The Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor: Why Didn't This Happen (and why is now the right time?)

Google Tech Talk
December 16, 2011

Presented by Kirk Sorensen

• Category

  Science & Technology

[steverg2]

The oil industry doesn't have any "power" of their own, they're just people pulling resources out of the ground and selling them. The power lies in the force of the state, and their ability to use that force keep the market closed. In absence of a state, the oil industry has no means to secure this monopoly. Diffused, smaller potential benefits to consumers vs. concentrated, huge potential losses for a small group. The small group will always try to corner the market with state force.

[Karriem Perry]

Write your Congressperson and tell them!!!!

[Tom Delta]

Yes well, the enrichment politics have to stay in place... for a reason.

Only familiar with the "THTR-300 ...helium-cooled...uranium-235 / thorium-232 fuel... graphite matrix"

Only stating operations were not unclassified/advanced... for political reasons & public opinions.

[mykmlr]

BTW, that was ALUMINA, not aluminum. I was pointing out that the only experienced people on earth working in Fluorine are the aluminum smelters and NOTHING keeps that corrosive stuff in.

[mykmlr]

As I said before, you don't get down to POUNDS until you have a 50% neutron reflector...and the current max in the unclassified literature is 2%.

[mykmlr]

Weighing tons. You cannot self-sustain a Thorium reactor, you shall have critical mass / concentration / density of 235U or 235U / 239Pu at the core. The figure is STILL tons for a 2% enrichment (which is all you can get away with in the current no-bombs-for-muslims politics). A submarine 20% 235U reactor is still 5 tons.

Figure 55 tons of 232Th around 12 tons of 2% 235U / 8% 239Pu is still a minimum.

We keep hearing about deuteron relativistic bombardment of Be, but it has never worked yet.

[mykmlr]

No, the waste OF THE URANIUM CORE without which the Thorium cannot fission will do the melting and exploding when it hits the groundwater.

Hastealloy is a chrome Iron alloy and will definitely corrode in the presence of fluorine.

[daobagua]

hastelloy n is the alloy (not aluminum) that was planned to combat the corrosion problems. But even if the reactor leaked, the waste would not explode and irradiate a 50 mile radios. It would dribble on the floor to be cleaned up by someone with the proper PPE.

[Tom Delta]

Weighting tons?

This isn't the 1980s THTR-300. Perhaps SOME of the concepts mentioned are not exact, newer designs have be engineered to be relatively small.

[mykmlr]

I'm pointing out that a corrosive salt bath around a uranium core will fail, always and inevitably. Just ask the people who work in fluorine the most, aluminum refiners. Those Al2O3 shells disintegrate and there is very little more immune to halide corrosion than aluminum oxide.

Now add in that the 'passive safety' system will remove the coolant from a stacked rod uranium / plutonium oxide reactor and what you have is a China Syndrome weighing tons..

Extremely bad idea.

[Tom Delta]

I understand your statement

After a little reading on 'energy from thorium dot com'

[jeselm1]

I wasn't compelled to "specify Fluorine into the equation." I was simply alluding to how nuclear science repeatedly has resort to actinide fluorides for critical processes. It's pretty basic stuff. You don't have to be a native speaker of English to know about it.