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A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades

thoriumenergyworld.com

81–90 of 170 posts

Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades

#81
post #78
post #76

I think we're making a serious PR mistake calling these "Thorium Reactors" even though the term is accurate. "Reactor" evokes "Nuclear Reactor". For many people, "nuclear reactor" is a deeply loaded term. Likewise "Thorium" (and other words that end in "-ium") sounds dangerously like "plutonium" and "uranium". It doesn't matter how much better/safer this technology is. Don't expect the public to respond positively wh…

At least this way you convince the educated public that you are credible. We should avoid names inspired by what amounts to political correctness, because people who see through the names may distrust us further. However, I do appreciate your point, and I agree that it is a problem. I think the attitude, at least from young white collar professionals, is warming up to nuclear.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance was the original name for the imaging technique we call MRI. Patients were scared so they changed the name.

Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades

#82
post #76

I think we're making a serious PR mistake calling these "Thorium Reactors" even though the term is accurate. "Reactor" evokes "Nuclear Reactor". For many people, "nuclear reactor" is a deeply loaded term. Likewise "Thorium" (and other words that end in "-ium") sounds dangerously like "plutonium" and "uranium". It doesn't matter how much better/safer this technology is. Don't expect the public to respond positively wh…

Are you suggesting that thorium molten salt reactors get their energy from a source other than nuclear fission?

Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades

#83
Glad to see some thorium-bearing salt being irradiated in a conventionally-fueled test reactor. That's a big step to getting back on the road to fluid-fueled reactors.

Here are some reminders for everyone on the technical info about Thorium. First of all, Thorium is found in nature as a single isotope, Th-232, which is fertile like Uranium-238 (not fissile like U-235 or Plutonium-239). This means that you have to irradiate it first (using conventional fuel). Th-232 absorbs a neutron and becomes Protactinium-233, which naturally decays to Uranium-233, a fissile nuclide and good nuclear fuel. This is called breeding. Thorium is unique in that it can breed more fuel than it consumes using slow neutrons, whereas the Uranium-Plutonium breeder cycles require fast neutrons (which in turn require highly radiation-resistant materials, higher fissile inventory, and moderately exotic coolants like sodium metal or high-pressure gas). Any kind of breeder reactor (Th-U or U-Pu) can provide world-scale energy for hundreds of thousands of years using known resources and billions of years using uranium dissolved in seawater (not yet economical).

Great, so Thorium can do thermal breeding, so what? Well to actually breed in slow neutrons, you have to continuously remove neutron-absorbing fission products as they're created (lest they spoil the chain reaction), so you really can only do this with fluid fuel. This leads to an interesting reactor design called the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR). Fun facts about this kind of reactor are that it can run at high temperatures (for process heat/thermal efficiency), can run continuously (high capacity factor), is passively safe (can shut down and cool itself without external power or human intervention in accident scenarios), and doesn't require precision fuel fabrication. Downsides are that the radionuclides (including radioactive volatiles) are not contained in little pins and cans like in solid fueled reactors so you get radiation all over your pumps, your heat exchangers, and your reactor vessel. This is a solvable radiological containment issue (use good seals and double-walled vessels) but is a challenge (the MSRE in the 1960s lost almost half of its iodine; no one knows where it went!!)

U-Pu fuel can work in MSRs as well, getting those nice safety benefits, but it can't breed unless you have fast neutrons.

People on the internet may tell you that Thorium can't be used to make bombs and that it's extremely cheap, etc. These are not necessarily true. You can make bombs with a Th-U fuel cycle (just separate the Pa-233 before it decays), and nuclear system costs are unknown until you build and operate a few. There are reasons to hope it could be cheaper due to simplicity, but there are major additional complexities over traditional plants or other advanced reactors in the chemistry department that add a lot of uncertainty. Fluid fueled reactors are probably ~100x or more safer than traditional water-cooled reactors, on par with sodium-cooled fast reactors and other Gen-IV concepts with passive decay heat removal capabilities.

Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades

#84
post #78
post #76

I think we're making a serious PR mistake calling these "Thorium Reactors" even though the term is accurate. "Reactor" evokes "Nuclear Reactor". For many people, "nuclear reactor" is a deeply loaded term. Likewise "Thorium" (and other words that end in "-ium") sounds dangerously like "plutonium" and "uranium". It doesn't matter how much better/safer this technology is. Don't expect the public to respond positively wh…

At least this way you convince the educated public that you are credible. We should avoid names inspired by what amounts to political correctness, because people who see through the names may distrust us further. However, I do appreciate your point, and I agree that it is a problem. I think the attitude, at least from young white collar professionals, is warming up to nuclear.

You might be swayed by facts. But that makes you one of the minority.

A LOT of people make decisions based on emotion. Then they cherry pick the facts (if any) that support the choice, and disregard the facts that oppose.

Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades

#85
post #76

I think we're making a serious PR mistake calling these "Thorium Reactors" even though the term is accurate. "Reactor" evokes "Nuclear Reactor". For many people, "nuclear reactor" is a deeply loaded term. Likewise "Thorium" (and other words that end in "-ium") sounds dangerously like "plutonium" and "uranium". It doesn't matter how much better/safer this technology is. Don't expect the public to respond positively wh…

Are you suggesting that thorium molten salt reactors get their energy from a source other than nuclear fission?

No. I'm saying that how you name things matters.

Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades

#86
post #84
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least this way you convince the educated public that you are credible. We should avoid names inspired by what amounts to political correctness, because people who see through the names may distrust us further. However, I do appreciate your point, and I agree that it is a problem. I think the attitude, at least from young white collar professionals, is warming up to nuclear.

You might be swayed by facts. But that makes you one of the minority. A LOT of people make decisions based on emotion. Then they cherry pick the facts (if any) that support the choice, and disregard the facts that oppose.

This is true. However, I think logical people as a group hold a disproportionate amount of power in society. I'm not sure, though, and I'm only arguing out of, well, logic.

What I mean to say is if I were a politician, I would be more concerned with aligning myself with other politicians, scientists, and policy makers, than my constituents in the initial term. Those who are non-technical may be won over later and with other means.

Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so sure about that. Might risk these billions of coal jobs he created...

“We will begin to revive and expand our nuclear energy sector, which I’m so happy about, which produces clean, renewable and emissions-free energy,” Trump said. https://www.nei.org/News-Media/News/News-Archives/2017/Trump...

ah yes the renewable nuclear

Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades

#88
post #81
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least this way you convince the educated public that you are credible. We should avoid names inspired by what amounts to political correctness, because people who see through the names may distrust us further. However, I do appreciate your point, and I agree that it is a problem. I think the attitude, at least from young white collar professionals, is warming up to nuclear.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance was the original name for the imaging technique we call MRI. Patients were scared so they changed the name.

For years I've been confused by the two different names. That was an insightful comment.

Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades

#89
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like this are why I don't bother getting my tech & science news from anywhere but HN.

I've seen an increase in the number of NLP bots that give snippets, but they're far from consistently being accurate. Are there any services that can give you summations like this, kind of like the WSJ's What's News section?

Autotldr on Reddit does a very good job

Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades

#90
post #76

I think we're making a serious PR mistake calling these "Thorium Reactors" even though the term is accurate. "Reactor" evokes "Nuclear Reactor". For many people, "nuclear reactor" is a deeply loaded term. Likewise "Thorium" (and other words that end in "-ium") sounds dangerously like "plutonium" and "uranium". It doesn't matter how much better/safer this technology is. Don't expect the public to respond positively wh…

"Green coal power systems" keep everyone happy.
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