We are dependant on fossil fuels, and they are killing us at the same time. This is why we need LFTR as soon as humanly possible http://videosift.com/video/Liquid-Fluoride-Thorium-Reactor-Google-Tech-Talk-Remix

Sorry @enoch, I like you, but this video is nonsense.

There are some real and genuine issues here, but it's presented in a way that only a stoned college student could take seriously.

Oh, and water fluoridation has been peer-reviewed again and again and found to be perfectly safe.

*lies
So much of this is simply factually incorrect or misleading.
I'll link sources above my information

http://www.historyliteracy.org/download/Sears2.pdf
First of all, in 1910, the school year was only 99 days in length. Only half of eligible students attended, and only 8% graduated from high school.

Furthermore, in 1910, only 35% of 17 year olds were in high school.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/12/ready-or-not-77-million-kids-and-adults-heading-back-to-school-soon/
Compare that to today, where nearly 100% of young people attend high school and OF COURSE it's going to cost more. DURR!

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending
Meanwhile, even though spending has gone up by an absolute number, the percentage of GDP from the federal and state governments has remained steady at 2% or LESS, with rising costs from local spending, in part, because of an increased privatization of schools.

Oi vey, and they rallying against FLUORIDE??? Seriously?
http://www.tampabay.com/news/localgovernment/dewitt-more-ferocious-fallacies-about-fluoride/2139759
"high rates of exposure were very high indeed — up to 11.5 parts per million. And many of the other highly exposed groups were drinking water with more than 3 parts per million of fluoride.

That's more than four times the concentration used to protect teeth: 0.7 parts per million.

And that, by the way, is the same or lower than the level in the water supply of some "low exposure" groups in the studies. In other words, the standard fluoridation level in this country was presented in some of these studies as an amount that allowed kids' IQs to flourish."

Stop fear mongering. Get some science.

Safe nuclear refers to many different new gen4 reactor units that rely on passive safety instead of engineered safety. The real difference comes with a slight bit of understanding of how nuclear tech works now, and why that isn't optimal.

Let us first consider this, even with current nuclear technology, the amount of people that have died as a direct and indirect result of nuclear is very low per unit energy produced. The only rival is big hydro, even wind and solar have a great deal of risk compared to nuclear as we do it and have done it for years. The main difference is when a nuclear plant fails, everyone hears about it...but when a oil pipeline explodes and kills dozens, or solar panel installers fall off a roof or get electrocuted and dies...it just isn't as interesting.

Pound per pound nuclear is already statistically very safe, but that isn't really what we are talking about, we are talking about what makes them more unsafe compared to new nuclear techs. Well, that has to do with how normal nukes work. So, firstly, normal reactor tech uses solid fuel rods. It isn't a "metal" either, it is uranium dioxide, has the same physical characteristics as ceramic pots you buy in a store. When the fuel fissions, the uranium is transmuted into other, lighter, elements some of which are gases. Over time, these non-fissile elements damage the fuel rod to the point where it can no longer sustain fission and need to be replaced. At this point, they have only burned about 4% of the uranium content, but they are all "used up". So while there are some highly radioactive fission products contained in the fuel rods, the vast majority is just normal uranium, and that isn't very radioactive (you could eat it and not really suffer any radiation effects, now chemical toxicity is a different matter). The vast majority of nuclear waste, as a result of this way of burning uranium, generates huge volumes of waste products that aren't really waste products, just normal uranium.

But this isn't what makes light water reactors unsafe compared to other designs. It is all about the water. Normal reactors use water to both cool the core, extract the heat, and moderate the neutrons to sustain the fission reaction. Water boils at 100c which is far to low a temperature to run a thermal reactor on, you need much higher temps to get power. As a result, nuclear reactors use highly pressurized water to keep it liquid. The pressure is an amazingly high 2200psi or so! This is where the real problem comes in. If pressure is lost catastrophically, the chance to release radioactivity into the environment increases. This is further complicated by the lack of water then cooling the core. Without water, the fission chain reaction that generates the main source of heat in the reactor shuts down, however, the radioactive fission products contained in the fuel rods are very unstable and generate lots of heat. So much heat over time, they end up causing the rods to melt if they aren't supplied with water. This is the "melt down" you always hear about. If you start then spraying water on them after they melt down, it caries away some of those highly radioactive fission products with the steam. This is what happened in Chernobyl, there was also a human element that overdid all their safety equipment, but that just goes to show you the worst case.

The same thing didn't happen in Fukushima. What happened in Fukushima is that coolant was lost to the core and they started to melt down. The tubes which contain the uranium are made from zirconium. At high temps, water and zirconium react to form hydrogen gas. Now modern reactor buildings are designed to trap gases, usually steam, in the event of a reactor breach. In the case of hydrogen, that gas builds up till a spark of some kind happens and causes an explosion. These are the explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Both of the major failures and dangers of current reactors deal with the high pressure water; but water isn't needed to make a reactor run, just this type of reactor.

The fact that reactors have radioactive materials in them isn't really unsafe itself. What is unsafe is reactor designs that create a pressure to push that radioactivity into other areas. A electroplating plant, for example, uses concentrated acids along with high voltage electricity in their fabrication processes. It "sounds" dangerous, and it is in a certain sense, but it is a manageable danger that will most likely only have very localized effects in the event of a catastrophic event. This is due mainly to the fact that there are no forces driving those toxic chemical elements into the surrounding areas...they are just acid baths. The same goes for nuclear materials, they aren't more or less dangerus than gasoline (gas go boom!), if handled properly.

I think one of the best reactor designs in terms of both safety and efficiency are the molten salt reactors. They don't use water as a coolant, and as a result operate at normal preasures. The fuel and coolant is a liquid lithium, fluoride, and beryllium salt instead of water, and the initial fuel is thorium instead of uranium. Since it is a liquid instead of a solid, you can do all sorts of neat things with it, most notably, in case of an emergency, you can just dump all the fuel into a storage tank that is passively cooled then pump it back to the reactor once the issue is resolved. It is a safety feature that doesn't require much engineering, you are just using the ever constant force of gravity. This is what is known as passive safety, it isn't something you have to do, it is something that happens automatically. So in many cases, what they designed is a freeze plug that is being cooled. If that fails for any reason, and you desire a shutdown, the freeze plug melts and the entire contents of the reactor are drained into the tanks and fission stops (fission needs a certain geometry to happen).

So while the reactor will still be as dangerous as any other industrial machine would be...like a blast furnace, it wouldn't pose any threat to the surrounding area. This is boosted by the fact that even if you lost containment AND you had a ruptured emergency storage tank, these liquid salts solidify at temps below 400c, so while they are liquid in the reactor, they quickly solidify outside of it. And another great benefit is they are remarkably stable. Air and water don't really leach anything from them, fluoride and lithium are just so happy binding with things, they don't let go!

The fuel burn up is also really great. You burn up 90% of what you put in, and if you try hard, you can burn up to 99%. So, comparing them to "clean coal" doesn't really give new reactor tech its fair shake. The tech we use was actually sort of denounced by the person who made them, Alvin Weinberg, and he advocated the molten salt reactor instead. I could babble on about this for ages, but I think Kirk Sorensen explains that better than I could...hell most likely the bulk of what I said is said better by him



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw

But the real question is why. Why use nuclear and not solar, for instance?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

This is the answer. The power of the atom is a MILLION times more dense that fossil fuels...a million! It is a number that is beyond what we can normal grasp as people. Right now, current reactors harness less that 1% of that power because of their reactor design and fuel choice.

And unfortunately, renewables just cost to darn much for how much energy they contribute. In that, they also use WAY more resources to make per unit energy produced. So wind, for example, uses 10x more steal per unit energy contributed than other technologies. It is because renewables is more like energy farming.

http://videosift.com/video/TEDxWarwick-Physics-Constrain-Sustainable-Energy-Options


This is a really great video on that maths behind what makes renewables less than attractive for many countries. But to rap it up, finally, the real benefit is that cheap, clean power is what helps makes nations great. There is an inexorable link with access to energy and financial well being. Poor nations burn coal to try and bridge that gap, but that has a huge health toll. Renewables are way to costly for them per unit energy, they really need other answers. New nuclear could be just that, because it can be made nearly completely safe, very cheap to operate, and easier to manufacture (this means very cheap compared to today's reactors as they are basically huge pressure vessels). If you watch a couple of videos from Kirk and have more questions or problems, let me know, as you can see, I love talking about this stuff Sorry if I gabbed your ear off, but this is the stuff I am going back to school for because I do believe it will change the world. It is the closest thing to free energy we are going to get in the next 20 years.

In reply to this comment by ReverendTed:
Just stumbled onto your profile page and noticed an exchange you had with dag a few months back.
What constitutes "safe nuclear"? Is that a specific type or category of nuclear power?
Without context (which I'm sure I could obtain elsewise with a simple Google search, but I'd rather just ask), it sounds like "clean coal".

I was giving statistics for the USA. The fear of nuclear energy is irrational. Given a near-worst case scenario like in Japan, no one dies from radiation and a very limited geographic area is made unusable and access is easily restricted. For the life of me I can't understand why people continue to be willing to fill the atmosphere with CO2, and other pollutants, while such a clean alternative is readily available. An individual's lifetime energy consumption footprint is less than a baseball size piece of nuclear waste. Bury it a mile deep in the desert and it will remain there for a million years.
>> ^Fletch:

>> ^snoozedoctor:
Number killed by radiation from nuclear power generation in the last 40 years, about zero.

Chernobyl?
But you are right. Perspective needed. I think nuclear power will be one of very few options for large and consistent amounts of power generation in the future, assuming wind and solar don't become vastly more efficient and take off in a MUCH bigger way. We are on the downward slope of the bell curve of available oil and fusion has been 30 years away for the last 40 years. There are safer, cleaner, more inherently stable nuclear options out there that could win over those opposed to nuclear power, although I think most opposition today is based on ignorance and unwarranted fear.

>> ^snoozedoctor:

Number killed by radiation from nuclear power generation in the last 40 years, about zero.


Chernobyl?

But you are right. Perspective needed. I think nuclear power will be one of very few options for large and consistent amounts of power generation in the future, assuming wind and solar don't become vastly more efficient and take off in a MUCH bigger way. We are on the downward slope of the bell curve of available oil and fusion has been 30 years away for the last 40 years. There are safer, cleaner, more inherently stable nuclear options out there that could win over those opposed to nuclear power, although I think most opposition today is based on ignorance and unwarranted fear.

http://energyfromthorium.com/

Forgot to post this. On the sides, if you go to "Thorium and the Liquid-Fluoride Reactor: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" under pages, you can get a better look at all the slides he uses.

>> ^PalmliX:

Nuclear could actually be MUCH safer and cleaner if Thorium reactors were built instead of the Uranium ones that are in use today.


We have a bunch of those video, I posted a new one

http://videosift.com/video/Liquid-Fluoride-Thorium-Reactors

I am not a technical person, supposedly there are some corrosion problems, but that is just something I heard from a person studing to be a nuclear tech (he isn't an authority yet)

@Stormsinger
You wanted a formal study on Prozac overdose or toxicity
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1586402

plenty more on google, and i don't mean to suggest that fluoride is a drug any more than lead poisoning is a drug.

**edit
Prozac exposure seems to cause phospholipidosis in animal studies. How is this different from F?

looking back, i clearly said fluoride was a drug, then I said it wasn't.
sorry for the bank robbery folks.
Just a misunderstanding. In my brain.

>> ^marinara:

No question that the active part of the molecule is the F.
http://saturn.med.nyu.edu/files/mylab/wang/pdf/Zhou-LeuT-SSRIs-2009.pdf

"All SSRIs possess halogen atoms at specific positions, which are key determinants for the drugs’ specificity for SERT"
"The SSRI halogens all bind to exactly the same pocket within LeuT."
That said, Fluoride isn't a drug. Putting fluoride in the water to make people happy is just crazy.


Seriously, just because a chemical has some fluorine atoms, does NOT make it the same as sodium fluoride. Every study (a massive three of them) mentioned on that page is talking about sodium fluoride or aluminum fluoride. There has never been any legitimate evidence that Flouxetine has anything remotely similar to the behavior of either of those. Look for actual peer-reviewed research, not the crap you get from conspiracy sites.

http://www.rense.com/general11/fk.htm

fluoride doesn't make you happy. it makes you slow and forgetful.

for example

Symptoms of Hypothyroidism

Fatigue
Weakness
Weight gain or increased difficulty losing weight
Coarse, dry hair
Dry, rough pale skin
Hair loss
Cold intolerance (you can't tolerate cold temperatures like those around you)
Muscle cramps and frequent muscle aches
Constipation
Depression
Irritability
Memory loss
Abnormal menstrual cycles
Decreased libido

No question that the active part of the molecule is the F.
http://saturn.med.nyu.edu/files/mylab/wang/pdf/Zhou-LeuT-SSRIs-2009.pdf
"All SSRIs possess halogen atoms at specific positions, which are key determinants for the drugs’ specificity for SERT"
"The SSRI halogens all bind to exactly the same pocket within LeuT."

That said, Fluoride isn't a drug. Putting fluoride in the water to make people happy is just crazy.

>> ^kceaton1:

I'm no fan of Fluoride or Prozac,


Shhhhhh... she can hear us....

>> ^marinara:

i don't expect people to know this, but fluoride in the water acts just like the active part of the prozac molecule (the Fluoxetine) molecule.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prozac


You're joking--right?