/sci/ - Science & Math

Reminder that China will have the first LFTR within ten years. From Kirk Sorenson:

>China’s thorium drive is galling for the Americans. They have dropped the ball.
>As I reported last year, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee actually built a molten salt thorium reactor in the 1960s.
>It was shelved by the Nixon Administration.
>The Pentagon needed plutonium residue from uranium to for nuclear bombs.
>The imperatives of the Cold War prevailed.

>The thorium blueprints gathered dust in the archives until retrieved and published by former Nasa engineer Kirk Sorensen.
>The US largely ignored him.
>China did not.

>Mr Jiang visited the Oak Ridge labs and obtained the designs – entirely legitimately – after reading an article in the American Scientist extolling thorium.
>His team concluded that a molten salt reactor may be the answer China’s prayers. It is playing out just as he hoped.

>Scientists in Shanghai have been told to accelerate plans to build the first fully-functioning thorium reactor within ten years, instead of 25 years as originally planned.

>>6323252
This. I'm waiting for some millionaire with a mission to take it on, since the government doesn't seem to be interested (well, besides China).

proliferation is a red herring. benefits outweigh any potential terrorist use.

India is building thorium reactors with solid fuel because 1) they stole the CANDU design from Canada and 2) they have much larger native reserves of thorium than uranium. They are not doing anything new, technologically.

I am much more excited by China's resurrection of the Oak Ridge LFTR technology. It will be very interesting to see how far they get with it in a decade, and whether they get there before Flibe's small modular LFTR designs for the military. China is OK killing a few villages to make an omelete.

>>2987437
While I salute your spirit of amateur scientific and engineering inquiry, making your own reactor is simply not realistic, just like making your own orbital launch system. The capital costs alone are going to be in the $100 million range, even if you had a proven design to copy.

And that isn't even the largest barrier! The current estimate by the NRC to even approve *research* into a new reactor type like LFTR is 13 FUCKING YEARS because no-one in the government has any experience with this technology. Also, the existing nuke businesses actively lobby against LFTR research because it destroys their business models of building plants at cost then overcharging for fuel assemblies year after year.

If you seriously want to work on LFTR, you should study all the documents at energyfromthorium.com, and then emigrate to either Japan or China, the only two countries that have expressed political motivation to devote the millions to research this tech. (India also likes Thorium, but as solid oxides in existing CANDU-style water cooled reactors.)

Why the FUCK aren't we investing millions into thorium reactor technology? If we aren't careful, China is going to get exclusive rights to the LFTR tech that the US developed in the 60s.