I’m of the understanding that the U-233 bred by a LFTR would be contaminated by enough U-232 to make weapon fabrication, storage, maintenance and firing highly problematic.

I don’t think 232-U is that big of a hindrance, at first anyway. The gamma rays that 232-U gives rise to, it gives rise to indirectly, by decaying to 228-Th, which has a ~2-year half-life, and then there is a fairly quick sequence of other decays, and then your thallium-208, which does the gamma emitting.

So in storage and maintenance there is indeed an increasing gamma ray problem, but making a sphere and then quickly doing one’s best to make it blow up, one would not run into gamma ray problems. More here.

(How fire can be domesticated)

I’m of the understanding that the U-233 bred by a LFTR would be contaminated by enough U-232 to make weapon fabrication, storage, maintenance and firing highly problematic.

#6: …leaving electicity generation to the private sector is a no brainer.

That’s ideology, pure and simple. If you want to control nuclear proliferation amidst the spread of nuclear power around the world, then you’d better abandon such concepts and embrace the idea of nuclear being controlled by an international regime. Nuclear power and the private sector leads to all sorts of potential problems, as I discussed at length in my book. Nuclear power isn’t like dealing with any other kind of power. The free market is best for everything line just doesn’t fly here. It’s blatantly untrue when it comes to nuclear power.

#13: I think Gen III reactors and their current deployment are integral to the future of any Gen IV reactor scheme. The Council doesn’t make that clear enough, IMO. Secondly, obviously, I think that not including LFTR as one of the ‘waste eater’ and ‘zero-waste generators’ is a huge mistake, *politically* for a group organized as this Council is.

Give us time to get rolling here. Virtually all of our contributors so far, and more to come, recognize the evolution of nuclear power to include Gen III reactors in our near future. We’d just like to get Gen IV off the ground ASAP for a host of reasons, not the least being that once the public is aware that there’s a solution to the LWR waste issue, Gen III systems will face a lot less resistance. As I pointed out in Prescription for the Planet, if we want to ramp up fast enough to get to zero power system GHGs by 2050, we’ll have to either build lots of Gen IIIs even as we start up IFRs as fast as fuel supplies allow, or we’d have to build massive amounts of IFRs from 2035 on. As the Grenoble study that Luke linked to in #15 states (Thanks, Luke!), the best possible scenario is one that includes LWRs, IFRs, and LFTRs. On that last point, we intend to discuss LFTRs on the SCGI site, but would prefer to do it in a manner that doesn’t pose them as an either/or choice or exaggerate the hazards of sodium. We’re interested in the strengths and weaknesses of various systems, but not in fostering rivalries. We’ll have AREVA people on our site too, and as you know they’re not exactly fans of IFRs.

#17: How hard to you want to try?

In P4TP, the speed of the nuclear ramp-up I propose, as ambitious as it sounds, is based on France’s nuclear build-up under considerably less urgent conditions. I did the analysis based on GNP to illustrate how little economic stress would be involved even if we build over 200GW per year worldwide. Your own country’s mileage may vary, but you might consider doing a quick analysis for Australia using such a comparison, for the facts of the French model are indisputable, and very encouraging. I might add that industrial bottlenecks common to LWRs are largely eliminated with IFRs because of the fact that they operate at near-atmospheric pressure and so avoid the difficult forgings needed in LWRs.

#19: SGCI needs a new logo (and website banner), fast.

If you’re willing to provide them, we’ll be happy to look at them.

#31: In the Council mission statement: I like the term “post-scarcity”. I assume this means that technology can now, if unleashed, provide abundance for all.

That’s the idea, not restricted solely to nuclear power but to a mix of synergistic technologies, which is what P4TP is all about. SCGI is our attempt to take the futurist label away from that vision and make it a reality. Clearly providing abundant energy for all, economically and environmentally sound, is a basis. But management and total recycling of the resources that provide our lifestyle comforts is critical. Plasma recycling can do the lion’s share of that, along with better management of renewable resources like wood, etc. The challenge is to do all this even in the face of population increases projected to add another few billion people to the planet. While I believe it can be done, I don’t think we’ve got much time to dither if we want to avoid all sorts of chaos.

#34: …we will be electrifying our transport fleets pretty rapidly pretty soon.

Too bad, because we don’t have the excess generating capacity to power them, except for one country: France. All the more reason to get our nuclear show on the road.

#36: All the names & their specialities given show that the SCGI is grossly imbalanced with people having a similar nuclear interest or preference. This really isn’t acceptable.

Oh, excuse me! It’s true that we’re nuclear-heavy now, due to the group I’ve been working with for a long time being the first participants, and also to the critical importance of getting nuclear running. Without abundant energy, the whole scenario comes apart. We need that foundation. Plenty of clean energy is the key. As for your secret systems that you just can’t tell us about yet, I’m sure we’re all waiting with bated breath for future revelations. Meanwhile, I propose we implement the things we know will work.

#40: I’m unclear on the modus operandi of this organization. Is it intended to be a high powered lobby group? A think tank? A popular organization, or closed membership? Is the intent to influence the policy makers, or to reach out to the public and run campaigns? How does the organization plan to achieve its aims?

We’re a nonprofit so we can’t act as a lobbying group. SCGI is a think tank, essentially. The members contributing their expertise are there by invitation, though we definitely intend to disseminate the information to both the public and policy makers. We’ll be putting out a weekly newsletter highlighting each week’s new material to make it easy for people to keep up without having to go dig through the site. Soon we’ll get our archive and indexing started so people will be able to quickly access information on a variety of topics related to the post-scarcity vision. I’m sure you realize that this doesn’t all happen overnight, and I beg your patience as we get up and running. I do believe it will evolve fairly quickly into a go-to place for technically rigorous information on a variety of topics, as well as for opinion pieces by its members. We’ll also be responding to events and media developments with press releases, and establishing a speaker’s bureau for SCGI members to engage with the public at all types of events. With respect to your further points, a variety of professionals with different specialties as you suggest are already in the membership pipeline, including geoengineering and electrified transport, among other things. It’s not going to be an all-nuclear group. Give us a couple months to flesh it out.

#47: I think one area of expertise that’s seriously lacking in SCGI members is on energy efficiency.

As you point out later in your post there in relation to wind and solar, vakibs, there is so much out there already about energy efficiency, and it pretty much goes without saying that that’s the low-hanging fruit that all of us expect to pick. What we’re focusing on is provision of clean energy supplies to replace existing baseload and vastly increase the new clean baseload around the world. We will certainly also be delving into various types of vehicle propulsion systems (note the article about ammonia power on the site now, not just boron, with more variations to come), and of course resource management/reuse, as well as nonproliferaton issues.

#49: The transport page says it links the boron chapter of P4TP, but it doesn’t.

Fixed. Thanks, Graham.

(How fire can be domesticated)

I think one area of expertise that’s seriously lacking in SCGI members is on energy efficiency. It will be great if you can convince a few scientists / engineers who have expertise on reusing industrial heat, construction of energy-efficient buildings etc. May be, Dr. Mackay can help you in finding the necessary experts. Please give this a try. This will definitely boost the green credentials of your group.

Allan Kay,

Solar and wind power are good, but they are hardly sufficient for the scale of problems that we’re dealing with right now. At worst, they are diversion tactics to continue with natural gas power plants (and to burn more coal in the future). I don’t think we need to spend much time discussing them, because there is a lot of publicity already on these technologies. Dr. Mackay’s book is a good introduction for explaining the vista of this new energy technologies. And it is good that he is serving as a guest writer of this group.

It’s possible, but given the rather irrational attack against nuclear fission included in the post, and the mention of ‘classical physics’, along with the lack of names for the ‘experts’ mentioned, I suspect it’s some kind of 2nd-law-violating free-energy scam.

Tom

What do you see the first/next tasks for this organization to be? Whats the immediate startup agenda?