> John, isn't it a wiser thing to consider impact over capability?
> then in the 1950's the immensity of nuclear fission over carbon burning should have led to an Atomic Age, but it didn't.
> All true JC, yet a world powered by atomic energy seems to await commercial fusion which out of my world view is a thing, despite recent progress, is a decades off.
> Nukes may have reduced the great war cycles, but Putin has restarted it again. Even with nukes. All it takes is a different set of values and culture and there we go. Comrade Xi seems of a similar mind set.
> The societal impact of QC is sketchy to me, as it needs to be conformed to human impacts if it is to be better than conventional?
On Tue, Jun 28, 2022 at 8:40 PM <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:
> All true JC, yet a world powered by atomic energy seems to await commercial fusion which out of my world view is a thing, despite recent progress, is a decades off.A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) would greatly reduce or eliminate entirely the problems associated with conventional fission reactors; they need some additional research and development before they become practical but vastly less than what would be required for a fusion reactor.
> Nukes may have reduced the great war cycles, but Putin has restarted it again. Even with nukes. All it takes is a different set of values and culture and there we go. Comrade Xi seems of a similar mind set.Stalin and Mao Zedong had nuclear weapons and both were monsters, but neither of them ever used one in anger, the fact is the only human being who ever did was Harry Truman, and that was nearly 80 years ago. So I think the human race has a pretty good chance of surviving Putin and Xi.
> The societal impact of QC is sketchy to me, as it needs to be conformed to human impacts if it is to be better than conventional?
Quantum Computers are well known for their code breaking abilities but that's not all they can do, in the June 9 2022 issue of the journal Science researchers report they have found a quantum learning algorithm that achieves an exponential speed increase over the that of any known conventional algorithm both in predicting how a quantum system, for example an atom or a molecule, changes over time, and also in its ability to extract useful information from noisy input data. It perhaps should be noted that a brain frozen to liquid nitrogen temperatures is bound to contain a lot of noisy data regardless of how carefully it was frozen. This is the abstract of the article:"Quantum technology promises to revolutionize how we learn about the physical world. An experiment that processes quantum data with a quantum computer could have substantial advantages over conventional experiments in which quantum states are measured and outcomes are processed with a classical computer. We proved that quantum machines could learn from exponentially fewer experiments than the number required by conventional experiments. This exponential advantage is shown for predicting properties of physical systems, performing quantum principal component analysis, and learning about physical dynamics. Furthermore, the quantum resources needed for achieving an exponential advantage are quite modest in some cases. Conducting experiments with 40 superconducting qubits and 1300 quantum gates, we demonstrated that a substantial quantum advantage is possible with today’s quantum processors."
So would we use uranium 235 or do Thorium 232-->U233 as a fuel cycle
and would it be safe enough so the public wouldn't object (protest, riots, etc)?
I'd am more interested (if doable) with Lead-Bismuth moderated reactors, or Helium using TRISO fuel-
> do Thorium 232-->U233 as a fuel cycle and would it be safe enough
> so the public wouldn't object (protest, riots, etc)?
> I'd am more interested (if doable) with Lead-Bismuth moderated reactors,
A Thorium reactor only produces about 1% as much radioactive waste as a conventional reactor, and the stuff it does make is not as nasty, after about 5 years 87% of it would be safe and the remaining 13% in 300 years; a conventional reactor would take 100,000 years. The fundamental reason for this is because the starting material of a LFTR is Thorium 232, lower down on the periodic table than Uranium 238 so much less nasty transuranium stuff is produced.
> That's the thing JC, its not always rationality, or compelled rationality that rules us. Energy policy is performed outside of logic, or even greed, but ideology.
> Will an era of energy shortages compel the Greens to yield to reason
> if we were smarter would we have not already poured money into R&D for MSR reactors decades ago