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]

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.

[Tom Delta]

Thank you. Please wiki GM EV1, they stopped trying. Nuclear power is political dynamite...