World’s First Thorium Reactor Designed

I wanted to add a couple additional points, separate from my other response:

Everything at Oak Ridge did _not_ provide our grandparents with insignificant technical challenges. Not only for the points (in my other response) about neutron bombardment making the Hastelloy N brittle, but also:

- The cooling circuit glowed red hot. This indicates that it was close to its thermal creep zone; we didn't know much about thermal creep back then. [0]

- The MSRE reactor spent a good portion of its life down for maintenance. [0]

- The tritium release is not a small problem: of an estimated 2.0TBq of tritium produced, 6-10% diffused from the fuel system into the containment cell atmosphere, and another 6-10% was released from the heat removal system. And these were lower than expected. You really don't want your LFTR to be leaking tritium everywhere. [1]

- The decontamination of the experiment was really, really hazardous. Not only were they dealing with nuclear waste; they were dealing with nuclear waste and fluorine gas. You really don't want to be anywhere near elemental fluorine gas. This was all because ORNL didn't defuel and store the salts correctly; it's mostly been rectified in modern designs[1]. But it goes to show how horrifyingly dangerous the components are. As bad as a nuclear spill would be, you have to remember that these aren't your run of the mill molten salts. They're highly toxic salts spewing out gamma, beta, and alpha radiation. I'm trying to imagine what it would be like if Chernobyl released these kinds of chemicals in its radiation plume. I don't think I can imagine something that horrifying. Toxic rain over Germany doped with uranium hexafluoride and plutonium? I'd rather have coal power. And I hate coal power.

Of course, all of this is me being extraordinarily cautious. I was really, really excited about LFTR design when I first heard about it. But the more I learn, the more I'm convinced that we really don't have the materials to safely operate one of these things on a commercial scale.

0. http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/part-8-msr-lftr/ 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment#... (throughout)

You are quoting verbatim as fact from an unsourced blog post you provide in another comment. That blog post says what you're claiming as fact are /rumors/. It points out beside the issue things like that a heat generation experiment that wasn't hooked up to dynamos didn't generate electricity, in literally the same paragraph as claiming they produced too much heat (so use some of it?)

In the meantime, it refers to hypotheticals as its only criticisms, many of which are mutually contradictory, many in ways as obvious as the above.

On top of that, one of the best bullshit detectors that has ever existed is watching for basic quality of language, and this guy has not yet mastered the wily apostrophe.

With apologies, I'm not going to be your unpaid research assistant tonight. You made a claim without evidence. I dismissed it without evidence. You seem to believe the burden of proof is now on me. Sorry; I have other things to do which are more important to me, and you flat out ignored several of the things I said, so I'm comfortable doing the same (like when you claimed that building ceramic housings was a challenge, and I thought you were confused about Japan Steelworks; you have provided no explanation for believing that ceramic containers, which Hitachi uses extensively, are out of our reach.)

Similarly, your story about grain boundaries is compelling, at least if you don't consider lining the reactor. But then you go on to observe that a 50s reactor ran for four years without a problem on 50s metallurgy, and don't seem to think that that's a problem for your concern.

Finally, that's true, you don't want to be around irradiated fluorine. But if you would rather be near a failed coal plant than a failed lftr, my interpretation is that you don't know much about what happens in either a fluorine leak or a coal plant explosion. Fluorinated uranium rain two countries away? Buddy, not even six blocks away. What makes that shit dangerous is how violently and universally it reacts. There would be less uranium and fluorine in the rain than in to day's seawater.

Helen Caldicott off, please. Either do the envelope math or stop pretending it's anything more than blog fuelled FUD.