allow the water to flow back through these turbines and spin them to produce power. Once the added load on the grid is gone, they can switch it back and use them to refill the reservoir again for the next need. If there’s ever a spill, it’s water. It’s not harmful to the environment, it’s cheap to refill losses and is basically a giant water battery.
By making a large power station Center we could combine technologies and have a waste energy plant burn plastics, catching the smoke and passing it through water like a stoner does with a bong, in several passes if need be, emit as little into the air as possible(with added filters if need be), power the turbines and fill a reservoir and off peak hours if say we don’t run this 24/7, the reservoir turbines continue adding power to the grid at night when people typically plug in their electric cars. Water from the bong filter can be put into tailings ponds and let the sun evaporate it and we can clean up the ashes and tailings into a remote landfill taking up much less room and getting some value back from the waste our civilizations creates. Power generation and removal of waste in 1 go, using water as a safe storage medium and a filter.
And down the road as plastics and wastes are phased out and depleted, the stations still have the water reservoir turbine system that can be reused with the next power generator built to replace the waste burnering generator. I’d be happy to take charge and lead the way for such a setup to be built and operated but it’s gonna need a LOT of permission from local and beyond politicians and energy execs.
In the reactor setup, the sodium in this case and pressurized water in the case of a PWR are in a closed loop to prevent exposure to the atmosphere. The heat is passed via a heat exchanger with cool water on one side of a metal wall and hot water or melted sodium on the other. The nuclear reactor heated medium be it water or sodium does NOT make contact with the cooling medium, usually water. Think of it like a cooling block for a water cooled computer. The coolant passes through my cooling block, over the metal and takes the heat from the processor on the other side, and water never touches the processor.
Or to explain it like your car, your cars cooling system is pumping coolant around the outside of the cylinder and not inside the cylinder. The heating action of the cars combustion is cooled via conduction of the heat through the metal engine block to the coolant and to the environment via the radiator.
The vents on the steam turbine and cooling towers is non irradiated cooling water dropped into the tower, allowing it to condense into water and be reused at the bottom and excess heat floating out the top as steam. You can build a nuclear tower style cooling system for water cooled pc’s, I’ve done it in the past. Use a y connector with a 4” fan to blow air into and up the “tower”, use a shower head on top of the tower to drop the water like rain, and pump the collected water in the bottom through your water cooling setup. It’s possible to run the computer slightly under room temperature with this setup, and can be built rather cheaply.
https://www.overclockers.com/nuclear-tower-water-cooling/ For an article explaining it, I was doing this kind of thing 20 years ago. Not my article, although i do have a couple on that site.
And for your car, check for coolant leaks around your heater core, hoses and radiator. If there’s no visible coolant leak you’ve probably got a head gasket blown. Get that shit fixed before you ruin your engine. I’ve got a 1977 New Yorker that still doesn’t leak coolant to this day with original hoses on it. Losing coolant ISNT normal.
Thank you for the reasonable explanation offered.
I didn't imply coolant was leaking only that an engine emits as it is in use, and the coolant level constantly needs topping up. Hence the constant run off of further resources needed in energy production and machine use. What amounts does it need to sustain its energy?
It is more energy efficient, because it using more resources. These are supposedly more environmental because it is sodium burning hotter and cooling quicker.
They are currently working on refining thorium salt reactors to reuse much of the molten salt. Some will be, for lack of better common terms, “burned up” in the reactor, and will need to be replenished or topped off. How much is up to several factors like efficiency, purity, reactor output etc.
Once mining and refining facilities are set up and streamlined, keeping them running will be a matter of cost. One of the major benefits of a thorium salt reactor is the short half life of the materials involved. Instead of spent nuclear fuel rods sitting around an area that needs guarding and shielding for thousands of years, the half life is around 50 years. It’s been a while since I’ve read up on experimental thorium salt reactors so my details may be less than perfect but they’re a good step forward.
The environmental damage from mining and shipping the reactor materials is minimal when compared to the large scale damage of open pit mining of coal, and the radiation released from the smoke stacks as coal is burnt. Fun fact, coal plants emit more radiation than nuclear plants. Strip mines for rare earth metals and cobalt for electric cars are far more damaging but you seem to know that from other posts of yours. A lithium ion battery electric car for me is no deal but a nuclear powered vehicle I can make a switch for. Probably won’t happen in or lifetime due to boomers fear of people making dirty bombs with the materials, damned fools.
Thanks again. I think it has more servicing is that angle. Always an angle. It needs the extracted products. Yes at the same time it offers some environmental benefits. Although it still has nuclear waste.
Coal emits true. But it emits less than the woodchip burners creating electricity off incineration all over America, being sold as renewable and green because they recycle scrap wood. But they aren't only burning the wood, they're burning paint, some are burning rubber chips off tires. Wood burning is far more emitting than coal, green wood wet wood sap and lichen. The oxymoron is largely in the mining of coal, but mining uranium is an ugly business. Copper mining is very bad for the environment and so is almost all mining especially rare earth minerals and gems, stripping mining, and the toxic run off created from metals like copper etc. Strangely nobody complains about cooking, it is super emitting. But they will use biofuel, ethanol, it is worse than diesel and is thicker. Nevermind the impact of growing sugar cane or plants turned into ethanol just to burn as it emits twice as much. Diesel was less. Until somebody profited more off recycling for even more emissions.
EVs have almost nothing to do with the environment they're simply the next upgrade costing you more. What they don't emit out of their exhaust they emit in their consumption. Their ridiculously expendable lifetimes. Everything electric breaks quicker. Nobody can repair it either, because it is cheaper just to buy a new one. As we are left with mountains of ewaste putting plastic, acids, and batteries and toxic alloys everywhere. More plastic and ewaste in electrics. Now they control you completely, it is all on the same source, inflation, hacked and monitored. Sure they offer hydrogen as well. It is astronomically more expensive and the hydrogen fuel cells deplete much quicker than EV batteries. Like they need servicing every so many refills. EV batteries lasting about 7 years. Well not when you recharge them more and more because everything and your robot dog is plugged into your car.
You are correct in that there is no free lunch. Everything costs and everything has downstream impacts. Solar is hard on the environment to produce panels and they wear it quickly and are hard to recycle while solar collecting strays to heat water for steam are basically an invisible death beam to flying creatures. Wind is unpredictable and kills birds and bats en mass and the blades aren't recyclable, plus they need petroleum in their generator part. Hydro electric seems nice until one looks at the damage to eco systems. Plus dams get old and fail. Geothermal is an option, in some areas more than others but require expensive installation and even using an active volcano for the heat requires good plating to handle the sulphur. Coal is dirty to burn, radioactive and bad to mine. Electric batteries ruin the earth to produce. Nuclear requires resource mining and has radioactive waste. There IS no perfect solution yet.
The best we can do is do minimal harm while we work on newer safe and clean technology. We will get there someday, but for now, efficiency wise nuclear IS our best provider. Highest output for lowest damage of environment, when one has a suitable storage area for the waste figured out.
To help in the future we should start building waste energy plants near major cities. Burning plastics returns almost the same energy used to create them in the form of heat. Burning the plastic to heat water, drive a turbine and produce electricity to power the station and run electric vehicles on site for sorting and moving the material, maybe even charging the vehicles used to bring the waste to the site.
We can add in further usefulness by adding a double water reservoir with turbines similar to those used in Britain. They have to regulate their power carefully and can actually time increased consumption to commercials on popular televisions shows. IE everyone runs to put the electric kettle on for tea while the program is on commercial and they have a noticeable spike in electric demand. They have a large reservoir that turbine/pumps fill with water when electricity is put into the turbines, and on demand, they can allow the water to flow back through these turbines and spin them to produce power. Once the added load on the grid is gone, they can switch it back and use them to refill the reservoir again for the next need. If there’s ever a spill, it’s water. It’s not harmful to the environment, it’s cheap to refill losses and is basically a giant water battery.
By making a large power station Center we could combine technologies and have a waste energy plant burn plastics, catching the smoke and passing it through water like a stoner does with a bong, in several passes if need be, emit as little into the air as possible(with added filters if need be), power the turbines and fill a reservoir and off peak hours if say we don’t run this 24/7, the reservoir turbines continue adding power to the grid at night when people typically plug in their electric cars. Water from the bong filter can be put into tailings ponds and let the sun evaporate it and we can clean up the ashes and tailings into a remote landfill taking up much less room and getting some value back from the waste our civilizations creates. Power generation and removal of waste in 1 go, using water as a safe storage medium and a filter.
And down the road as plastics and wastes are phased out and depleted, the stations still have the water reservoir turbine system that can be reused with the next power generator built to replace the waste burnering generator. I’d be happy to take charge and lead the way for such a setup to be built and operated but it’s gonna need a LOT of permission from local and beyond politicians and energy execs.