How much fuel do we use in a year?

Monday, January 4, 2010 @ 01:01 AM
admin

******EDIT *******

Spilk over at Reddit pointed out I had a major mistake in my calculations. The figures I originally calculated represent only 41 days of power. The pictures shown below are now the proper calculations. Thanks for pointing out the mistake Spilk!

**************

Sketchup is a fantastic 3D modelling package that Google bought a few years ago. Having done a small amount of work on Swift and Maya, I found this tool immesurably simpler. This is how 3d interfaces should be done! The commands, whilst very different to common 3D packages, are all logical and started to come naturally after only an hour or so of experimentation.

Inspired by PageTutors post on how much a trillion dollars is that used Sketchup for the illustrations, I thought I would have a go myself by calculating and displaying how much of a energy based raw material would be needed to power the entire world for a year.

The world uses about 474 exajoules, which equates to about 15 TW (1.504×10^13 W) of power usage at any one time (2005 estimate) (source).

1.5  x 10^13W * 24hrs * 365.25 days = 13149 * 10 ^ 13 Wh = 13149 x 10^10kwh.

I then looked up the amount of electrical energy that could be produced from 1kg of firewood, coal, oil and uranium. Whilst looking for this information, I also came across Thorium as a power source, which looks very interesting, with none of the obvious drawbacks of conventional nuclear power. I will include it here, but this is not yet a commercial option. Note this is not the energy density, as power plants usually only operate at 40% efficiency, so I tried to find the amount of final electrical energy produced.

1 kg firewood generates 1kw-h of energy
1 kg coal generates 2-3 kW-h *(assumed 3kw-h)
1 kg oil generates 4-6 kW-h *(assumed 6kw-h)
1 kg uranium generates 50 000 kW-h
1kg thorium (or reprocessed uranium) generates 3 500 000 kw-h

Sources :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_development
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Development/devnine.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071014210223AA8sTVx
http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/guide/facts/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
http://www.ltbridge.com/

I then looked at the mass of the raw materials required to power the globe based on 2005 figures.

I used Sketchup to draw a cube of the amount of those materials needed if they were used to power everything for a year. I also put in a scale model of the Sydney Opera House for a comparison of the scales.

Firewood

131 490 000 000 000 / 1 = 131 490 000 000 000 kg firewood
131490000000000 / 600kg/m3 = 219150000000 m3 of firewood
Cubed root of 219 150 000 000 = 6029 x 6029 x 6029 m cube of firewood.

The calculations above resulted in a cube over 6km high, which is about 13 Empire state buildings on top of each other (the building is 443.2m to the top of the spire). In the example above, the Opera House barely registers.

Note that I took a density of the wood as 600kg/m3.  There are obviously lots of different types of wood, varying from balsa at 130kg/m3 to Ebony and Lignum Vitae up around 1300kg/m3. I would not imagine people cooking using ebony though, so took a mean density of some dense softwoods or softer hardwoods. Obviously if you take something as light as balsa, this cube would have been much larger.

Coal

131 490 000 000 000 / 3 = 43 830 000 000 000 kg coal
43 830 000 000 000 / 1426 = 30 736 325 385 m3 of coal *note – took mean density of bituminous and anthracite coal
Cubed root of 30 736 325 385 = 3132 x 3132 x 3132 m cube of coal.

Coal is significantly more energy dense than simple firewood, but this is still a 3.1km high cube, or nearly three and a half Empire State buildings on top of each other.

Oil

131 490 000 000 000 / 6 = 21 915 000 000 000kg oil
21 915 000 000 000 / 881 = 24 875 141 884 m3 of oil
Cubed root of 24 875 141 884 = 2919 x 2919 x 2919 m cube of oil.

There isn’t a huge difference between coal and oil in terms of volume, because although oil is much more energy rich than coal, it is also less dense (it floats on water).

Uranium

131490000000000 / 50000 = 2 629 800 000 kg uranium
2 629 800 000 / 19050 = 138 047 m3 of uranium
Cubed root of 138 047 = 51.68 x 51.68 x 51.68 m cube of uranium.

When I first worked these figures out, I wasn’t sure I had got them right. I have kept the similar scale as the oil to demonstrate the huge energy difference involved in extracting energy via nuclear means rather than chemically through burning.

Lets have a look a little zoomed in.

Its clear creating energy via uranium is efficient in terms of raw materials, but I would certainly not advocate an all out push for current nuclear practices. Normally only a small percentage of the raw material is used, leaving most of this quantity shown above as highly radioactive waste.

However while researching this post, there are a number of promising technologies, loosely grouped into Gen IV nuclear, that attempt to address these problems. Some continue to use uranium but limit the waste issues, some are just much more efficient. None are perfect, but all are better than current systems. I thought the most promising one was the LFTR reactor, using Thorium.

Thorium

131 490 000 000 000 / 3 500 000 = 37 568 571 kg thorium
37 568 571 / 11 700 = 3211m3 of thorium
Cubed root of 3211 = 14.75 x 14.75 x 14.75 m cube of thorium.

Density sources :
http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_wood.htm
http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_materials.htm
http://www.about-the-element.com/92-the-element-uranium.html

I must admit I am trying to be as impartial as possible and let the facts talk, but I was so surprised at these figures I had to go over them again to double check. If anyone wants to triple check, please give it a go and discuss it in the comments.

Also note I also do not take into account embodied energy, that is the energy required to create the fuel, including digging it up and processing. I would assume that extraction of coal and oil, while using a significant amount of energy, would be a lot less than enriching uranium, but I cannot find any accurate information on the energy required to assess this. I guess its not the sort of information you want to put up on the web with states looking to pursue nuclear weapons ambitions! From sources I have found, it seems it is highly dependent on the quality of the ore, but I would be most appreciative if someone could suggest where to find a reliable source this information.

From my personal investigations here, it seems using nuclear energy, particularly thorium if technological progression allows, is better for the environment out of the list above due to the small amount of raw materials needed to produce huge quantities of electricity with little CO2, provided we can solve the proliferation and waste storage issues. Cheap energy could also provide clean drinking water for boosting agricultural output in marginal quality lands and significant power for people in the third world.

Some other advantages of the LFTR Thorium reactor include the huge reserves of Thorium (several thousand years), inherent safety (it is a sub critical reaction, so cannot melt down), the majority of the waste is fine to handle after only 10 years, you can throw in old nuclear weapons and they will convert them to safe materials, and it is much harder to create nuclear weapons from this type of reaction.

So why aren’t we using this energy source. From what I have read, this is not a physics problem. The science works, and has been tested in the 50s. The problem is an engineering one. The reactor burns at 4000k, and passing extremely hot corrosive salt through pipes without corrosion or failure needs some new solutions.

Still, until I did some reading I was a nuclear skeptic, and still am using much current technology. However this has given me some hope that technology can solve much of the worlds problems.

However there are huge dangers with conventional nuclear power with nuclear proliferation issues that are somewhat solved by thorium and I believe this technology really should be investigated more. Any way to take the benefits of nuclear power, including massive quantities of cheap abundant energy, combined with removing the drawbacks such as nuclear proliferation, radioactive waste disposal and safety concerns is quite promising. I hadn’t really heard about it before this post, so I am in no way an expert, but if anyone knows more or can provide some impartial research, post info in the comments!

If anyone wants to find out more and get up to the fairly basic level I got to, I would encourage you to watch the Google Tech Talk by Jon Bonometti for more information.

I am interested to see how this compares to conventional renewables such as wind, solar, wave and tidal power, as well as some “out there” suggestions like orbiting solar reflectors, so will do another post comparing these in the near future.

Please, feel free to investigate my figures, critically analyse them and provide constructive feedback and discussion.

Oh, and if you liked this post can you click on the Digg, Reddit or other  aggregators below? Thanks!

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35 Responses to “How much fuel do we use in a year?”

  1. Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Reddit by drummerman345: Damn….

  2. [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by struky, J. J said: How much fuel do we use in a year? – http://3.ly/F6J [...]

  3. MK says:

    You forgot antimatter power plants which would only need about 5 tons of fuel per year. Pretty little impact on the environment, isn’t it? ;-)

    Much of the total energy consumption is due to heating and transportation. For heating, nuclear energy or any other kind of centralized large-scale power plant isn’t that good since you can’t use waste energy efficiently then but instead have to convert the plant’s process heat to electric power and back which is quite inefficient. BTW France is using nuclear power for heating and had quite a lot of trouble these days since the last few cold days overloaded their power network…

  4. Gerry says:

    Thorium maybe, nuclear no. Nuclear gets free liability insurance (thanks Congress) – why not other industries? Cost of storage of waste (long term storage does not even exist!)? Thanks for storing our waste for 10,000 years, future generations. Hope you don’t mind. Governments provide research and development for nuclear (they want the nuclear bombs). Even if you don’t include the cost of storage nuclear is the most expensive option. And we are going to run out of uranium anyway!

  5. [...] } I came across a great post today on Global Artwork which I’d like to share here on Enviralment about how much fuel we use in a [...]

  6. ttl says:

    Gerry – “Nuclear gets free liability insurance” – this is a myth, in reality it is completely backwards. Nuclear via Price Anderson act is the only industry which has to get insured by law to values which would cover any unlikely accident (limit never reached even by TMI accident), and there is a plan to pool industry players if the accident is even larger (insanely unlikely). Only then the taxpayers are on the hook.

    For any other industry it is the opposite: if the accident is more costly than the net worth of the company, the company goes belly up and taxpayers pay the cleanup. Of course the fossil fuel toxic wastes are explicitly exempt from EPA hazardous waste treatment, and there is no liability for smog, acid rains, global warming, mercury pollution or what have you.

    Concerning the waste, same could be said – nuclear is the only energy source which has to sequester its wastes, and which has to pay a fee to make up funds for decommissioning the plant and dealing with the waste. No other energy industry has to do tha, so your concerns are rather misplaced.

    What is more, LFTR (and most other GenIV designs) can use the spent fuel from current power plants as a startup charge.

  7. mike says:

    The engineering problems have for the most part been solved and are not as extreme as you have presented. The salts for the Thorium Fluoride Reactor are not very corrosive and the temperature the reactor runs at can be engineered to be as high or low as one chooses. The “waste” is radioactive for between 300 to 500 years. We can engineer storage for that length of time. Also the total amount of waste reaches a maximum because after 500 years, you remove the waste as fast as you are making it. (1 year of waste is added and one is now non radioactive and can be removed from storage)
    The problem is peoples’ irrational fear will paralyze us until it is too late.

  8. Tony Wildish says:

    Interesting post, and I am very likely to refer to your graphics later on my own blog, thank you!

    I’m not sure you are correct to say that the LFTR core burns at 4000K. According to http://www.energyfromthorium.com/joomla/index.php?view=article&id=80, the core outlet temperature is 700 C (so about 1000K), and the liquid salts boil at about 1400K.

    I’m sure I’ve also read that corrosion is not a problem, see http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/liquid-fluoride-thorium-reactor-in.html

    For numbers on mining etc, you could try http://www.bravenewclimate.com/. They go into a lot of detail about cost analyses, and I know they have discussed mining costs.

    @MK, many French nuclear power stations are still in maintenance after strikes have delayed work that was due to complete earlier in the year. That’s the main reason for the shortage of electricity. See http://www.connexionfrance.com/news_articles.php?id=1172

    @Gerry, please also read bravenewclimate.com, and look at their information on closed fuel cycles. Nuclear waste from LFTR and other Gen-IV reactors will only be radioactive for 300 years. The pyramids are ten times older than that, so storing it isn’t hard. Bear in mind that the nuclear industry we grew up with was designed to produce bomb-material during the cold war. Liquid-salt technology was rejected by the US government of the day because it could not provide bomb material, because it consumes its ‘waste’ so efficiently.

  9. Gadolinium says:

    Enlightening! Beautiful! It would be nice to have something equivalent for the amount of CO2 sent to the atmosphere in the energy production processes involved in each case.

  10. David says:

    Thorium has great potential, especially in the LFTR structure. You can check out the http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/ to find a great deal of information. The interesting thing is that this has been researched and working reactors ran for years. The technology was set aside, according to some, because Admiral Rickover wanted light water reactors.

    There is a document repository on the website that will give you more information than most will ever want. The links to summaries of the google talks are a good place to start. There is a 10 minute version but I don’t have the link at the moment.

  11. Bob Steinke says:

    MK,

    But what’s the density of antimatter? For current storage methods it’s about 10^11 protons/cm^3 or 1.66×10^-9 kg/m^3. Your 5 tons has a volume of 3,010,000,000,000 m^3, or a cube 14,400 m on a side, bigger than the firewood!

  12. Bill Hannahan says:

    Nice graphics. A correction regarding this sentence.

    “Normally only a small percentage of the raw material is used, leaving most of this quantity shown above as highly radioactive waste.”

    Actually about 85-90% of the mined uranium in the graphic is extracted at the enrichment plant and never gets into the reactor. It is called depleted uranium and it is slightly less radioactive than natural uranium in the ground. Our primitive steroidal submarine reactors split less than 1% of mined uranium, whereas the Gen IV reactors like IFR and LFTR can split essentially all of it.

    Another interesting graphic would be the fuel requirement for an individual lifetime. At the U.S. rate, 1,500 watts for 80 years, we would need 1.1 million pounds of coal, producing 2.4 million pounds of CO2, or 58 pounds of natural uranium which provides 8 pounds of reactor grade uranium from the enrichment plant, which will manufacture about 10 pounds of fuel assembly. The 10 pounds of fuel assembly will go into a reactor and produce a lifetime equivalent of electricity by splitting 5.4 ounces of uranium during its 4.5-6 year stay in the reactor.

    With the IFR or LFTR simply mine 5.4 ounces of uranium or thorium and end up with 5.4 ounces of fission products dissolved in a few pounds of rock or glass that becomes less radiotoxic than uranium ore in 300 years.

    The numbers come from here;

    http://coal2nuclear.com/ENERGY%20REV%20X1.pdf

    The calculations and references are here;

    http://coal2nuclear.com/ENERGY CALCS REV 7.xls

  13. billreiswig says:

    Have you shown here the amount rock that needs to be mined in order to get that amount of uranium? Thats actually likely a more relevant image.

    While these images are interesting from a volume perspective, they tell little about the environmental imacts, the energy necessary to retrieve these volumes, the pollution and its effects on the other end of the process, and the volumes and flows of water and other materials to build and run the reactors and plants that burn the material. Volume is a consideration but only a small one.

  14. Nuclear Ned says:

    Dec. 14, 2009 FORBES MAGAZINE page 52

    ONE SMALL UNREGULATED POWER MERCHANT THINKS IT CAN REVIVE THE FALTERING NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE. HOW? OFF-LOAD RISK

    “David Crane, chief executive of NRG Energy, is seeking loan guarantees from the Department of Energy and the Japanese government (read tax payers). He’s finding a series of suckers to take the risk off his hands.”

    If the market is snubbing nukes, why should taxpayers step in? To proponents, loan guarantees cost nothing. You might recall that was the argument when the federal government was, directly and indirectly, guaranteeing home mortgage debt.”

    Nuclear power isn’t cost effective (also published in FORBES. With looming shortages or uranium it will become less cost effective. Without huge government subsidies, nuclear power isn’t going anywhere.

  15. Mico says:

    You’re not showing the energy and mass required to strip mine the uranium, the fresh water that needs to become toxic when mining it the other way, or the energy required to extract the uranium out of seawater.

    To be fair, we should account for that energy, waste, and pollution for oil, wood, and coal as well — but if you do that, the sizes get more fair.

  16. Tony Wildish says:

    @Nuclear Ned, nuclear power is undergoing something of a renaissance in the US, with many manufacturers working on new designs for smaller, modular reactors. These would greatly reduce costs as they can be factory-built and shipped to their destination. See http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2009/09/small-is-beautiful-even-for-nuclear.html for a primer.

    Let’s also point out that solar and wind power wouldn’t get off the ground if it weren’t for government subsidies. Can we stop funding them too, please?

  17. GRLCowan says:

    I also do not take into account embodied energy, that is the energy required to create the fuel, including digging it up and processing.

    Actually, you do: the images would differ by an unnoticeably small amount if you took into account, for instance, the two-to-three percent increase in the necessary amount of uranium if it all had to be enriched by old-fashioned gaseous diffusion plants. If your nuclear plants, like the ones powering this computer, run on unenriched uranium (aka natural uranium), or if your enrichment plants are the new centrifuge-based ones that France is now switching to, the extra is 50 times less.

    The energy of uranium deposits, even very lean ones such as seawater, is virtually all net energy. The very small amount of stuff that must be extracted to yield a given amount of energy is exactly the reason for this. That is what fossil fuel interests have in mind when they try to persuade you of the opposite.

    (How fire can be domesticated)

  18. I have done a similar post comparing a million barrels of oil to uranium. The million barrels occupies a cube roughly 55m cubed. The equivalent of uranium would be about 16 cm cubed, about the size of a softball.

    Comparing a “renewable” source of energy to equal the world’s energy would shock you. Entire continents would have to be covered with wind turbines in hopes that nature will be kind and give us a big gust of wind to power our civilization. This is what renewable advocates fundamentally fail to understand – dilute sources of energy require extremely large collection machines and lots of them to do the same job as a machine that processes a dense source of energy. No amount of redundancy or “smart grids” will kludge together a 100% renewable energy system powering millions of people.

    You said “However there are huge dangers with conventional nuclear power with nuclear proliferation issues”. No, that’s a myth. We’ve seen the worst it can get with a bad reactor design, Chernobyl, and that is still far less worse than coal is on its best year. Statistically, nuclear energy is the safest energy system ever, even if you were to take into account the supposed 4000 deaths from Chernobyl. As far as proliferation goes, conventional nuclear power has nothing to do with weapons development although one might argue this was not the case for the former Soviet Union. No one has ever built a bomb from post civilian power reactor fuel, especially when you consider that if that’s the desire, making electricity just gets in the way of that task. Reactors are not necessary to make a bomb – period. Making plutonium can be done in much cheaper reactors, thus trying to do it with a power reactor would not only be stupid, it would be expensive and convoluted and not likely to work.

  19. Me says:

    Good points, I think I will definitely subscribe! I’ll go and read some more! What do you see the future of this being?

  20. Soylent says:

    I’d like to elaborate a little bit on how nuclear reactors work and a little bit about plutonium quality.

    Have a look at the curve of nuclear binding energy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg

    Binding energy per nucleon rapidly increases at first and then progressively slower as add more nucleons; reaching a peak at iron-56. You release energy by taking light elements and turning them into heavier elements, up to this point.

    The small amounts of elements heavier than iron are produced in a couple of cosmological processes, mostly the s-process(slow neutron capture; the neutrons come from certain fusion reactions) and the r-processes(rapid neutron capture; occurs in the extremely intense neutron flux of a core-collapse super nova, only a fraction of the heavy isotopes being ejected from the star). This is intensively radioactive stuff, but after some million years the short-lived isotopes are gone and only the stable or relatively stable elements(like uranium-235, bismuth-209 or thorium-232) remain.

    Nuclei are positively charged and strongly repel each other, but if you can keep bounding them off each other at high energy, they will eventually get close enough that the strong force, which is very short distance but extremely strong, takes over. This is nuclear fusion and it is much harder than nuclear fission because you need to overcome electrostatic repulsion, where as neutrons are blissfully aware of the electromagnetic field and will happily enter a nucleus, which is all you need for a sustained fission reaction.

    Notice that helium-4 is very stable for such a light element? This is because both the neutron and proton shells are full(it’s a “doubly magic” nucleus; it’s roughly equivalent to the full electron shells of the noble gasses). This is the reason alpha decay(essentially throwing out a helium nucleus at a very high velocity) is such a common decay mode for heavy elements. If uranium-235, uranium-238 and thorium-232 are left in the ground they will slowly decay via a series of alpha decays and a few beta decays until they become stable isotopes of lead. On the way to stability is the element radon, a noble gas which is very mobile, this is why radon is such a big part of the natural background radiation.

    Very heavy elements can also fission in two unequal parts, fission products, centered around atomic mass 80-110(e.g. Strontium-90) and atomic mass 130-150(e.g. Cesium-137). The breadth and location of the peaks depend a bit on the isotope and the circumstances under it was fissioned.

    Fission may occur spontaneously, but it is a very low fraction in all but the very heaviest elements.

    It turns out that heavy elements need about 1.5 neutrons per proton to be relatively stable, where as very light elements need only ~1 neutron per proton. As a result, when you fission an element you release a few neutrons that cannot be bound any at all for any discernible amount of time, and the fission products are generally too neutron-rich as well.

    When an atom has a few too many neutrons to be stable it will get rid of some by turning a neutron into an electron and a proton. The proton remains bound, the electron is ejected at high energy; this is beta decay. An anti-neutrino is also produced, but it only interacts through the weak interaction. This ghostlike particle proceeds to barrel straight through the Earth and escape into deep space at very close to the speed of light. An energetic beta-decay can cause the nuclei to become excited and kick out a neutron or merely decay to ground state by emitting a gamma photon; these neutrons are known as delayed neutrons.

    When neutrons are absorbed by U-235 it is transmuted to U-236*(star denotes excited nuclear state). With thermal neutrons the U-236* will decay to ground state by emitting a gamma ray 18% of the time; the other 82% of the time the nucleus will fission, releasing 2-3 prompt neutrons.

    The fission products have too many neutrons and are generally beta and gamma emitters. A few of the fission products also kick out delayed neutrons; this small amount of delayed neutrons make controllable, stable nuclear reactors much easier to build than if you had to rely only on prompt neutrons.

    U-238 can be fissioned, but the probability is not large enough to be relevant in a fission reactor. High energy fusion neutrons from D-T fusion will however readily fission U-238; about half of the energy and most of the fall-out of a thermonuclear bomb comes from fissioning a U-238 casing.

    In a reactor the U-238 will absorb a neutron and become U-239, which will beta-decay into neptunium-239, which will beta-decay into plutonium-239.

    In a typical reactor you will produce less Pu-239 than the U-235 you are consuming. Some of this Pu-239 will fission, acting as a fuel, some of it will absorb additional neutrons and become Pu-240, Pu-241 etc. If you have very good neutron economy you can produce more Pu-239 than the initial charge of U-235, reprocess the fuel to remove neutron-gobbling fission products and use Pu-239 to produce energy as well as produce replacement fuel from U-238. This is a breeder reactor operating on the plutonium fuel cycle.

    In order to use thorium as fuel you need to use U-235 to do a similar trick in order to turn thorium into uranium-233, which can then be used to produce more U-233 in a way that is sustainable as long as you have more thorium.

    Weapons quality plutonium is produced by having very low burn-up, much lower than is practical in a power-producing reactor. The reason is that you only want Pu-239, the other isotopes of plutonium are problematic. You’re going through a large amount of fuel, so you want cheap fuel(natural, unenriched uranium) and you want to be able to refuel the reactor without shutting down. The type of reactor used for weapons plutonium has historically been graphite or heavy water moderated natural uranium fueled reactors or heavy water research reactors made to irradiate samples.

    It is obvious from satellite imagery if you are shutting down and restarting a large commercial reactor way too frequently. There are difficult questions to answer if fuel elements starts going unaccounted for.

    Reprocessing lightly irradiated uranium slugs requires much less shielding than spent reactor fuel, but even then it’s quite an honerous task.

    There are several reasons weapons plutonium should be almost pure Pu-239. The most important is that nuclear wepaons are very sensitive to being set off at just the right time, which requires a timed neutron pulse; if you have a bunch of background neutrons there is an unacceptably large chance that the reaction will start too early, and the weapon will blow itself apart at a yield of tens of tonnes to a kiloton rather than tens of kilotons(a fizzle). Pu-240 and Pu-238(18% of the time U-235 will absorb a neutron without fissioning, Pu-238 is formed by successive neutron capture and decay from U-235) produce a lot of heat per unit weight; you do not want to insulate it behind a thick wall of high-explosives. A would-be proliferator would have to design some form of cooling channels that do not interfere with the precise, spherical implosion necessary for a good yield. Pu-241 beta-decays to Am-241*, which is a relatively intensive gamma emitter, Am-241 also produces a bunch of decay heat. Gamma rays are difficult to shield and can easily cause integrated circuits to sporadically malfunction.

    It is in principle possible to use reactor grade plutonium in a nuclear weapon, but it is sufficiently unattractive that no one has bothered. Britain probably comes closest; they producest a supposedly dual-use reactor(magnox), which had poor economics(but the state paid to recieve the spent fuel for its plutonium content). This plutonium is of a quality better than modern reactor-grade plutonium and worse than weapons grade plutonium. They did produce at least one test device from this plutonium, but they were not happy with the results and never went to production of warheads.

  21. cna training says:

    nice post. thanks.

  22. pizza recipe says:

    This is the nice site! I adore a few of the articles that have been written, and especially the comments posted! I will definately be visiting again!

  23. Ross C. says:

    I love pretty much everything said on this page,

    im not sure if you said this or if anyone else has already told you but thorium can’t be weaponised and so would actually be a good alternative to the nations (iran etc) that we dont want have Uranium. (another thumbs up to thorium) (although a small quantity of uranium is needed to start the reaction) :P

    Thorium is pretty much the way forwards, it may be expensive now, as you said, but as oil becomes harder to get to, many nations will look towards Thorium. China, India, Germany and America already have. America have already started mining and currently have quite a large reserve of thorium burried in containers underground.

    R

  24. Ross C. says:

    Another comment, corrosivness is definately a problem, a reactor built and run for (as an experiment) in america only lasted for 2 years before much of the piping had to be relaced. Admittedly this was in the 60′s, but we havn’t come much further because we havn’t wanted to.

    Lastly, although i said that a small quantity of uranium is needed to start the reaction, infact spent uranium could be used (:

    Rock on Thorium :P

  25. fossil fule gal says:

    there is no way that were gonna die in the year 2012 it was an incorrect prediction! :)

  26. Very good this post
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