Sympathy for Pests - a short story
Jul. 8th, 2014 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eHere's another short story:
Sympathy for Pests
Let me know what you think.
An aside: If you think the technology being discussed in the story sounds like thorium nuclear reactors, yes, I've been reading a lot about them lately.
Sympathy for Pests
Let me know what you think.
An aside: If you think the technology being discussed in the story sounds like thorium nuclear reactors, yes, I've been reading a lot about them lately.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-08 01:57 pm (UTC)I'm not an expert, but about 7 years ago we did look into the possibility of securing some thorium deposits for a few days. The fact that there are huge stockpiles around made them not attractive, as I recall. And the lack of tech.
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Date: 2014-07-08 05:27 pm (UTC)A lot of the claims in the story are those made for liquid fuel thorium reactors (LFTR) -- non-pressurised, so impossible to explode; can't go critical; melt-downs are impossible; consumes nuclear waste, making existing stockpiles safer; raw material can't be used to make bombs. All the claims have partial truth, but are misleading. The thing that really annoys me is that it would lead to greater nuclear weapons proliferation, which is something we really do not need.
The lack of tech is still a problem, though the thorium fanboys say it's easy to solve -- just give them a few billion and several decades and they'll fix that.
I hadn't considered the idea that easy availability could be a sticking point financially. Very interesting and very amusing. Also lucky. If the crowd that desperately want to build thorium reactors managed to get their way we would all be in worse trouble than we are.
I'd be much happier laying my bets on wind, geothermal, and solar power. Windmill efficiency recently jumped from around 50% to around 80% efficient with introduction of archimedes screw design turbines. Even better, they also have the advantage of being silent. Solar is steadily getting cheaper and more efficient, and energy storage (the weak link) is gradually improving with work on supercapacitors and the eternally-5-years-away fuel cells.
For the life of me I can't understand why those who love centralised power don't jump at the chance to build geothermal stations. It's old, tried and tested technology, tends to be most available around the edges of continental plates where people concentrate. No fuel requirements.