Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire: Doing Mankind a Favor

Friday, August 26, 2011

Doing Mankind a Favor – Part 2/2

Some critics say the reason the US government and a few European countries such as Germany stopped developing Thorium as a source of power was because it is thought to be almost impossible to use thorium to make nuclear bombs.
China, on the other hand, has more than 1.3 billion people expecting a better lifestyle and to deliver that modern lifestyle takes electricity, which means China cannot afford to ignore safer and cheaper sources of energy.
Currently, the Chinese are building two radically different uranium power plants (in addition to the thorium research) called “pebble-bed reactors“, which use hundreds of thousands of uranium billiard-ball sized elements cloaked in a protective layer of graphite that will be cooled by non-explosive helium gas instead of water.
Unlike power plants such as Japan’s Fukushima Daiichy power plant, these new Chinese “pebble-bed reactors” are designed to gradually dissipate heat on their own — even if the coolant is lost as it was in Japan.
If the first “pebble-bed reactors” work, China will build dozen more.