On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List < everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> Possibly the worst nuclear fission by product is Cessium-137 Fission > It's far from the worst but Cessium-137 is certainly dangerous and must be dealt with carefully. Even a LFTR produces nuclear waste, just a hell of a lot less of it than the solid fuel Uranium reactors we use today. > > Any design that relies on active safety features has a catastrophic > potential > And LFTR's are walk away safe, when the liquid fuel gets hotter it expands and the fission process slows down as a result. And the working temperature of the liquid is 800 degrees Centigrade but the salt doesn't boil till 1400 giving you a huge safety margin. And a LFTR doesn't operate at 160 times atmospheric pressure as today's reactors do, instead it operates at exactly ONE atmospheric pressure, so you don't have to make everything so thick and expensive, and even if there were a leak it wouldn't be a catastrophe. And a LFTR doesn't make Plutonium, present reactors do. And you don't need a human operator to notice that things are getting too hot and figure out that it might be a good idea to shut the reactor down, instead the freeze plug melts due to the laws of thermodynamics and then the fuel drains out of the reactor into a holding tank and the fission reaction stops. And you don't need expensive high tech emergency pumps, you just need the law of gravity. > > But no such reactors exist. One cannot make positivist statements about > a system, until one has actually built the only thing stopping it from > being a full fledged LFTR is that the U233 was bred from Thorium in another > reactor. > It's true that it will take some R&D before a full fledged LFTR is built, but it would be trivial compared with what has already been spent on fusion research, and we're still very far away from even a prototype fusion reactor. Kennedy decided that the USA should go to the moon in 1962 and in 1969 they were on the moon, and far more technological advancement was needed to achieve that than to make a LFTR. Even though it had a miniscule budget a liquid fuel U233 reactor (called the MSR) was built and operated successfully from 1965 to 1969; the only thing stopping it from being a full fledged LFTR is that the U233 was bred from Thorium in another reactor. Unfortunately Richard Nixon cancelled the MSR program in 1969 and a few years later Nixon fired Alvin Weinberg the chief engineer of the MSR and the inventor of the LFTR concept. Nixon felt that other types of reactors were just a distraction and all efforts should be put on the pressurized water reactors that we use today in power stations and submarines. It's ironic that Weinberg was also the inventor of the pressurized water reactor, but when he started expressing doubts about his own invention and insisting the LFTR's were the way to go Nixon gave him the boot. I think history will say this was a greater blunder than anything Nixon did in Watergate, it certainly harmed his country more. We'd be living in a very different world if Nixon had made a different decision back in the late 1960's. > > It is illustrative to look at the real world example of the world’s only > large scale serious attempt to build a fast breeder power plant. > Fast breeder reactors use fast neutrons and solid fuel to turn U238 into Plutonium, LFTR's use slow neutrons and liquid fuel to turn Thorium into U233. > The reactor was especially plagued with problems with its sodium coolant systems Molten Sodium catches fire spontaneously in the air and explodes in the presence of water, LFTR's use fluoride salt which is known for its chemical stability even at very high temperatures. Solid fuel Uranium breeders suck. LFTR's don't. > >> if you're waiting for a energy source that is 100% clean and is so > safe that the very laws of physics guarantee it will never harm a single > person or animal then you're going to be waiting forever; and while your > waiting for perfection people will increase their use of enormously dirty > and dangerous crap like coal which has killed orders of magnitude more > people than nuclear ever has even if you count Hiroshima and Nagasaki. > > > I would not put nuclear power and perfection in the same sentence > The safety record of nuclear power plants is not perfect, but if you compare them to the safety record of any other sort of power plant it's about as close to perfection as you will find on this planet. John K Clark > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
