[Zero-point]

link The LFTR is unique, having a hot liquid core thus eliminating fuel fabrication costs and the need for a large reactor. It cannot have a nuclear meltdown and is so safe that typical control rods are not required at all. This design topples all the conventional arguments against conventional energy sources in such areas as:

* Waste Production
* Safety
* Proliferation
* Capital Costs and Location
* Environmental Impact
* Social Acceptance
* Flexibility
* Grid Infrastructure
* Efficiency

[mos6507]

I'm all for thorium breeder reactors. Not enough talk about it right now.

Here is a good doomer blog site that covers the technology as a mitigator:

Energy From Thorium

[Zero-point]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', 'I')'m all for thorium breeder reactors. Not enough talk about it right now.

Here is a good doomer blog site that covers the technology as a mitigator:

Energy From Thorium

[pedalling_faster]

http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/mailing ... _Obama.pdf

James Hansen mentions LFTR's in his advice to Obama.

[Tanada]

Molten Salt Reactors, especially the MOSEL design developed by Germany have a lot of advantages over other types. Two of these are constant waste removal as well as being able to burn any fissionable material as fuel. This design can actually partition waste to the level where it can be harvested for valuable byproducts.

[josephmoore]

I think that the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors are designed in such a way that the partitioned waste can be harvested for the valuable byproducts.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('josephmoore', 'I') think that the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors are designed in such a way that the partitioned waste can be harvested for the valuable byproducts.

[Dezakin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('josephmoore', 'I') think that the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors are designed in such a way that the partitioned waste can be harvested for the valuable byproducts.

[Dezakin]

I wrote a post speculating on a plausible LFTR for hydrogen production that I took a while to find. Apparently someone saw fit to lump it in a monolithic thread on hydrogen, so I had to do some looking for it.

http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic28695-0-asc-630.html

Liquid fluoride reactors offer two huge advantages over LWRs that are entirely unrelated to their fuel efficiency and their ability to mitigate waste production.

1) They're high temperature. In addition to offering higher thermodynamic efficiency for strait electricity production you can use them for industrial process heat in the 800-1200 C range.

2) They're low pressure. Many friends I have who've done nuclear engineering note that the most troubling aspect of reactor design is the high pressure operation that causes all kinds of headaches from safety concerns to production bottlenecks predicated on single forging reactor vessels.

I'm cautiously optimistic about their deployment. Hopefully the new administration will take a solid look at them.

[Carlhole]

tHORIUM rEMIX 2009

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')horium is plentiful and can be turned into energy without generating transuranic wastes. Thorium's potential as fuel was discovered during WW II, but ignored as it was unsuitable for bombs. A liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) is the optimal approach for harvesting energy from Thorium, having the potential to solve today's energy/climate crisis. This 10 minute video is summarizes 197 minutes worth of Google Tech Talks on the subject of Thorium & LFTR.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Thorium energy is one of very few areas where a genuine progress (as opposite to senseless technoblabbery) is certainly possible.

I have had quite lengthy discussion with one of other members (Dezakin) related to this tech.
He is also an advocate of molten salt thorium reactors but believes that in foreseeable future uranium tech will be superior.

There are still plenty of issues related to molten salt reactor left to resolve and perhaps the most important one is related to removal of lanthanide fission products of high neutron crossection from salt melt.
Failing that our reactor will work for few months at best and remaining mix will become to be just intractable mess.
Need of reprocessing of such mess would easily kill commercial advantages of such project.

Significant chemical development is needed here and much work required particularly in the area of high temperature ion exchangers capable to extract lanthanide and also other fission products out of molten salt mix.
Unfortunately all such materials known up to date are dissolving in said salt mix and are useless by the same.
Salt distillation process might come to a rescue (it is possible to run it at ~1500*C because LiF and BeF2 are volatile at these temperatures and fission products fluorides are not volatile) but halide induced corrosion (pitting) of vessel construction materials and also its thermal stress related deterioration are still not resolved.

So it is still difficult to say anything about prospects of said technology.

For sure there were good reasons for its abandonment in the past.
It may prove successful but it may also fail like commercial FBR did - due to intractable engineering difficulties.

[wisconsin_cur]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/7970619/Obama-could-kill-fossil-fuels-overnight-with-a-nuclear-dash-for-thorium.html

-Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')r Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "It’s the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

"Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels," he said.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('wisconsin_cur', '[')url]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/7970619/Obama-could-kill-fossil-fuels-overnight-with-a-nuclear-dash-for-thorium.html[/url]

-Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')r Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "It’s the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

"Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels," he said.

[Dezakin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'I')'m sorry to have to do it but this is a blatant lie. Thorium 232 or regular Uranium 238 can both be used in a liquid fluoride reactor, the statement that 1 ton is equal to 200 tons is a lie, nothing less.

[Tanada]

Hi Dezakin, nice to see you posting again even though you disagreed with me. Have you ever looked at the early history of the LFR for USAF use? The very early designs were as compact as they could make them and fueled with Uranium. Some variations such as the German design known as MOSEL and its descendants/variants have a much harder neutron spectrum than the classic LFR with its carbon moderator block because they remove all possible moderators other than the salt itself. They averaged out in the epithermal range, just barely high enough to breed Pu-239 sufficient to maintain the reaction in combination with a constant very small input of natural Uranium with its .7% U-235 content. Really remarkable machines, though the Japanese are now working on a Reduced Moderation Water Reactor that they calculate has the same ability, for the same reason though they intend to enrich the solid fuel before the cycle to allow for infrequent refueling as is common industry practice.

[Dezakin]

MOSEL would still have problems actually utilizing a lot of plutonium because of solubility issues. In liquid fluoride reactors we really don't want to be breeding plutonium much. The only purpose of that is to denature the U233 with U238 for proliferation (in other words political nonsense) concerns. My favorite design is the tube in a tube epithermal design. I hate carbon moderators because they become maintenance headaches and also become disposal problems because of neutron activation. I hate D2O because of the huge plumbing problem, even though its just about the best moderator there is. I'd prefer salt only moderation.

Epithermal designs however must necessarily have slightly higher fissile loads. There's still design questions on weather or not to partition neptunium. I prefer not to bother with protactinium partitioning and instead rely on a larger blanket salt volume.

I say proliferation concerns are political nonsense because no one ever breeds weapons material from power reactors. Its too expensive, and using U233 for weapons material is a huge headache because of unfamiliar neutronics for weapons and U232 causing hard gammas that make maintenance and reliability of weapons systems suspect.

[Dezakin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EnergyUnlimited', '
')There are still plenty of issues related to molten salt reactor left to resolve and perhaps the most important one is related to removal of lanthanide fission products of high neutron crossection from salt melt.
Failing that our reactor will work for few months at best and remaining mix will become to be just intractable mess.

[EnergyUnlimited]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Dezakin', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EnergyUnlimited', '
')There are still plenty of issues related to molten salt reactor left to resolve and perhaps the most important one is related to removal of lanthanide fission products of high neutron crossection from salt melt.
Failing that our reactor will work for few months at best and remaining mix will become to be just intractable mess.

[Dezakin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EnergyUnlimited', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Dezakin', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EnergyUnlimited', '
')There are still plenty of issues related to molten salt reactor left to resolve and perhaps the most important one is related to removal of lanthanide fission products of high neutron crossection from salt melt.
Failing that our reactor will work for few months at best and remaining mix will become to be just intractable mess.

[EnergyUnlimited]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Dezakin', 'T')hey form equilibrium concentration because they form at low concentration. They're at worst annoying.
http://energyfromthorium.com/2010/06/20 ... n-poisons/