/sci/ - Science & Math

>ansty teens act out their tortured childhood and highschool life by putting their oppressors on the chopping block
i'm sorry, but that's really all that is going on here

>>4102960
>who cares?
other countries
i'd very much rather china NOT have control over this technology first, and dictate the market price on it.
My displeasure is based on their incredibly shady buisness tactics in all things, and almost no regulatory oversight on whatever they do. Them owning any market is probably bad news


>>4103607
honestly? LFTR cleanup would probably be a cakewalk compared to traditional reactor cleanup, what with the crazy decay products riding the outventing steam from the core and the plutonium getting everywhere

this is why i really fucking like continuous reprocessing two fluid designs. even if there's a CATASTROPHIC failure, you don't have many bad fission products mucking about in the fuel salt at any one time. you'll get a nasty ass fluorine-gas producing gamma-intense puddle on the floor, but you can just use robots to clean it up and decontaminate them. Also that salt is still good. pack it up and slap it in another reactor.

honeslty, detractors of the technology need to realize what's the real chokepoint for development, which will be fuel reprocessing. it hasn't really been done on full scale in a continuous sense, they messed around with vacuum distillation at oakridge, but not much.

the concerns about maintenance and salt freezing? not really a problem according to the old MSRE papers. they had some problems with lubricating machine oil polymerizing when met with the intense neutron flux inside the piping system, it started to clog shit up a little.

>>4098832
actually the current administration sees large nuclear stockpiles as a liability, they're rather dismantle them for other uses, but keep some on hand.

>>4098529
again, we're not going to reap any benefits, we'll be financially forced to buy reactors from them, possibly even the thorium, and cause further debt. oh boy.

on the reverse scenario, we're the ones making the reactors and everyone buys them from US, which probably isn't any better for other countries through.. hrm


>>4098529
most of the fuel is still sort of active as it travels around from the core to the reprocessing systems, so it maintains its molten state from decay heat. It'll snap freeze in open air but in the pipes it'll take a while to clog up

as for the sodium? you don't need it, you can run straight up helium through the core, and the massive heat difference actually makes the energy conversion more efficient.

as for uranium usage, you're thinking of seed material for reactors. that's going to be a bit of a problem starting up with the first few prototypes, but converting them into U233 breeder configurations to provide seed for other LFTRs isn't too much trouble

>>4098270
was this before they tried again with higher molybdinum content? that mostly knocked the problem out

as for ceramics, there's probably some obscure ceramic made in the past few years that could do it, but was shelved for one reason or another, there we too many damn ceramics

>>4095881
might work...

>>4095927
>Rickover even rejected it because there was no possible material that could handle it and still be able to provide huge amounts of energy

hastelloy-n?
i guess he wasn't aware of it when he made that statement.
also a LFTR in a submarine isn't a good idea, the hard gamma is too high, you need hueg shielding. great for a stationary installation

>>4093726
they'll find a way, they're very good at that.

plus the whole "let's just wait for the chinese to do it" is extremely apathetic and irritating.

>>4092268
>there's still no material to withstand the highly corrosive environment. What do you suggest?
there's a flurry of activity to find exactly this.
i'm personally looking at advanced ceramics. my university has like, one of the top three polymer science divisions in the country, and they do a SHIT TON of work with ceramics. super corrosion resistant, super stable in high heat, and probably super stable in high neutron flux over long periods.

Hastelloy-N is a good backup, since it's been proven to work, but it's pretty expensive and very hard to forge into specific shapes

>>4092283
it's not quite *that bad* if you're clever with core geometry. This is why i'm also a huge fan of the two fluid design, protactinium buildup isn't much of an issue due to the constantly circulating blanket salt. IF, in practice, it turns out to be a massive neutron sink, filtering is also a possibility using a liquid beryllium tower. just dump the protactinium+thorium at the top, and it'll sink over 27 days. grab whatever's at the bottom and slap it back in.

this is, of course, if you're doing continuous reprocessing. Lots of designs wait a couple weeks between reprocessing runs, but it's all on-line reprocessing, no shut downs.


there's a great presentation on LFTR design speculation, lots of hard data and graphs. I LIKE GRAPHS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F0tUDJ35So&feature=relmfu

>>4092223
uh, kirk didn't discover anything, he was just at the right place at the right time, and happens to be a decent public speaker

>>4092217
no, i've been end-of-semester-ing

>>4092205
hey guy, look it up. china uses a very clever system of forcing all foreign manufacturers to set up shop within mainland china in order to use their rare earths, so they don't have to export them, and get all the jobs internally.

it's an incredibly brilliant system, and one which they'll probably improve upon once they have a working LFTR design.

>>4092198
i guarantee you they'll find some way to corner the market on the technology and charge a boatload for it

they did it with rare earth metals, they basically monopolized them.

if you like foreign oil, you'll love foreign nuclear

>>4092133
what's wrong with chalkboard stick figures?

granted, it'll be digital images made to look like chalk on a chalkboard (not difficult with custom brushes)
and of course there will be multiple colors of chalk, and i supposed they would be pastel by default due to chalk

i think it's go time for a serious grass roots LFTR movement. we can't really afford to let the chinese develop one, and they're well on their way. public attention to the benefits might just be our best bet.

over the christmas break i will be writing the scripts to those "introduction to nuclear power" videos i've been talking about. directed towards laymen, common knowledge, nothing too complex, it'd be done in an animatic format with a stick figure character drawn on a chalkboard.

are there any youtube voiceover artists who might be interested in dubbing it?

sometimes
sometimes /sci/ is funny
can't type, unable to breath

this thread is just corny

>>4077314
lots of things are possible
few of them are practical
very few are practical enough to pursue

i was implying that breeding 234 up to 235 would be inefficient enough that it would be more troublesome than refinement, which is already monstrously troublesome and expensive and fuck the higher uranium cycles anyway.

>>4076711
that's not going to work because...
>>4076740
>>4076759
yeah, that.

>>4077117
235 is too abundant to justify attempting to breed it up from 234 to 235.
and 235 has to be hella refined from natural uranium

>>4076781
exotic usually means expensive, get out your checkbook

>>4077150
easy in a relative sense. over a long period it's just a few missions and a lot of waiting. if you try to do it in ten years you'll bankrupt the whole damn planet, but if you stretch it to 100 years using a few methods and some time, it's not so bad.

>>4076537
>But maybe we can salvage those RTG's in the future to get some of the starter fissionables for a LFTR using Martian thorium.
yeah....
no
an RTG will barely power a workshop lamp, it isn't going to be useful for any kind of large scale thorium extraction

>>4076530
well, RTGs have a set output, you can't really use them like winding a spring to release lots of energy at once, batteries do that.

and if you just set an upper limit on all the equipment you use in the rover so it never exceeds the RTGs output, your rover isn't going to do much

>>4076518
yes, i believe there are little kits to do this?
i'm just saying it might be fun to push the boundaries with a heating element suspended in the center, just to see if, say, 150 degrees above ambient temperature will allow significant buoyancy.

but then again i know absolutely nothing about these things so i'd probably just be using experiments to confirm a few easy-to-use equations that were developed decades or centuries ago

>>4076509
guess i'll need a big ass air pocket for the heating element
or just make it black and use solar power
or both

>>4076500
i'm not one for crazy projects, but i kind of want to try something like this on a small scale, just to see how much lift i could get in a large volume using a high temperature heating element