There is also Thorium, in much higher quantities, and much more secure to use. During the cold war Thorium wasn't used as it produces very little plutonium, used in nuclear weapons, so both USA and USSR developed uranium reactors as they wanted the military subproduct.

The problem with safety is that it costs money. What they do is look at the events that happened the last x years and then make a plant that will resist those. If something "bigger" happens... well, you saw what happened in Fukushima.

However, Kasz is right. The effects of nuclear meltdowns aren't that bad. Accidents in chemical plants are usually more dangerous and nobody cares about those. (I'm not saying that we shouldn't care about nuclear accidents, though).

@Kynes: No fissible Thorium isotopes can be found in nature. However, Th-232 can absorb slow neutrons like U-238, then beta minus decay into Uranium 233 which is fissible, but you need a source of neutrons to do so. A fuel rod composed only of Th-232 won't work, just like a rod composed only of U-238 doesn't.

Fire from Salt Water


The late John Kanzius found a way to burn salt water with the same radio wave machine he is using to kill cancer cells.

Kanzius was testing his external radio-wave generator to see if it could desalinate salt water, and the water ignited. A university chemist determined that the process is generating hydrogen, which can be burned as fuel.

While the phenomenon is interesting, it is not yet practical for energy generation as long as more energy is consumed by the radio frequency device than is produced for burning. Efficiency-wise, they started at around 76 percent of Faraday's theoretical limit. (Other Hydrogen-from-Water methods, such as the one being pursued by Bob Boyce, are approaching 7x Faraday). They subsequently quietly reported that they surpassed 100% efficiency, which would mean that the system is somehow harnessing environmental energy such as from the zero point or some other yet-to-be discovered phenomenon.

Another problem to be overcome from burning salt water is the liberation of toxic chlorine (from the Cl of NaCl/salt).

Kanzius said if someone wants to buy up the rights to the technology, that would be fine. He would use the funds to finance his quest to cure cancer.

He passed away Feb. 19, 2009.

 http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:John_Kanzius_Produces_Hydrogen_from_Salt_Water_Using_Radio_Waves

Of course, but that doesn't mean we can't use it in much cheaper and much more secure reactors. We have tons of neutron sources usable to transmute Thorium and create the fissible Uranium, and that non fissible by itself property is what makes it much more secure, as it can't sustain by itself the reaction, so the risk of a meltdown disappears.

It makes a small part of the reactor radioactive very slowly, yes. So it will need to be replaced every 10 years or so, that's the only waste, and the radioactivity is short lived, more like 100 years than millions of plutonium, so we can safely store it. And of course once we achieve sustainable DT fusion we can move types with no neutrons.

Also worth noting the whole "The desert can power the whole country" argument isn't actually true.

It could create enough power to power the whole country... if the whole country was right next to it.

In reality though....

A) Transference. The longer power goes on the power lines, the more energy is lost.

B) Storage. It's a lot harder to store solar energy.. and it's very inefficient at the moment.

C) Peak usage times. These are usually when the sun isn't shining. Combine this with the storage and transference issues and.....

D) Stupidity of central power location. Would we really want all the power for the country being supplied by one area, or even the majority of it?

Essentially one terrorist attack, or hell, a bored 6th grader who's good at hacking could essentially take out the entire country for a while and cause HUGE problems.


I could go on... but i mean, That alone should be pretty decent to start.

I know there is a limit, but solar panels can still be made more energy efficient than they are now, maybe to the point they produce a significant part of a house's electricity hopefully. And i'm not saying we should only rely on solar panels, we just need to move away from oil and coal for now and eventually gas and nuclear (needs to be made safer). We need an worthy alternative to these. 

People may not believe those oil conspiracies but I do believe they are true. No one will convince me that in 80 years they couldn't create a car that works with anything else. Back in the 90s they were talking about having electric cars almost everywhere in North America by 2002. Nothing happened, the only one was the new Beetle but some rumor said the batteries could explose so they removed all of them.

There's always something "bad" with electric cars that prevent them from being mass produced and sold to the public. People are asking for this yet all we have are cars they say requires less oil/km so we "forget" the constant hikes every years/months.

There are brilliant inventors around the world, something always happen to them... mysteriously...

This guy for example, here in Quebec. He has to go through so many steps to get to drive his cars it's ridiculous, after having passed every tests they ask him in the end to make a crash test with his car... even if his car is the same all he did was replace the engine (it's in french, find a translator)

http://tvanouvelles.ca/lcn/infos/regional/autresregions/archives/2012/09/20120907-071553.html


And this is not the magnetic motors that could run like forever. People need to understand that extracting oil costs a lot and they put a lot of research in this industry, it costs them a lot yes but they still invest because they make a lot with it. No one will tell me they couldn't put as much research in what some inventors here and there do with less than 10 000$.

No oil conspiracy... yea... we're all idiots!

Using an external source of neutrons would increase the cost (and then the price) of electricity a lot. That's why it isn't used to generate Pu-239 from U-238 to increase the % of fissible material in the fuel.

We have tons of U-238 that can do the same thing as Th-232. So much that countries use it as armor-piercing projectiles and tank armour.

The question is if it's worth it, not if we can do it.

Damn, I'm the KylieDog of the thread with all this negativity >_<

Wow, thanks for the update.

Real shame as he really didn't care about the fuel discovery but rather wanted to sell it so he could work on a cure to cancer. His idea on that was also interesting.

If we consider his death a conspiracy theory as pointed out, I wonder who got him? The oil companies or the medical companies. as he was close to solving something theuy didn't want solved meaning they loose research funding.