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A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
161–170 of 170 posts
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think nuclear power could follow other products like Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (NMRI) and just drop the word Nuclear (MRI). How about fission power or fusion power, depending on the source?
Since we're talking about rocks, and heat, I kinda wonder if "geothermal" might be a viable misnomer. Fusion is fine for now, but "fission" has already been chicken-littled :/
In the earth sciences the term radioactive dating has been replaced with radioisotopic dating. Maybe isotopic power? Or just wait till the generation that grew up with "duck and cover" drills at school to be out of power. Not very long now.
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the major problems is we were told our current reactors would provide safe and environmentally fuel. The trouble is it's not as clean as most people think. Mining Uranium ore does have a significant environmental impact. There have been leaks at plants; trace amounts of tritium has been found around breeder reactors like Watts Bar (and TVA has bought up more and more of the land around the area). The waste, cu…
I'm going to start off saying we NEED Yucca Mountain, BUT you seem to think this stuff is more dangerous than it is. Myself and many others that work with these technologies aren't actually happy about the new John Oliver episode. > Mining Uranium ore does have a significant environmental impact. I'm glad you bring that up. To actually understand how much of an impact we need to compare it to things. The human mind i…
> concerns about decades old technologies. Remember [...] Things have really changed in the last 50 years
A cautionary tale about this flavor of argument.
I saw a panel of Boston city planners. They complained about still getting grief for the "original sin" (their phrase) of some really bad decision making (like Boston City Hall) in the 1960's and 70's. It was half a century ago they said. We're not like that anymore they said. They seemed quite miffed about it.
Then they later mentioned Boston's recent Big Dig, and some of its impacts. And the description was surprisingly distorted. Not even a defensive "none of the failure was our fault!", though that was implicit. But more, almost an obliviousness towards causality. And certainly no recognition that their brief description of their field's "no longer relevant" 1960's flaws, seemed to overlap quite a bit with failure postmortems of the Big Dig.
This combination of arguments was remarkably effective in trashing their perceived credibility.
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most important change we could make would be to consistently upvote comments that are explicitly abstracts/tldr's, rather than downvoting them based on the mistaken thinking that this will force people to read the entire article and improve discussion. There is latent desire to supply this service for free if it isn't penalized.
Or people could read the articles. For most topics don't want to bother to have a discussion with someone that only knows what was in the TLDR comment. Maybe it's a little too Aristotelian for your tastes but I think taking the time to read the article is a decent barometer for genuine interest in discussion. If I wanted to read lulzy drive by comments on articles based of what was in a TLDR I would not frequent HN.
See this subthread for some arguments against that.
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cherenkov Radiation [1]. It's not because the particles are going faster than 300M m/s, but because light in the medium is going less than 300M m/s. The unbreakable "speed of light" is actually, the "speed of light (in a vacuum)". Outside of a vacuum, the light is slowed by the materials it travels through (see prisms, angles of refraction, Snell's Law [2] etc.). But it's still a very special condition when the mediu…
Yup. Whenever you see that blue glow surrounding a reactor core submerged in water, that's the Cherenkov radiation. If the blue glow happens in your own eyeballs, you've probably just witnessed your own death sentence.
It is dangerous? Nuclear subs have cherenkov radiation outside the hull which implies they have it inside the hull as well, but you don't hear about sailors getting radiation poisoning all the time.
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#166So there was a meltdown at a liquid sodium cooled reactor due to a materials problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment I don't see a pump seal test in this experiment... does anyone know if a solution to the SRE meltdown problem is known at this point? Perhaps the LFT chemistry would not have the issue.
This isn't a sodium cooled reactor, in this case the molten salt is the fuel itself, not the coolant. Plus there is probably no sodium involved but instead a fluoridated nuclear fuel such as thorium or uranium. Also this is a sub-critical experiment so pretty much all they have to do is turn it off if it overheats.
The best part of a molten salt fueled reactor is that in case of heat runaway the fuel would melt plugs and drain into separate containers. Essentially a meltdown would only require replacement of the plugs and refueling of the reactor to make it operational again.
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
India's Thorium rich sands are being mined and exported. Not many people are aware though. Hope it isn't too late. Scandals have throttled many efforts to grow indigenous techs. The ridiculous ISRO spy case is one such example. Cui bono?
Cui bono indeed. Corruption benefits. I don't think the spy case affected much of anything.
It did affect our Cryogenic initiatives. Nambi Narayanan was the main brain behind it. It was a setback from scientific point of view for ISRO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nambi_Narayanan
Looking at the wiki, it seems likely that outside forces might've been involved in the scandal.
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#168I am surprised they are using stainless steel instead of Hastelloy-N http://www.haynesintl.com/alloys/alloy-portfolio_/Corrosion-... The Hastelloy family of super alloys is basically stainless steel without the steel and was proven in the Oak Ridge MSR experiment.
Oak Ridge MSRE found unexpected cracking throughout the reactor anywhere Hastelloy came into contact with the salt fuel. Experiments produced various means of reducing the cracking, but it is not exactly true to characterize this system as "proven." In 1977 Oak Ridge concluded [1]: Controlling the oxidation potential of the salt coupled with the presence of chromium ions in the salt appears to be an effective means o…
To be fair, the same is true of the LWR.
Re: A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or people could read the articles. For most topics don't want to bother to have a discussion with someone that only knows what was in the TLDR comment. Maybe it's a little too Aristotelian for your tastes but I think taking the time to read the article is a decent barometer for genuine interest in discussion. If I wanted to read lulzy drive by comments on articles based of what was in a TLDR I would not frequent HN.
See this subthread for some arguments against that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15083088
Why don't you summarize the arguments for me? Too many words for me on that page.