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Gold/Mining/Energy : What is Thorium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Metacomet who wrote (832)	4/15/2014 12:40:50 AM
From: Condo	Respond to of 908

<The only way that the worlds energy needs can possibly be met without destroying the environment is with a combination of renewable and nuclear> Agree. Notice also that the replacement of coal power with natural gas in the US, while a very good step, may actually be slowing the transition to renewable and nuclear power generation. <The resistance to changing from uranium, driven by producers with a massive installed reactor base, is going to put the US at a competitive disadvantage when the dam does break and the world commits, as they will have to do, to bringing Thorium online> Yes. Old school nuclear reactor manufacturers like GE have every reason to twist and distort federal regulations to suppress Thorium reactor introduction. I'm pretty sure GE manufactures wind turbines, however. <It's a shame that the US has allowed itself to be dominated politically by entrenched, wealthy interests who are adamant to keep the income streams they are enjoying at the risk of the worlds health> True. It's probably always been so, for example: big tobacco, big sugar, etc. Still, generating electric power from Thorium will be a huge global game-changer. When India and China demonstrate that it's practical, I bet Japan and Europe will quickly follow because they need it more urgently than the US. After that who knows, maybe the US will become the first to deploy fusion power plants.

To: Metacomet who wrote (832)	4/18/2014 1:58:16 AM
From: Broken_Clock	Respond to of 908

another storage idea bites the dust. 2 months and they can't get near the accident. "The U.S. has 71,862 tons of the waste, according to state-by-state numbers obtained by The Associated Press. But the nation has no place to permanently store the material, which stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years." huffingtonpost.com AP, Apr. 17, 2014: Crews on their fourth trip into the mine on Wednesday made it into the only active waste storage area and found contamination, [Tammy Reynolds, U.S. Dept. of Energy’s deputy recovery manager] said. The deeper they went into the area, the more widespread the contamination, she said. But the crews had to retreat before identifying the possible source because they had been underground for five hours in protective gear that retains heat and the batteries on their respiratory equipment were running low. [...] The next step is for crews, and possibly robots, to go back down to see if they can identify what caused the leak. Tammy Reynolds, deputy WIPP recovery manager: “The more they went into panel seven, the more (the contamination) became more widespread [...] They made the correct decision to turn back [...] Everyone was safely returned to the surface.” John Heaton, former state representative and chairman of the Carlsbad Mayor’s Nuclear Taskforce, WIPP Town Hall, Apr. 17, 2014 (at 7:00 in): I think that next week might a very busy week in that I think that there will be progress to report in terms as to what might have been the cause and also Phase 1 of the accident investigation report. […] I believe — I hate to speculate on this — but there will be a significant amount of information that will come out next week. So I think it will be a very important meeting and I think we need to have adequate time for people to be able to ask questions. Reynolds, WIPP Town Hall, Apr. 17, 2014 (at 23:00 in): One of the other things we’ve been working on is the contingency plan […] They’ve been working to have robots prepared that in the event that the conditions in the underground don’t allow us to be able to get to the waste space or other parts of the mine later on in recovery activities because of the level of contamination, as a contingency we’re looking at the use of robots. And so there’s a couple of robot operators, they’ve already been to the WIPP site, they’ve received all of the training they would need to go into the underground […] they’ve completed that. And today they brought the robots out to the site and they did a demonstration for us […] so that if we can’t go and visibly put our eyes on certain pieces of the mine, the robot can do that for us and feed us back that information. Watch the KRQE broadcast here