/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.6778105]

Could molten salt reactors really be the future of our energy?
China wants to make a thorium powered molten salt reactor in less than a decade.
is this really as good as it sounds, or is there a catch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7FvxN_gkt4&list=UUzWQYUVCpZqtN93H8RR44Qw

[Anonymous No.6778133]

>>6778105
It is pretty fucking good. Back in the 50s, it was the road not taken.

Good:
* burns thorium, which needs no expensive refinement, unlike the uranium fuel in current power reactors.
* burns it up 100%, unlike the few percent in solid fuel rods, leaving the rest as waste.
* liquid fuel salts make certain problems like trapped gas fission products easier to deal with.
* lower pressure/higher temperature, makes energy extraction more thermodynamically efficient and requires less accident shielding

Challenges:
* needs billions in development funding, just like the beginnings of the LWB reactor age.
* the salts are corrosive, needs plumbing in special alloys, may need a decade to qualify
* needs a fissile slug of uranium or plutonium to start the breeding process

[Anonymous No.6778170]

Why are we not just going solar?

[Anonymous No.6779066]

>Could molten salt reactors really be the future of our energy?
that's fusion m8

[Anonymous No.6780817]

i'm still hoping that nuclear fusion turns out to be viable

it'd literally make every other kind of power plant obsolete

[Anonymous No.6780884]

>>6778170
Solar power output is intermittent and it requires very large areas to produce a good amount of energy.

Not saying solar has no place but the issue of being intermittent alone means we can't use it as a main power source without some serious advancements in large scale energy storage.

[Anonymous No.6781477]

>>6780884
> Solar power output is intermittent and it requires very large areas to produce a good amount of energy.

Neither are that much of a problem. There are large areas of the planet where sunlight is both abundant and predictable, and those same areas are largely unused (i.e. desert).

The technical problems (improving efficiency, transmission, storage, load balancing) are relatively trivial compared to either fusion or complex fission cycles such as thorium. Actually, they're also trivial compared to safe long-term storage of spent fuel (we're talking millennia here).

[Anonymous No.6781486]

>>6781477
We do not have the technological capability to produce batteries good enough and cheap enough to solve the storage problem in a practical fashion without completely reengineering the grid. Science has not yet delivered us the necessary chemistry. For that matter, solar isn't to grid parity yet either.

Meanwhile, all the problems with thorium-based nuclear power are engineering issues. No new chemistry or semiconductor physics must be discovered or invented to make it work.

[Anonymous No.6781489]

>>6781477
Thorium reactors are breeder reactors; They don't have the waste problem. You're just left with some really short-lived isotopes you need to store for a few decades, and the remainder is long-lived isotopes with very wimpy radiation. Everything else is burned off.

[Anonymous No.6781495]

>>6781477
>efficiency, transmission, storage, load balancing
>trivial

You are absolutely clueless.

[Anonymous No.6782493]

>>6781486
> We do not have the technological capability to produce batteries good enough
Who said anything about batteries? For the foreseeable future, the primary storage mechanism will be hydroelectric power.

> Meanwhile, all the problems with thorium-based nuclear power are engineering issues.
You can say the same about most things (including, FWIW, grid-scale battery storage; we *could* use batteries on that scale with existing technology, it's just not economically feasible).

But the biggest problem with thorium is economic viability. Conventional (uranium/plutonium) fission plants are expensive enough, and thorium certainly isn't going to be cheaper in the foreseeable future, even before you allow for the fact that the significantly higher economic risk will make capital far more expensive (by far the biggest cost of conventional nuclear generation is the interest on the capital).