On 4/1/2014 6:43 PM, LizR wrote:
On 2 April 2014 14:13, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 4/1/2014 4:20 PM, LizR wrote:On 2 April 2014 12:10, Chris de Morsella <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Why has LFTR development essentially stopped for forty years? Apparently they can't be used to make bombs.That was part of the reason. But the story is that when Hyman Rickover was put in charge of the atomic submarine program he went to Oak Ridge to be briefed on the thorium power reactor that was there. He was famously abrasive and he started telling the director Alvin Weinberg how to run the reactor research and Weinberg had him thrown out of the lab. Rickover then turned to Westinghouse who would take orders from whoever supplied the money. Westinghouse had a LWR design and that then became the de facto standard.Either way, it doesn't look like there's anything intrinsically wrong with thorium reactors, and quite a few points in their favour - but once a lot of effort has been sunk into getting one method of power generation up and running, people are naturally reluctant to start again from scratch (or nearly so), and possibly have to pay similar up-front costs to get a new design working.
Right. The reactor at Oak Ridge was not a power plant. To make a power plant that takes advantage of the LFTR features will take a lot of engineering. And another problem is government regulation. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency just has a blank page "reserved for thorium liquid salt reactors". Nobody is going to allow a LFTR be built near them unless it meets government regulatory standards - but the standards don't exist. So the only way LFTRs will get built is either the government develops them (the way they did LWR) or they are developed in some other country where regulation is non-existent. One company formed to develop LFTRs is proposing to develop them in Brazil.
(I believe something similar is supposed to have happened with the internal combustion engine using petrol rather than alcohol (I think it was) - or is that an urban myth?)
I hadn't heard that. There's virtually no difference between and IC engine running on gasoline vs ethanol or methanol. Engines are converted to run on ethanol for racing by just changing the fuel/air mixture.
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