I’m going to take a vacation from blogging for a little while. Partly a mental-health break, partly a need to get other stuff done. But there are many things I would love to blog about! So here is a list of recent stuff I’ve saved — you can fill in for yourself all the illuminating and entertaining words that would undoubtedly accompany a full-blown discussion.
- Algae! The Editors chide me for carelessly conflating ethanol and biofuels. Fair enough. If algae are a clean and efficient way to capture and store energy from the Sun, I’d be all for it.
- Meanwhile, we continue to heavily subsidize corn for ethanol, and as a result people are dying.
- Don’t like your government? Take to sea and create your own!
- At some point I will say more about Ben Rosen’s great blog, and especially Harold Rosen’s great entry for the Google Lunar X-Prize, about which Deborah Castleman blogs here. Private ingenuity will be crucial to the future of human spaceflight, especially when NASA can’t remember how to replicate its heat shields from the 1960’s.
- I was going to score some non-partisanship points by criticizing Barack Obama for peddling nonsense about autism and vaccinations, just as John McCain does. (Hint: there is no connection!) Then I noticed that Hillary Clinton does the same thing, sadly. And, worse, Clinton has bought into John McCain’s panderiffic notion of declaring a summer holiday on gas taxes — at least Obama has come out squarely against that. (Encouragement to burn more fossil fuels is probably not sound policy.)
- You might also be interested in Michael Berube’s rundown of the candidates stances on disability issues. McCain’s, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, consists of exhortations along the lines of “Hey, disabled folks! Suck it up!”
- John McCain doesn’t want you to forget that Barack Obama is the preferred candidate of Hamas. He’s also the preferred candidate of nearly everyone outside the U.S., but whatever.
- At The Corner, Michael Novak continues Jonah Goldberg’s project of portraying Fascism as left-wing. His evidence is that a friend of Albert Camus’s joined the Nazi Party because everything in the world had lost its meaning. Novak seems to miss the fact that this anecdote proves the opposite of his point — Camus’s friend became a Nazi because the Nazis provided “a meaning in the destiny of our nation,” not because they denied the existence of objective meaning. But keep trying!
- Gerard ‘t Hooft proposes a locally finite model for gravity. A related discussion of whether the universe is continuous or discrete appears in an article from FQXi, which is annoyingly only available in pdf. I actually think the universe really is continuous, not discrete, for reasons that might become clear if I can just get this paper finished.
- Tomorrow, April 29, is Duke Ellington‘s birthday. He was the master.
And here is the orchestra, with Paul Gonsalves on tenor.
- Oops, almost forgot this one: Cosmo Girl! suggests you should design your own religion, just like you design your favorite Starbucks coffee beverage. (Simile theirs.)
Be excellent to each other.
Everything you ever wanted to know about thorium / uranium ratios:
http://lablemminglounge.blogspot.com/2008/05/thorium-uranium-ratios-and-atomic-power.html
They are building a thorium reactor in India
“String Theorist”
The problem I’m complaining about isn’t anarchy, it’s juvenile and unprofessional behavior like yours.
If I were a string theorist, I’d be rather upset that a colleague was doing this kind of thing anonymously and signing themselves as “string theorist”. You might want to think a bit about what this kind of behavior does for how people perceive your field.
Peter, first, there is a case to be made that your visceral dislike for string theory and the malice, organization and relentlessness with which you try to see it dead cannot BY FAR be explained by a purely scientific motive. Even if one considers string theory as merely a toy model where UV complete theories can be made some sense of, it has more merit than you claim – at the very least it is a useful source of insights.
So I am not sure you can legitimately make a demand for disentangling the personal from the scientific – at least not the way YOU attack string theory. I meant what I said about your mischarecterizations of people etc. You say it is a personal attack, but I think I am just making a relevant comment. I am not trying to be obnoxious, but the reality of the situation as I see it forces me to be!
Finally, you will have the moral high ground to talk on “unprofessional behavior” when you clean up the “juvenile” attacks against string theory defenders on YOUR blog. Go do that, and we will talk then.
Can we all go back to being excellent to each other now?
Julianne,
I’ll resist the temptation to respond to “string theorist”, whose behavior anyway speaks for itself, whoever he is. In return, please do me a favor and think a bit about whether allowing this kind of anonymous personal attack on your blog is a good idea.
Peter,
Please get off your holier-than-thou attitude. As ST pointed out, YOU are largely responsible for the visceral nature that the discussion of the pros and cons have string theory in the public arena has taken.
Count Iblis:
“Most significantly for India, ATBR does not require natural or enriched uranium which the country is finding difficult to import.”
Translation:
Much of India’s domestic uranium production goes into its weapons program, so other countries are reticent to sell them more of the stuff.
India is in the rather unique position of having poor U resources, Decent Th supplied as a byproduct of heavy mineral sand mining, and a military which is trying to build lots of bombs.
If they were to dismantle their military program, open up to inspection, and comply with the relevant non-proliferation treaties, then they could import uranium at market prices, and the thorium reactor would probably become uneconomcial. As it is, the need to build Th reactors is just another one of the many hidden costs of building nuclear weapons.
Thanks Eric, I was going to say that. Also, I wish this Peter person who stop trying to boss people into policing the comments. If you don’t like the commenters on CV, then go away. I don’t always like commenters, no matter what darling blog I’m visiting, but I do not try to ethically browbeat blog owners (while behaving without a moral in sight myself) into making the commenters I don’t like get banned.
This is what the internets is all about people. If you cannot take the heat, get out of the kitchen. If people continue to behave idiotically, then treat them like trolls. And now, I shall take my own advice and shut up, and begin to behave excellently.
These pieces of music are really beautiful. Duke is a master, I do agree, and I cannot understand jazz almost all of the time, I am alternately confused and jarred by his notes, and then quickly soothed by some beautiful melody he plays, am ultimately more soothed and amazed than jarred and confused. He’s great. Visually, the way his hands move on the keyboard is amazing. Thanks for the embeds Sean, and have a great time in the South Pacific, recovering your tan, er, I mean, mental health. (In all honesty, good luck getting the papers out as quickly as possible!)
It is truly sad that economists of all people are now using string theory as a metaphor for bad science.
Seriously, the lack of progress – 30 years and still not one testable prediction – is damaging the reputation of physics.
You guys need to come up with some testable predictions or funding for high energy physics is going to go to zero.
Lab Lemming,
Sure, and we indians will greet our enemies with garlands and flowers when they come to kill us. India is not the country that has ~10,000 nukes in its stockpile. There is a cartel (the “Nuclear Suppliers Group”) which controls access to uranium in the world, and the only way India can have nuclear power with minimal reliance on the cartel is to develop a thorium based fuel cycle. Which would you prefer: India burning huge amounts of coal and driving up oil prices by competing for resources in the middle east, or being relatively less reliant on oil and coal through nuclear power?
Krishna, I’m sure they aren’t the only two choices India has. I think Lab Lemming mentioned at least one more…
Lab Lemming,
Suppose India has one thousand of 200 kiloton fission bombs (some may be the detonators of thermonuclear devices, we should only count the yields of the fission devices). Then, if you do the math, you find that the total energy yield would only let you operate a single 1000 megawatt powerplant for 30 years.
For all those who have seen Peter Woit’s recent post about this blog, you should know what kind of censorship he really advocates. He doesn’t want people to anonymously attack him or other scientists, but he allows commenters on his own blog to anonymously attack non-scientists, as if there were a moral difference (see recent anonymous attacks on Christopher Hitchens in his comments section).
So his ideas about comment moderation are confused in theory …
How about in practice? Well, when I made a comment pointing out the double standard mentioned above, in a way that was not inappropriate or rude, Mr. Woit applied his enlightened principles of censorship by moderating my comment out of existence. Sean, don’t change!
The comment that “anonymous” is complaining was censored by me was posted here:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=681#comment-37499
and my response to it is here:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=681#comment-37524
What happened in this case was that the comment was initially identified by the WordPress spam filter as spam, so not immediately posted. When I checked the spam queue that day and found it, I dug it out, posted it and responded to it. It seems that “anonymous” couldn’t even be bothered to actually read the comment thread in question before posting accusations attacking me here. If “anonymous” were using their real name, they might find this embarrassing and it might do some damage to their reputation. But, hey, when you”re “anonymous”, that’s something you never have to worry about!
Although I did link to a potpourri of different topics above, none of them involved the endlessly fascinating subject of blog etiquette. So let’s just leave that subject for some other time, okay?
LL, I don’t get that people are still arguing for countries to open up their military programs to inspection. After what happened the last time a nation did that, aren’t people in the US embarrassed to ask for it again?
“Richard Butler…had known of and co-operated with a US electronic eavesdropping operation that allowed intelligence agents to monitor military communications in Iraq. This was confirmed by UNSCOM insider Rod Barton on Australian television in February 2005. This intelligence was used to target US air attacks on Iraq.”
So, even if string theory is “not even wrong”, you still need to know about it to be able to make sense of the blogosphere. 🙂
Count Iblis,
comparing the energy released from a bomb with a reactor is misleading, as it neglects the energy consumed in making bombs, which is considerable.
It is also irrelevant to my point, which was this:
India, due to a shortage of uranium, has no economic uranium mines. That is, there are no places where the total cost of finding, digging up, and refining uranium is less than the current market price.
Due to their weapons program, India mines uneconomic uranium for bombs. It can do this because bombmaking is not an economic activity, so they expect to lose money.
Because they make bombs, most uranium producing countries will not sell uranium to India for any purpose, for fear that it might end up getting used for military applications.
Therefore, the price of uranium in India is artificially high. It is this unusually high local uranium price that makes thorium reactors economic there, but not in the open market.
Krishna, I do believe that thorium reactors are preferable to coal, especially in countries like India with lax emissions laws.
As for the wisdom of nuclear weapons, it is my personal opinion that India should stop making atomic bombs and instead concentrate on weaponizing Harbhajan Singh. In the case of an attack by Pakistan or China, India could fire the off-break spinner into Beijing or Islamabad, where he can personally bitch-slap whoever ordered the attack.
L.L., you are wrong in one sense, and right in another sense. I have two explanations: long-winded and short.
Long-Winded Explanation:
As you explained in your nice blog post, the chemical properties of thorium (Th) are such that it is more difficult for natural geological processes to concentrate it than they can concentrate uranium (U). How much more difficult? One obvious way is to compare the bulk Th:U ratio to the ratio of Th reserves to U reserves. Estimates of Th reserves are sketchy: quite a few countries do not report, and there has been even less exploration of Th than of U. I have seen Th reserves estimates ranging from between 1.2 million tons and 2.5 million tons (these are only reasonably assured reserves). Give Th the intensity of exploration that U has enjoyed, and I do not think it unreasonable to expect that the amount of Th reserves would be similar to the amount of U reserves. So perhaps 4 times more difficult, perhaps more. In any case, on the question of how much thorium we can extract out of the ground, you are wrong that the bulk Th:U ratio is irrelevant: it is relevant precisely because of the relative difficulty of finding rich deposits of Th in the crust. Imagine if the bulk ratio was the other way around, i.e. U/Th was 4. Then the Th boosters would have much less of a case.
Fortunately, the case for Th does not rest entirely on the bulk Th:U ratio. In fact, most of the case rests on something else, something further down the ore-electricity line. It’s something I already mentioned in an earlier post: only 0.7% of the U extracted from the ground is used to generate electricity (i.e. the U-235 isotope), while in a Th reactor, virtually all of the Th is usable (after converting to U-233 via a cheap, efficient process of neutron bombardment). Since the output energies per atomic unit of mass are similar for both sets of fission reactions, we just need to compare 100% to 0.7% to get a rough idea of how much more “energy-rich” a given mass of Th is to a given mass of U: at least two orders of magnitude. So on the question of how much energy you can extract from the world’s supply of thorium, you are right: the bulk Th:U ratio is not very relevant, because it is a significand issue, and we are concerned mostly with the exponent.
Short Explanation
Current thorium reserves are probably not much less than uranium reserves. All of the thorium, compared to only 0.7% of the uranium, can be used in the energy generation process. Notice the two orders of magnitude difference: that gives us a good amount to play with on the relatively uncertain issue of thorium reserves.
“Give Th the intensity of exploration that U has enjoyed”
e.g. 2 years? The reason I got hired was that all the uranium geologists with work experience are now in their late 60’s or older. Nobody has looked for U since Three Mile Island flattened western demand when I was 6 years old.
Also, Monazite deposits occur in a subset of titanium/zirconium heavy sands deposits, which have been in keen demand ever since we started building rockets and gave up lead paint. So the accidental byproduct exploration for Th has actually been greater than for U, as Th deposits are cogenetic with other valuable minerals, while high grade U isn’t.
As for the ore grade, consider the Western Australia mineral sands, which are one of the more Th-rich deposits. The Th here has been studied extensively for radiological hazard work resulting from dust inhalation. The mineral sands (zircon+ilmenite+rutile+monazite) generally grade 10%, of which 2% is monazite. The monazite there has a Th content of around 5%. So the Th content for the deposit is 5% of 2% of 10%, or 100ppm. (numbers from http://earthsci.org/mineral/mindep/depfile/minsand.htm )
100ppm of 235U requires a total U grade of 13888pmm, or around 1.4%. This is a few times higher than most producing Australian mines. Canadian mines are much higher grade, however- generally around 20%U, or 1440ppm 235U.
There do exist some obscure high Th rocks (high being a percent or two)- one happens to be in the roadcut of a major US freeway (to find which one, start driving around with a scintillometer in your car). But they are small, rare, poorly understood, and not easy to look for.
But the main advantage of U-based reactors has nothing to do with geology- it is that they are available now- the technology is mature. Th may be competitive in a few decades, but by that time, renewables will probably be cheaper. Wind power is already cheaper than nuclear- it just has stability/storage issues.
I’m all for burning today’s Th byproduct in a reactor- it makes a lot more sense than disposing of it as radioactive waste- but I think that assuming that this technology can support civilization is a bit premature. Feel free to prove me wrong with a superior reactor design and exploration plan.
Not to long ago it was considered a sin to let any food go to waste. Now we burn food in car engines while children in other countries starve to death.
It’s sad that logical reasoning is no longer used when discussing energy issues. The fear of nuclear energy is so ingrained that it is not considered even when: *environmental disaster is looming
*people starve when alternative energy is used
*the US economy is bleeding dollars to oil producing dictatorships
Technically, with nuclear energy, it wouldn’t even be to difficult to produce carbon neutral fuels for use in vehicles.
Yes, actually, I agree with you. I’m not advocating using thorium-based reactors right now, although we would be stark raving mad not to immediately start building some experimental reactors, given the obviously great potential of thorium as a source of energy.
That is a biased and probably wrong statement. Estimating costs for various forms of power is not an exact science. Costs will vary depending on location and time, on what you count (external costs like pollution?) and what you don’t count (what about subsidies?). The best you can come up with is a range of estimates. For your statement to be true, you would have to take the lower end of the cost estimates for wind, and compare it to the higher end of the cost estimates for nuclear: that is unfair and hence biased. I say you are probably wrong, because the lower-end estimate for nuclear is a bit cheaper than the lower-end estimate for wind, the higher-end estimate for wind is significantly more expensive than the higher-end estimate for nuclear, but nevertheless there is significant overlap between the two. A fair statement would be that the average costs for wind and nuclear are in the same ballpark, but it is a bit more likely that nuclear is cheaper than wind rather than vice versa.
Well I think the superior reactor design for thorium is already well-known: molten-salt reactors, and in particular, the liquid-fluoride variety. An experimental reactor based on this design was actually built and run successfully at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA, over 40 years ago, and you can read about that project here.
Lab Lemming, I see! But the new deal with the US and the IAEA will change the situation.
I agree with Ijon Tichy and Erik on nuclear power. The history of the SNR-300 reactor shows that bad decisions were made in the past which took away some of the options we could have had today.
It is feasible to produce a large fraction of all our energy needs from nuclear energy and the remaining part from renewable energy sources, such as wind power and geothermal energy. We also need to store energy, e.g. by producing hydrogen.
It is also possible to build “power islands”. You can use wind power to pump out seawater and by letting it flow back in, you can generate power at any time of the day, regardless of whether there is any wind or not.
Sorry I am a week late to the party, Ijon & Lab Lemming. Jeremy Whitlock’s excellent Canadian Nuclear FAQ is worth an examination, perhaps most relevantly:
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionA.htm#j
and
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionG.htm#uranium_supply
(http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_fuel.htm is also interesting and has a section on Thorium)
The Canadians, South Koreans and Indians have collaborated in various ways over the years (the Canada-India relationship is, uh, complicated, not least by the fact that Canada’s completely civilian nuclear engineering community sometimes seems congenitally unwilling to keep politically embarassing or militarily sensitive secrets (“they leak like a calandria”). CANFLEX (AECL and KAERI), DUPIC (AECL, KAERI and KNFL), once-through cycles with on-power managed piles comprising 232Th bearing sand bundles (“OTT” from AECL and BARC) and the increasing number of Korean “reburn” PWR-PHWR (AECL, KHNP-Kepco, KNFL) sites are among the results.
These developments are described on the FAQ site and Whitlock himself is an avid emailer, in case you spot errors or have questions, as noted at the bottom of the main nuclearfaq.ca page.