/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.4222617]

OK, what's the catch?

There has to be a reason why nobody uses thorium reactors.

[Anonymous No.4222618]

It has never been proven to actually work.

[Anonymous No.4222641]

>>4222618

yes it has, ft st vrain... india, etc.

its because its not economically feasable to aquire bomb grade nuclear material from the process compared to a U/Pu cycle, so the US invested in and researched ad naseum the other fuel cycles.

[Anonymous No.4222643]

>>4222618
>>4222617

did either of you even read.... what YOU posted?

the infograph answers your own question and disproves the second response.

both of you go diaf

[Anonymous No.4222650]

>>4222643

hahaha lol pointing out the best /sci/entists here.

fucking this

[Anonymous No.4222655]

>>4222641
if 1 ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium then surely its worth extracting

whats the cost of a ton of thorium compared to 200 uranium tons

[Anonymous No.4222667]

OP, against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

[Anonymous No.4222701]

A geology student with business electives. I can bridge any gap between business, mining, academia and profitability!

[Anonymous No.4222704]

>>4222667
I blame laziness, not stupidity.
Unless you were talking about the masses (am i condescending), then i agree.

But all our talks doesn't matter, China is on it, it will be done, they only relevant question is when.

[Anonymous No.4222725]

Store the waste in a maximum of 300 years and then its over with...

compared to leaving the shit to far far distant civilizations its sounds like a better plan.
Are there not enough nukes in this world already?

[Anonymous No.4222732]

>>4222617

They're not technically feasible right now so of course no one is using them.

What are you, dense?

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[That Q Guy From The Last Thread No.4223965]

>>4222701

Speaking of which how valuable are business courses? I had your exact same thought here. I always thought it was something you could do reasonably on your own with a little know how about how the market, and paying yourself/paying overhand works.

>orldss solutions

Foreboding captcha.

[None !!BJiYgff8zf2 No.4223971]

>LFTRs are air cooled

I fucking lol'd

[Anonymous No.4223987]

>looking at the table at the bottom
>Fuel input per gigawatt output
>1 ton raw thorium

If you dont know why this is wrong yout should try a different board

[That Q Guy From The Last Thread No.4224073]

>>4223987


Alright, please, tell me why I am a tard?

[None !!BJiYgff8zf2 No.4224081]

>>4224073

Thorium has to be cooked before it can be used in reactors

[None !!BJiYgff8zf2 No.4224086]

>>4224081

Thoroughly cooked*

[That Q Guy From The Last Thread No.4224088]

>>4224081

oh.

I thought of everything else but the obvious.

[Anonymous No.4224091]

>>4224073
power is a derivative of time, mass isnt

it would be like saying a certain amount of fuel will let your car drive at a certain speed, rather than letting you travel a certain distance.

[Anonymous No.4224123]

there are still some logistical problems with thorium reactors.
The main problem for governments looking to subsidize them is that they don't produce nuclear weapons material.

[Anonymous No.4224124]

The short catch is that they are hard to scale up. The MSRE worked well because it was small.

Bigger you get, harder it is to maintain. Salt is hella corrosive, and this entire system depends on hot, radioactive salt.

[That Q Guy From The Last Thread No.4224227]

>>4224091

Noted. What should the chart say instead?

>>4224123

Is there any other way to cool the system other than salt? And wouldn't you build a lot of little LFTR's instead of a few big ones?

Wouldn't this only be a problem for countries that don't already have a nuclear arsenal?

>>4224124

[Anonymous No.4224258]

>>4222617

The catch is that fossil fuels and conventional nuclear is used instead, and they cover our needs sufficiently for now. There is no technological reason nor conspiracy behind it.

[Anonymous No.4224345]

>>4224124
But we have materials that can handle the salt (Hastalloy-N and graphite). And not much of that material is required, since it operates at low pressure.

On the other hand, standard water-cooled reactors make the other tradeoff: normal steel and concrete, but built extremely robust to handle the high pressure and threat of containment breach (i.e. pressure explosion).

Honestly, if we were starting from scratch, and both technologies were being evaluated today, the LFTR would be the obvious choice to develop, since the fuel is cheaper and the fuel cycle is magnitudes more efficient. We only went the other way because we needed the plutonium for the cold war and we didn't think nuclear waste disposal would be such a tough problem 40 years later.

[Anonymous No.4224526]

>>4224345 But we have materials that can handle the salt (Hastalloy-N and graphite)

But they can't handle it! Corrosion and damage is measurable within 1000 hours, that's terrible for something you want to work for at least 20 years.

[Anonymous No.4226398]

the catch is that we already have the capacity to acquire sub-atomic energy. Earlier versions of atomic reactors was just a means to justify the development of atom weapons. Look at the cost and efficiency of uranium, plutonium reactors. Anyone developing nuclear power based on heavier elements such as uranium is probably looking to weapons technology since thorium and other lighter elements don't reach critical mass as easily. A lot of news don't make sense because a ton of facts are missing.

[Anonymous No.4226502]

>OK, what's the catch?

Military-Industrial Complex

[Anonymous No.4226538]

>>4224526
um, your info is seriously out of date

[Anonymous No.4226876]

>>4222617
China and India are developing the shit out of it.

You'll have it by 2025.

US and EU are just retarded, well not the EU actually since it's has joint operations with Australia...

The only nation that didn't hope on the thorium train is the USA right now.

[Anonymous No.4228382]

bump

[Anonymous No.4228748]

>>4224345
Super heated graphite is a very bad idea. When super heated graphite comes in contact with water it produces syngas (hydrogen + carbon monoxide.) Highly explosive. Very bad for use in nuclear power plants no matter what type. Only the Russians have ever been foolish enough to use graphite in nuclear power plants. It did not end well.

[Anonymous No.4228759]

OP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI&feature=g-user-f&context=G239c046UCGXQYbcTJ33Zm2D
Ws-v1bH4TK5hHwfr-BUepZtmjR7Ec

This link explains why it was never developed.

[Anonymous No.4228777]

Somebody should really send that picture to Elon Musk or maybe Richard Branson, they seem the kind of people (bros?) to invest in the LFTR

[Anonymous No.4228791]

Die Thorium-Salz Lösung korrodiert die Innenwände des Reaktors zu sehr, als dass es wirtschaftlich ist. Was nicht wirtschaftlich ist, wird nicht unterstützt.

idk, go use google translator, ni­ggers

[Anonymous No.4228802]

>>4226876

India is developing solid-state thorium reactors, not LFTR. Get your facts straight.

[Anonymous No.4228805]

>>4224091
>>4224091

That is fuel per one year for the reactor with such output.

To answer the OPs question:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI

[Anonymous No.4228812]

Wanna know the reason we aren't using thorium reactors? They are chemically active. In a uranium reactor the water is the most corrosive thing in the system and it take's YEARS to corrode the casing to unusable levels. With thoriums it's WEEKS. On top of this thorium reactors form crystaline solids inside the reactor, these drop thermal conductivity leading to instability leading to unpredictabilty. This solid also builds up on the inside of the reactor and needs to be cleaned off the inside... yeah that is gonna be cheap.

[Anonymous No.4228818]

>There has to be a reason why nobody uses thorium reactors.

We don't use them now because of industry momentum and public indecisiveness.

We did not use them first because they don't make good bomb materials.

[Anonymous No.4228826]

>>4223987

It's per year, though that should certainly be indicated.

>>4224227

Joules would be an accurate measure but the public doesn't know what the fuck joules mean so instead it's 1 gigawatt-year.

[Anonymous No.4228831]

>>4224526

What the shit?

Hastelloy vessels and piping at the proscribed spec can withstand fluoride fuel salts for centuries.

[Anonymous No.4228840]

Unproven technology, really.
Fluoride salt distillation at such high temperatures is going to be ridiculously hard to do.
Ask any chemical engineer about the nightmares he will get from a distillation column that should be able to separate 30+ different compounds in very low concentrations, but highly selectively. Now tell him it is highly corrosive metal salts, at 800+ degrees and the stuff is radioactive.
Not going to work, and if it does it will be pretty expensive.
If you don't do online reprocessing, you'll run into problems with reactivity, since the neutron economy is hard if you need 2 neutrons per fission and you're running thermally. The Fission product will quickly poison the reactor.
There's a reason no actual nuclear engineers are supporting this, just layman.
All the people that support it know just enough to see the benefits, but not enough to see all the horrible, horrible problems associated with such a design.

[Anonymous No.4228850]

>>4228831
Worst case scenario it would take 100 years to compromise 4-inch piping.

>>4228840
>higher heat in liquid phase makes chemical processes harder to perform

[Anonymous No.4228864]

>>4228840

The biggest neutron poisons (esp xenon) actually come out of solution on their own.

You need to do online reprocessing anyway though, to reduce residual heat potential in the event the reactor must be shut down.

On-line removal of waste products is one of the reasons why a LFTR does not require vulnerable external active cooling.

>horrible problems associated with such a design.

TBF the reactors we're using now have worse, and thus far unsolvable, problems. eg: What's that? Your backup generators are underwater? Enjoy your hydrogen explosion and compromised containment.

[Anonymous No.4228867]

>>4228805
Ok this is my first time ever posting/going on /sci/ but one major flaw in thorium seems to be 233
Pa bred from the fission. Since it's a neutron absorber it decreases efficiency or time.

[Anonymous No.4228885]

>higher heat in liquid phase makes chemical processes harder to perform
Separation processes for sure, especially if you have metal salts that can undergo rapid ligand exchanges at that temperatures, and can probably exist in several oxidation states thanks to ionizing radiation and the high temperatures.

[Anonymous No.4228888]

Thermal breeders are generally a bad idea, if you just have ~2.5 neutrons to work with and need 2 for the next fission you have to go to ridiculous lengths to ensure your reaction keeps on going.
People seem to forget that the MSRE wasn't even breeding his own fuel (or certainly not enough of it)

[Anonymous No.4228892]

>>4228867

Pa233 production is intentional, not a flaw. That's the shit that becomes your fuel by spontaneously decaying into U233.

It's constantly cycled out of the breeding blanket and into a decay tank, then as U233 it can be fluorinated out and reduced to UF4 (your fuel salt) and sent into the core.

[Anonymous No.4228894]

>>4228864
Yeah, but the online removal is the horrible problem i talked about.
>TBF the reactors we're using now have worse, and thus far unsolvable, problems. eg: What's that? Your backup generators are underwater? Enjoy your hydrogen explosion and compromised containment.
There are already passively safe solid state reactors and we have already built them and they work.

[Anonymous No.4228907]

>>4228894
>passively safe solid state reactors

Such as?

I'm disinclined to believe they can be passively safe unless they both operate at low pressure and there's a way to continually remove waste byproducts.

[Anonymous No.4228929]

>>4228907
Pebble bed reactors, for example, or any decently built PWR or BWR in the last 20 years, really.

[Anonymous No.4228936]

>>4228888
>People seem to forget that the MSRE wasn't even breeding his own fuel

If you had read up on it as you seem to imply you have, you'd know that they intentionally left out the blanket in order to instead take neutron measurements.

>(or certainly not enough of it)

It wasn't breeding its own fuel at all during the experiment. It wasn't meant to, as stated above.

The design's neutron economy was not a problem. Those measurements demonstrated sufficient neutron flux in the "blanket" area to sustain fuel breeding. Finding this out was one of the major points of taking those measurements.

[Anonymous No.4228946]

>>4228929
I like me some PBR reactors but they still produce 100,000-year waste.

[Anonymous No.4228955]

>>4228748

The molten salt reactors under consideration don't even use water, so there's no risk of that occurring.

[Anonymous No.4228962]

>>4228946
>but they still produce 100,000-year waste.
So do LFTRs.
There's no actinides, alright, but some fission products still have half-live of millions of years.
In fact, you can run PBR with Thorium just the same, and avoid all the bullshit with the corrosive salts. And that has actually been done, and it worked (and it produced energy)

[Anonymous No.4228989]

>>4228962

Don't confuse long-lived waste with geological-scale radioisotopes.

Billion-year waste is not a problem because it is not radtioactive enough to harm you.

A half life of 10,000 years on the other hand is still fucking dangerous.

We do not care that it's radioactive at all; only that it be safe to be around.

The measure you're looking for is the time to decay to background level, which for most LFTR waste is less than ten years, and 300 for the small quantities of the worst of it.

>you can run PBR with Thorium just the same

You don't prevent the creation of long-lived waste just by using thorium. A LFTR's fluid reprocessing is a key component of its more benign waste cycle.

[Anonymous No.4229069]

Why dont we just take the waste...

and PUSH IT into space?

[Anonymous No.4229304]

>>4229069

Yeah or a railgun, I dont see how that could fail.

[Anonymous No.4229646]

>>4222655
>if 1 ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium then surely its worth extracting
It already is
>whats the cost of a ton of thorium compared to 200 uranium tons
Probably at about a hundredth of the cost.

The average Rare Earth mine produces about 5000 metric tonnes of Thorium a year, and there are hundreds of such mines across the world.
But as there is little current industrial use for it, and it isn't particularly radioactive, it's considered just another waste mineral to be put into barrels and shoved into landfills.