[ExI] cost of SBSP and thorium

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Sun Aug 19 18:36:33 UTC 2012


On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 12:13:37PM -0400, Brent Neal wrote:
> 
> On 19 Aug, 2012, at 5:17, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 04:54:59PM -0400, Brent Neal wrote:
> >> 
> >> On 18 Aug, 2012, at 15:18, Keith Henson wrote:
> >> 
> >>> 
> >>> However, the time scale involved (which I don't understand at all)
> >>> makes them a questionably choice.  Any thoughts on why even the
> >>> Chinese think it will take 20 years?
> >>> 
> >>> 
> >> 
> >> 
> >> This is confusing to me as well. Making fluoride salts of actinides is a well known technology. Molten salt reactors have existed, as has been pointed out here, for years. The only thing I can figure is that there are some issues with fuel handling and heat management that we were cavalier about in the 60s that need to be dealt with now. But that's not a 2-decade problem, that's a half-decade problem…
> > 
> > Are you fucking kidding me? Why do I bother to post facts when
> > you all seem to prefer to exist in a make-believe universe?
> >> 
> 
> Eugen  -
> 
> Being cranky with us will not change the actual facts:
> 
> Overview of fluoride salt reactors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
> You make the fluoride salts with HF, of course: http://science.howstuffworks.com/uranium-centrifuge.htm
> Also more overview on the manufacture of fluoride salts here: http://www.exportcontrols.org/centrifuges.html
> And a representative scholarly article here (from 1967, just to pin a date down): http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac60252a030

Entirely irrelevant to the problem. 
 
> More on molten salt reactors - a presentation from Oak Ridge: http://www.ornl.gov/~webworks/cppr/y2001/pres/120507.pdf

Alternative fuel cycle breeders don't exist. Figuring out whether
they can will take you at least 20 years. We do not have 20 years.

You will not be able to scale TW/year substition rate in any case.
This does not address synfuels and synthons, nor food.

> And a reference from the journal Nuclear Applied  Technology in 1970: http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=4727102
> 
> Digging into the Oak Ridge literature leads me to believe that heat management is the problem they're trying to solve now. The 1960s era Oak Ridge MSR used graphite as insulation. We understand now that this is a poor materials choice. 
> 
> The point is that thorium salt based liquid fuel reactors appear to have a very good chance of producing relatively safe, low-byproduct heat which can be used to turn a turbine and make electricity. The main reason they don't appear to have been used thus far is because they don't produce a lot of long-lived fissionables that can be used to make bombs. The military-industrial complex would not have had a lot of use for this in the 60s and 70s.

Complete bullshit. Thorium fuelcycle systems have been investigated in many
countries and all of the pilots have been shut down (the latest in late 1980s).

The dolchstosslegende of thorium fuel cycle being unsuitable for
nuclear weapons is also bullshit, both because the projects were
civilian, and because U-233 happens to be as suitable for making
weapons like U-239. So you're doubly wrong here.

And this demonstrates, again, that it is useless to debate thorium
polyannas on the Internet. 

So I'll be back to enjoying my vacation, and my shitty 3G connection
which happens to work today.
 
> B
> 
>  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Brent Neal, Ph.D.
> http://www.brentneal.me
> <brentn at brentneal.me>
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list