Very good and thanks. I think the goal needs to be an accident-free reactor.
This has been what has driven up the cost for this engineering.
On Thursday, January 16, 2025 at 11:04:18 AM EST, John Clark
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 16, 2025 at 10:37 AM '[email protected]' via Everything List
<[email protected]> wrote:
> How safe is "it" from an accident, say sodium fire with radiation spread,
>versus, a "ater" reactor and a core meltdown, versus, a Chernobyl reactor
>with graphite moderation?
LFTRs don't use sodium or graphite, they use a molten mixture of lithium
fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2), and it is not flammable and it's
not corrosive. The thorium fuel is dissolved in it. If you look at that video
you can see it flows like water not like lava.
John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis0i3
On Thursday, January 16, 2025 at 05:28:29 AM EST, John Clark
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 15, 2025 at 3:04 PM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote:
> There are many advantages for use of Thorium as a reactor fuel. Listing them
>would be desirable.
I sent this to the list some years ago.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) are what fusion wanted to be but never
achieved, despite tens of billions of dollars poured into it. Certainly LFTR's
are better than conventional nuclear fission. Consider the advantages:
*Thorium is much more common than Uranium, it's twice as common as Tin and
almost as common as lead. And Thorium is easier to extract from its ore than
Uranium.
*A Thorium reactor burns up all the Thorium in it, 100%, so at current usage
that element could supply our energy needs for many billions of years; A
conventional light water reactor only burns 0.7% of the Uranium in it. We'll
run out of Thorium in the Earth's crust about the same time that the sun will
run out of Hydrogen.
* To burn the remaining 99.3% of Uranium you'd have to use a exotic fast
neutron breeder reactor, Thorium reactors use slow neutrons and so are
inherently more stable because you have more time to react if something goes
wrong. Also breeders produce massive amounts of Plutonium which is a bad thing
if you're worried about people making bombs. Thorium produces an insignificant
amount of Plutonium.
* Thorium does produce Uranium 233 and theoretically you could make a bomb out
of that, but it would be contaminated with Uranium 232 which is a powerful
gamma ray emitter which would make it suicidal to work with unless
extraordinary precautions were taken, and even then the unexploded bomb would
be so radioactive it would give away its position if you tried to hide it, the
gamma rays would also destroy the bomb's electronic firing circuits and degrade
its chemical explosives needed for implosion. For these reasons, even after 80
years, no nation has a Uranium 233 bomb in its weapons inventory.
*A Thorium reactor only produces about 1% as much waste as a conventional
reactor and the stuff it does make is not as nasty, after about 5 years 87% of
it would be safe and the remaining 13% in 300 years; a conventional reactor
would take 100,000 years.
*A Thorium reactor has an inherent safety feature, the fuel is in liquid form
(Thorium dissolved in un-corrosive molten Fluoride salts) so if for whatever
reason things get too hot the liquid expands and so the fuel gets less dense
and the reaction slows down.
*There is yet another fail safe device. At the bottom of the reactor is
something called a "freeze plug", fans blow on it to freeze it solid, if things
get too hot the plug melts and the liquid drains out into a holding tank and
the reaction stops; also if all electronic controls die due to a loss of
electrical power the fans will stop the plug will melt and the reaction will
stop.
*Thorium reactors work at much higher temperatures than conventional reactors
so you have far better energy efficiency; in fact they are so hot the waste
heat could be used to desalinate sea water or generate hydrogen fuel from water.
* Although the liquid Fluoride salt is very hot it is not under pressure so
that makes the plumbing of the thing much easier, and even if you did get a
leak it would not be the utter disaster it would be in a conventional reactor;
that is also why the very expensive containment building in common light water
reactors need to be so much larger than the reactor itself. With Thorium
nothing is under pressure and there is no danger of a disastrous phase change
so the expensive containment building can be made much more compact.
John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
8bc
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