It is my personal belief that nuclear fission is the ONLY chance the human race has of surviving and prospering up until the point where hydrogen fusion or some totally unknown at this time technology can provide us with reliable, abundant,
economical, and long term viable energy.

But after a number of nuclear accidents, even though the total number of deaths that have resulted are far lower than ANY other power source including all of the renewables, people are paranoid to the point where it's very difficult to license a new reactor and particularly it is difficult to license new safer and much more sustainable designs.

I want you to understand the bullshit that the anti-nuke people go through, first see this film:

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I want you to note here that after mentioning the legacy of nuclear waste from the Hanford program to make Plutonium from the bomb, he makes the statement that Washington has the highest per capital cancer rates in the nation, this is patently false.

See this chart below, (unfortunately, Friendica's composer will not allow me to inline the chart as I would like) and you will see that Washington State ranks 20th from the lowest to highest in terms of deaths per 100,000 due to cancer. In other words, we are not even average in cancer rates, we are BELOW average. See that Oregon, who gets it's drinking water from the Columbia, which is the contaminated river they are speaking about, has a similar rate. So right there, the very first premise of this film is ONE BIG FAT LIE.

Also notice some of the lowest areas of deaths by cancer on this chart, are the states were above ground nuclear testing was carried out, Nevada (16th lowest cancer deaths), Colorado (4th lowest cancer deaths), New Mexico (9th lowest cancer deaths), and Alaska (34th lowest cancer rates), of all of these only Alaska has cancer rates above the 50th percentile. Colorado is particularly interesting in that it has relatively high background radiation rates not because of the nuclear testing but because it's so high above the atmosphere that there is relatively little shielding of cosmic rays.

The states where the highest cancer rates are tend to be the farming states, so it would seem farming chemicals, probably in large part "round up", would seem to be a much higher contribution to cancer than nuclear waste.

And this is with today's rather poor from either a safety or waste production standpoint boiling water or pressurized water reactors, and the main thing that makes these reactors so dangerous is that they operate at pressures of around 300 atmospheres in order to raise the boiling point of water to around 600-700C because at lower temperatures the thermal efficiency is poor. And in terms of waste production usually these reactors are only 1 or 2 pass, use only the energy available in the U-235 isotope of uranium and recover less than 1/2 percent of the Uraniums energy potential, and this is precisely what makes the waste a problem.

A different type of reactor, a molten salt liquid fuel reactor addresses both the safety issues and the waste and proliferation issues. We should be building these in huge numbers because not only could they produce as much energy as we need to power the planet for more than 1000 years just using the waste from existing reactors, but they could extend the lifetime of existing resources to provide power for the next million years, even more if we extract uranium and or thorium from oceans. And at the same time they eliminate the the long term actinide waste, it just becomes additional fuel, leaving only short term fission products which return to the radioactivity level of the fuel that was initially mined in 300 year or less, and much of those isotopes have medical or industrial uses.

They are anti-proliferation because while they do produce plutonium PL-239 that in theory can be used in bombs, they also produce other isotopes of plutonium which are simply too hot to isolate from the PL-239 and which would cause the bomb to fizzle rather than to explode, that is to say you can't separate it economically by any of the classical methods, diffusion, distillation, centrifugation, thermal diffusion, exchange reactions, lasers, and electrolysis, because it's too hot to handle so it is just left in the reactor core to burn and produce energy.

Now the reason these reactors are so safe, 1) They do not operate at significant pressure, less than two atmospheres generally, just enough pressure to circulate the fuel through the primary coolant loop and heat exchanger, 2) the fission products are constantly removed so if the reactor is scrammed there is no residual source of heat, in a boiling water reactor, the fission products remain in the fuel rod and even if the chain reaction is stopped entirely they still provide enough heat to cause a melt down. 3) A meltdown can't occur because liquid state is the NORMAL state of the reactor. 4) The reactors are self regulating and self adjusting to load with NO mechanical devices. The liquid salt mixtures have a high expansion coefficient that moves the fissionable atoms away from each other as it heats up slowing the reaction, or brings them together as it cools off increasing the reaction and this happens with NO mechanical interventions. At Oak Ridge, they built and operated a test molten salt reactor, they pulled all the control rods so the reactor was going full-tilt, shut off the cooling, and allowed the reactor to run this way for 24 hours, no damage resulted. 5) If by some weird unforseen means the reactor DID actually overheat, it would just melt a melt plug and allow the liquid fuel to drain into a much larger drain tank that would separate the fuel far enough to stop the chain reaction entirely, and with little fission products, because they are continuously removed, there is so little residual heat that just normal radiative cooling of the tank to it's surroundings is sufficient for the fuel to cool down and solidify. 6) Because there is no water in the reactor tank, no hydrogen is produced so there is no potential for a chemical explosion like those that happened at Fukushima to disperse the radioactive elements. Further since only the actinides are in the reactor and the much more radioactive fission products are continuously removed, even if you have an explosion, for which there is neither a chemical nor nuclear basis, you wouldn't distribute these products across the nearby land. The absolute worst nuclear accident you can have is frankly a plumbing leak in which some of the fuel would spill upon the floor and solidify, and since it doesn't have fission products, it would not be intensely radioactive and easily scooped up and thrown back into the reactor tank.

So there are three very compelling reasons we should build these reactors, first, safety, they are safe based entirely on the principals of physics and need no safety equipment to activate to keep them that was, they are inherently safe. Second, they can burn the existing actinide waste for fuel, turning a million year waste disposal problem into a 300 year waste disposal problem so we aren't leaving a nuclear legacy to future generations, and third, they can eliminate the need for fossil fuels, and pull the entire planet out of poverty. We mustn't let stupidity as promoted by this film which is chucked full of lies and damned lies, to deny us this future.

While we currently have none of these reactors in the US, the Russians have been operating several for upwards of 50 years without incidence, and the Chinese, Indians, French, are experimenting with them. Japan has been experimenting with a similar but less safe design that uses molten sodium rather than salts, and the issues are two fold, one is that sodium is more corrosive than the salts although salts are somewhat corrosive, but water at 700C is very corrosive, and the other is that sodium is highly flammable and self ignites when it comes in contact with the air, and Japan did have a accident in their experimental reactor of this nature and had it shut down for repairs for some time as a result so for these reasons I do not favor these reactor types except given a choice between a boiling water reactor and these I'd prefer them, but molten salt is a much safer option.