back to article New nuke could POWER WORLD UNTIL 2083

A company spun off from MIT is claiming it has cracked the holy grail of nuclear technology: a reactor design that runs on materials the industry currently discards as waste and which could meet all of the world's power demands for the next 70 years. It's also "walk-away safe," the designers claim, making it immune to the kind …

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          1. itzman
            FAIL

            Re: connected to a drain plug of salt that has been frozen solid

            well the radiation level 100km firm Chernobyl is lower than Dartmoor, as is the case at Fukushima.

            So I am not sure what sort of straw man this is..

            1. Andydaws

              Re: connected to a drain plug of salt that has been frozen solid

              Actually, the radiation level in Pripyat - about 10km from Chernobyl - is at about the same as the average for Cornwall, much less Dartmoor)

              1. Robert Sneddon

                Re: connected to a drain plug of salt that has been frozen solid

                I visited Fukushima City last year. It's about 60km NW from the Fukushima Daiichi plant on the coast, in line with one of the contamination plumes. It's got a higher background count than it did before the explosions and releases but it's not been evacuated. If I spent a year there I'd have picked up about 8-10 mSv of exposure or about 10% of the annual permitted dosage of a nuclear industry worker.

        1. PlacidCasual

          @ Andydaws

          Is that true with regard to the storage tanks?

          I'm an engineer with a professional passing interest in nuclear power. I've read numerous *shudders to say it* Wikipedia articles on the 1950's experiments into molten salt reactors and thorium reactors.

          Is the energy density of the salt sufficiently high that decay heat is only a limited meltdown/containment failure risk? So passive cooling arrangements and heat sinks are sufficient.

          Are tanks such as these really going to the that highly irradiated, the 1950's salt reactors, if the articles are correct, were routinely left unattended to "trip" off using this facility. That would suggest regular occurences of emptying the drain down tanks which would be unlikely if there was a high radiological risk.

          It is however nice to see some new fast reactor concepts being considered it must be better to burn through our waste and create ultimate waste that only requires 100's of years of storage rather than 10,000's.

          1. Andydaws

            Re: @ Andydaws

            "Is the energy density of the salt sufficiently high that decay heat is only a limited meltdown/containment failure risk? So passive cooling arrangements and heat sinks are sufficient."

            I've not considered density per se - I don't think it's a major driver in this. What I'm working on is a simple assumption that the decay heat removal requirements in toto are roughly similar between thermal designs - which has to be agood assumption. For a 500MWe unit, even assuming a 40-50% thermal efficiency, you're still producing 1-1.2GW at full power. And decay curves give us 7% or so of full power heat production on shutdown ((70MW or so) decaying over the first day to 20MW or so, and down to 10MW in another couple of days.

            That's a lot of heat to lose - and without making the drain down tank huge, or of a geometry that'd be hideous to shield, I really can't see passive air cooling doing the job.

            There's also a bit of a misunderstanding about the Oak Ridge reactors. They were extremely small - 5MWTh at full power, if I recall rightly. It's also worth understanding that yes, they were drained down - but also that they operated only intermittently. They also lacked any breeder blanket/salt arrangements, and (I think) had nothing like the full fission product extraction functions that would be needed in a commercial design. And, let's recall - radiological standards in the fifties were by current standards hideously lax!

            I agree re the advanced fast concepts - and in all honest, see concepts like IFR as far more developed and ultimately viable that MSR. For the longer term, I suspect that the lead-cooled designs will emerge as leaders - concepts like BREST-1200 using online electrochemical processing of nitrate fuel, and operating at 700--800C have to be attractive. Yes, there are coolant chemistry issues (to do with the behaviour of oxygen in lead), but they look minor compared to the chemical challenges of MSR!

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: connected to a drain plug of salt that has been frozen solid

          Hay, let's not down-vote a reply just because you don't like its implications. Most of us laypeople understand so few of the facts about this stuff that any and all educational replies are welcome.

          You may think andydaws has missed the point, but unless his facts are wrong I don't think a downvote is fair.

  1. ledmil
    Big Brother

    What about the oil barons??

    Whilst I completely agree with the 'I REALLY hope this is true' sentiment I would question if the political power of the oil lot in the US could make getting this in action very difficult. Obviously hope not, but the cynic in me questions.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: What about the oil barons??

      Oil is always needed and this is still some ways off. Oil baronies are the least of the problems. They may even put up some money for this.

      1. Cipher

        Re: What about the oil barons??

        Exactly.

        Oil Barons want to make money, they don't particularly have some love affair with oil. They will simply start investing in this if they think it will return a good profit. At some point they will become Nuke Barons...

        Another upside of not having to use fossil fuels for electricity is that the dwindling supply can be used for agriculture and medicine to a greater degree...

        1. ChrisM

          Re: What about the oil barons??

          Never mind anything else... What about plastics... I know some are made from other materials but most are derived from oil... Plastics rule our lives more than any other product...

          1. Professor Clifton Shallot

            Re: What about the oil barons??

            I just want to say one word to you. Just one word ... Plastics.

          2. Tom 13

            Re: What about plastics...

            Probably not an issue. More plastics are being recycled and it turns out to be a very small percentage of oil production goes into making plastics.

            1. Andydaws

              Re: What about plastics...

              It's even more subtle than that....

              I once got stuck next to the Tech Director of the UK's biggest plastic bag maker on a flight back from India (oh, the glamour of international business.....).

              Most of the material that goes into plastics is used simply because there's not much other use for it. It's not readily crackable for petroleum products, and it's a bit more valuable than it would be just leaving it as part of the Asphalt residue. If the plastics industry didn't buy it, it'd mostly just end up in road tar - as the money is getting the petroleum bits out.

      2. Intractable Potsherd

        Re: What about the oil barons??

        As I read somewhere else this week, there are no "oil companies" any longer - they are "energy companies". It will ultimately make no difference to them - they will still make money providing the thing that civilisation runs on - electricity.

    2. Esskay
      Thumb Up

      Re: What about the oil barons??

      I can see Texans sweating over this long term... But short term, the U.S seems to be more focused on reducing reliance on foreign oil - something I'm sure the US oil Co's would see as being good for business. In any case, I'm sure there will be coal/oil/gas plants for many years to come, and cars won't be running on nuclear reactors any time soon anyway.

      1. itzman

        Re: What about the oil barons??

        US has the largest know reserves of cheap coal in the world.

        They don't need nuclear to keep the lights on.

        Just to irritate the Greens.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Not just oil barons..

      This would push governments strongly into higher electricity taxes.

      This is biggest con going in the energy world: governments trying to make us consume less energy. As they are dependent on the vast revenues they get from energy (most of what you pay at the pump is tax), making us use less simply means the price will go up. The more you save in energy, the less you will save in cost terms.

      This is also why I had to laugh at UK fuel strikes a long way back: Gordon Brown urging BP to lower prices was a bit like Gary Glitter and Jimmy Savile asking Catholic priests to go easy on them kids. They must have laughed themselves silly when they met.

    4. fandom

      Re: What about the oil barons??

      Rockefeller campaigned against electric light, it didn't work out so well, did it?

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What about the oil barons??

      In view of Peak Oil, it's high time we started planning to save oil for things that we can't make any other way. (Plastics, etc.) In other words, it's becoming too precious to burn for energy.

      Fossil fuels took hundreds of millions of years to form, and there won't be any more in the lifetime of the human race. So let's take it easy consuming them.

      1. Nextweek
        Boffin

        Re: What about the oil barons??

        Plastics can be made from things other than fossil fuels, don't panic:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: What about the oil barons??@Tom Welsh

        In practice peak oil really refers to "peak cheap high quality oil". There's no shortage of hydrocarbons on the planet, and not even any shortage of oil - just that what's left is finite, and is progressively more expensive to produce and usually lower quality.

        For product purposes you could distil what you want (rather inefficiently) from coal, you could use tar, or the more problematic oil reserves (deep sea sub-salt, shale oil etc). Or you can use natural gas, and even after all of those you've got things that we haven't a scooby how to exploit yet, such as gas hydrates.

        The threat of peak oil is particularly to transport, since you want cheap, easily refined oil with high yields of the fractions suitable for internal combustion engines.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: What about the oil barons??@Tom Welsh

          And if fission takes off, there's even work under way to use spare nuclear power to produce synthetic hydrocarbons. The US Navy's interested because it means carriers have to pack less fuel each time they refit. If they can pull it off, the oil companies will probably be paying more serious attention to nuclear power since it could actually disrupt their bread-and-butter industries.

    6. gromm
      Facepalm

      Re: What about the oil barons??

      What about them? Since the oil shocks of the 1970's, only about 3% of America's (for example) electricity supply comes from oil. The same goes for say, China which said company thinks would be a good market for the product. Most of their electricity comes from coal.

      The only places that use oil for electricity are places swimming in oil - like Saudi Arabia or Iraq. And they would prefer instead to export it instead of consume it.

  2. MrXavia
    Thumb Up

    The UK should invest in this technology too! we need new nuke reactors, and this seems like the best possible technology, and such a low waste amount plus high safety would make most objections irrelevant!

  3. Oninoshiko
    Boffin

    salt plug

    The salt plug is not a new concept, and has been around as long at molten salt reactors. Every LiFTER/MSR design has it, because it's an obvious, simple, and failure resistant safety feature. MSRs are also nice in that once they are off, it's relatively easy to turn them back on, which also means that if there is an issue there isn't as much incentive to try to keep it running. Let it shut off, sort out whats going on, then turn it back on. Easy.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. t.est

        Re: salt plug

        Someone said, everything is relative. Another said everything is complex until it's easy.

    2. John Hughes
      WTF?

      Re: salt plug

      "MSRs are also nice in that once they are off, it's relatively easy to turn them back on,"

      How do you do that? All your pipe work is full of solid salt. How do you melt it again?

      1. Ru

        Re: salt plug

        All your pipe work is full of solid salt. How do you melt it again?

        Most of the salt will have drained into the holding tank. The pipes won't be blocked... rather crusty, perhaps, but they'd have lots of space still.

        I am not a nuke engineer, but restarting the reactor doesn't seem like an impossible task. You heat your fuel load up to melting point in a filler tank above the reactor, and heat up the inlet sections of the reactor chamber so the fuel doesn't refreeze. You then let gravity drain the molten fuel into the reactor chamber, where nuclear reactions will keep it warm. It can then flow through the outlet pipes into teh heat exchangers, melting any residue as it goes. You might need to heat up the fuel pump to get it started again, as it would have to be above the heat exchanger and wouldn't have the hottest fuel running through it.

        Hell, you could just lag the whole thing in heating elements, if it came to that. I don't doubt that the real system is rather more elegant.

        1. Andydaws

          Re: salt plug

          It's slightly more complex than that Ru - let's recall we're discussing a mass of heavily radioactive material, that's only pump-amble when heated to something over 400-500C.

          And no, I don't think you can make easy assumptions about drain-downs clearing pipework. Recall that this stuff starts cooling as soon as the nuclear reaction is closed down - and you've not a massive temperature range between operating range and solidification (since the meltable plug wouldn't work otherwise).

          All of this has to be done technologies that basically involve no moving parts in contact with the actual salt

          The thermal stressing implicit in (say) having one end of a heat exchanger at 500C, with the other end isolated from flow, maybe C cooler don't bear thinking about. Once, about 30 years ago I spent an amusing month modelling thermal stresses in the boiler skirt of the proposed commercial fast reactor, during a shutdown transient. it'd shear mild steel, easily. That didn't involve anything so severe as this.

          And let's also recall, any pipework failure here doesn't just involve a loss of cooling function - it's spilling actual fuel, in a highly corrosive salt matrix,

          1. Oninoshiko
            Boffin

            Re: salt plug

            Well, rather then speculate, lets see what someone who ACTUALLY RAN a MSR thought of the difficulties involved:

            "From the months of operation and experiments, a very favorable picture emerged. In properly designed equipment, handling the high-melting salt proved to be easy. Maintenance of the radioactive systems was not easy, but there were no unforeseen difficulties, and control of contamination was, if anything less difficult than expected."

            -- PAUL N. HAUBENREICH and J. R. ENGEL, "EXPERIENCE WITH THE MOLTEN-SALT

            REACTOR EXPERIMENT," September 19, 1969

            Arguably "easy" was overly optimistic, but the difficulties on the startup and shutdown procedure where a solved issue before 1970. MSRE was stopped and started multiple times during it's lifetime, so I would say the above comment covers that information. If any of you have a more authoritative source, I'd love to see it.

            1. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

              Re: salt plug

              What on earth are you doing? Deriding a knowledgeable man with a misapplied citation, and as if that was not enough, spicing it up with ALL CAPS?

              Problem is, that citation applies to a low-power experimental reactor. Even fusion is easy to achieve on that level.

              Remember the Farnsworth device? Many geeks have built one at home. Of course, conveniently forgetting to tell their significant others, what they are actually up to. Some people just cannot cope with the knowledge of free neutrons flying around.

              Andydaws, on the other hand, was talking about industrial scale. 1,21 jigawatts or thereabouts. Even a thing so simple as a piece of wire becomes a monster at the kiloamper scale - harder to calculate, harder to produce, harder to maintain. And most of the difficulties tend to increase exponentially.

              Well, I've grown weary of all the thorium talk. It has definitely gone beyond technical - infinite repeats of the same old cliche's, from the thousands. It is a matter of faith now. Repeated like a mantra, propagated like a myth. Perhaps more plausible than some other myths, and it has chances to become a reality, but still a myth at the current stage. All puns fully intended.

              Yes, thorium cycle looks so promising on the paper.

              Yes, there is lots of thorium available.

              Yes, there was a successful test reactor running in the sixties.

              As for the "killed by the military-industrial complex" meme - well, duh. No.

              Yes, it could be shut down for the weekends, unlike conventional reactors.

              Yes, it could be cleaned out and refuelled relatively easily.

              Yes, it could be started quite easily.

              But there is another side to that coin, which gets so thoroughly ignored, so thoroughly rejected. Another telltale sign of a mythology instead of technology.

              They could shut it down periodically - but then again, they absolutely had to. Reaction was not sustainable for the long periods. Removal of the inhibitors is extremely difficult here, as Andy has explained so many times. It needs a major breakthrough to become viable. And sadly, miracles are quite rare in that field.

              They could shut it down quickly - but mainly because of the small size. Some of the residual heat could be absorbed in the structure and could be safely left there for a weekend. Few degrees one way or another did not matter much.

              More power, more heat to remove - much slower shutdown sequences (yes, well, reaction stops quickly, but it takes many weekends before the reactor can be touched again)

              Startup sequences suffer from the same effect - it takes quite a lot of time and work to get to the proper operating range.

              They could clean it rather easily - again, because of the small scales involved. Many miles of plumbing and many tons of nasty substances are a much different story. And online cleaning is next to impossible right now.

              Bottom line - this test reactor did confirm that the thorium cycle actually works. Which is wonderful. But those technical solutions do not scale much beyond that capacity point.

              1. Oninoshiko
                Boffin

                Re: salt plug

                "What on earth are you doing? Deriding a knowledgeable man with a misapplied citation, and as if that was not enough, spicing it up with ALL CAPS?"

                The PDF of the original article printed their names in all caps. This was common well into the 80's I cut and pasted there names from the title page of the article, rather then typing it in again. I am sorry of that offends your sensitive sensibilities.

                "Andydaws, on the other hand, was talking about industrial scale. 1,21 jigawatts or thereabouts. Even a thing so simple as a piece of wire becomes a monster at the kiloamper scale - harder to calculate, harder to produce, harder to maintain. And most of the difficulties tend to increase exponentially."

                Commercial viability starts at around 200 MW. While it is true that MSRE only ran at a 7MW, there have been no experiments testing above that. Any assertions about the difficulties really need experiments. We call it "science" maybe you have heard of it? Fortunately there are at this time a number of groups interested in conducting these experiments. If we're lucky, we'll get to see what really happens.

                "Well, I've grown weary of all the thorium talk. It has definitely gone beyond technical - infinite repeats of the same old cliche's, from the thousands. It is a matter of faith now. Repeated like a mantra, propagated like a myth. Perhaps more plausible than some other myths, and it has chances to become a reality, but still a myth at the current stage. All puns fully intended."

                The article was not talking about thorium as a fuel, It's only worth discussing as a the design similarities, should lead to similar properties (maybe not, but lets do some science and find out!)

                "As for the "killed by the military-industrial complex" meme - well, duh. No."

                Not really sure where this is coming from. I didn't mention it. I also did not mention the Illuminati, Xenu, or Atlantis.

                "Bottom line - this test reactor did confirm that the thorium cycle actually works. Which is wonderful. But those technical solutions do not scale much beyond that capacity point."

                This is speculation. Let's test it and find out. We need a 200MW reactor to be viable. I suspect using these student's idea, we dont even need that, but there are existing commercial reactors operating at this level so it's a decent target. Lets see how a real one actually performs. At least see what happens at say the 50MW level.

                1. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

                  Re: salt plug

                  Some of those all-caps came from the paper, but the line "ACTUALLY RAN a MSR" came from you. It carried quite a lot of emotional bias. Not to mention that Andy's educated guess is quite different from a speculation.

                  OK, from my part it would have been better, if I had separated general ranting into a separate comment. Most of it was not about you personally. Then again, it shouldn't be a big problem, there were enough clues of ranting and jesting available in the comment.

                  One full agreement too. 50MW+ online plant would be a better test of viability. Most of the scaling issues would be apparent at that point.

        2. t.est

          Re: salt plug

          Restarting it is a security issue. This is a walk away solution, it fails and you walk away, at least for some period of time.

          You would need to make that holding tank removable, and that is not an easy task considering the volume it needs to be able to absorb all that heat generated in a failure process.

          I do not think that these are designed to be restarted after such a failure, that is to be classed as an accident. They are just designed to be safe to the environment when an accident happens.

          I would be happy to be proven wrong.

          1. Andydaws

            Re: salt plug

            But, as I've pointed out before, all the drain-down gains you is that it ensures there's no continuing reaction. You have exactly the same problem of decay heat removal. Which is probably harder with a discrete mass, than if fuel is divided into individual pins (think of the surface area:volume ratio.

            Let's just be clear - there was no continuing chain reaction at Fukushima. There was none at TMI.

            In both of those cases, the issue was of decay heat removal.

            And I'd really not try to "absorb" all the heat from decay. Assuming the average production over the first day of an accident is about 10MW (which is probably optimistic),and that's 860 Gigajoules - enough to raise about 1000 tonnes of steel from room temperature from it's melting point, and then to melt it.

            You can't "absorb" the heat - you have to get rid of it to the atmosphere, or to water.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not going to happen

    Not in the UK anyway...

    Typical Daily Fail Reader:

    Nuclear Fuel Dangerous

    Nuclear Fuel Bad

    Me no wanty Bad thing happen

    Reality:

    Too much money invested in subsidising the friends of government to supply lots of wind power/solar power, etc for this to be used by us.

    1. tony72

      Re: Not going to happen

      The British public are actually a pretty pragmatic lot, and unlike many of our foreign counterparts, we're much less likely to let an accident at an ancient design of nuclear plant built on a fault line in the world's worst earthquake zone dissuade us from building modern reactors here if it's good for our economy. Multiple polls in the last couple of years have shown that Brits like nuclear energy just fine, see e.g.

      http://www.energylivenews.com/2013/02/11/uk-public-favours-nuclear-over-renewables/

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14847875

      And a Daily Mail article highlighting how much we could save by scrapping wind and investing in Nuclear. The reader comments don't seem to reflect your caricature of that august publication's readership;

      http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2058415/Scrapping-wind-farms-favour-nuclear-gas-save-550.html

      The real obstacle to nuclear is the typically large up-front cost, as compared to the stealth taxes which can be used to subsidize renewables.

      1. BlackKnight(markb)
        Holmes

        Re: Not going to happen

        unfortunately in Australia thats exactly what happens. on a very geographically stable landmass what the japan event happen and the nuclear discussion is again sidelined for another decade.

        If this works as advertised awesome.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Unhappy

        Re: Not going to happen@tony72

        "The real obstacle to nuclear is the typically large up-front cost, as compared to the stealth taxes which can be used to subsidize renewables."

        Less of a problem than you might think for the nuke developers (we'll get to the customers further down). EdF and Hitachi want to invest in new UK nuclear plant, and if need be both would borrow money to do it. Energy companies and money markets have already found around £20bn to throw at renewables, in return for the subsidies, which come in three main forms: "must run" status - a huge hidden subsidy that requires National Grid to take anything that renewables generate; ROCs, or renewable obligation certificates granted to renewables operators which can then be sold profitably to fossil fuel generators; and then the further preferential rates that renewables can be sold for in the form of LECs (levy exemption certificates). And that's over and above the wholesale price. WInd farms under construction now expect to get wholesale prices of around £45/MWh, ROCs worth around £43/MWh and LECs worth around £5/MWh. There's no price put upon the "must run" status, but given that the merit curve would normally put such costly plant at the wrong end of the curve, I'd guess that we're actually talking about something with a value in the region of £30-£60/MWh.

        So money to build isn't the problem. What is at issue is the risk over the project life, given the capricious and inept actions of governments and regulators, and that leads to higher financing and margin needs, which feed into higher rates. Whilst government are happy to give these guarantees of around £100+ per MWh to ineffectual wind farms, they seem to be rather more concerned about offering this to nuclear.

        But what about customers? The result of going nuclear is more expensive electricity (like double what you now pay). If you don't want your power prices to go up by that much, then renewables need to be stopped, and nukes kicked into the long grass, and the solution then is a dash for gas (accompanied by a dash for fracking, to reduce the security of supply concerns).

        Even if you stop the madcap renewable subsidies, you create a problem because of the huge installed wind capacity, in that these subsidies were contractual promises by government. If that "regulatory risk" crystallises in the form of a policy change that unilaterally cuts the over-generous subsidies, then why would energy companies and financiers invest further billions on the back of a promise to offer subsidies for nuclear from the same people? And that's the big hairy deal - renewables were never a solution, and they've made the underlying problems of cost worse. Any intelligent person could see how this would/will end, but still DECC and successive governments, egged on by the Wankers of Brussels chose policies that cost more but fixed nothing. So do we continue to pour money down that drain, or do we stop it and find that nobody will lend us the money to build a proper solution?

        It wouldn't solve the problem, but we could all feel better if all of DECC, all of the consultants they employ, and all politicians involved over the past thirty years were taken to Beachy Head and thrown off.

        1. Andydaws

          Re: Not going to happen@tony72

          Small point of information....

          "WInd farms under construction now expect to get wholesale prices of around £45/MWh, ROCs worth around £43/MWh and LECs worth around £5/MWh. "

          A ROC is worth rather more than that. They pay out two ways. One is the baseline price, which is what you've got there. The second is the payment from the "buy-out" fund.

          Basically, any supplier who can't source enough ROCs pays a "fine" to DECC, equivalent to what the shortfall of ROCs should have cost. This is then divided up by those who have produced ROCs as a credit.

          It's usually been worth £5-10 per ROC. Last year was the lowest ever, being worth an extra £3.58.

          So the real worth of an ROC is about £46.60.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Not going to happen@Andydaws

            "So the real worth of an ROC is about £46.60."

            Well, it I was being harsh I'd say that £46.60 was definitely "around £43", but thank you for the correction anyway!

    2. PhilBuk

      Re: Not going to happen

      It's not the Daily Mail readers that you have to worry about - just Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Lib-Dems and any other political group that derives power from frightening the public.

      Phil.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not going to happen

        "the Lib-Dems"

        I know it is only anecdotal and I suspect your stereotypes hold quite well but my dad was a Lib Dem councillor, and a "green" type, and also very much pro-nuclear.

        All these groups have people who are not morons and who are not blinkered.

        What we need is for the sane members to push to have their voices heard.

      2. itzman
        Mushroom

        Re: Not going to happen

        Climate of Fear.

  5. Graham Marsden
    Paris Hilton

    "Silly name"??

    You'd prefer some ridiculously contrived acronym?

    1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Happy

      Re: "Silly name"??

      Well with just a bit of work I think WOWSR would have been possible.

      <sigh>

  6. Chemware

    Recycling of ideas

    Check the similarity of the idea to the thorium salt-based Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment of 1960s:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment

    1. auburnman

      Re: Recycling of ideas

      That's what's confusing me: exactly what is new here? I'm all for nuke power from safe reactors and would love for this to take off, but I'm not seeing what the magic is in this new announcement. I thought our current nuclear 'waste' was only wasted because political constraints prevented it from being reprocessed?

      1. Charles 9

        Re: Recycling of ideas

        Because, at the time, most of the reactors that used spent fuel were designed to ALSO produce high-purity nuclear fuel: the kind you need for WARHEADS. This and other Generation IV reactors, OTOH, are designed to consume the fuel as completely as possible: leaving probably only reactor poisons that by their nature aren't much good for any kind of fission reaction regardless of their purity level.

        That said, I'm getting a feeling of "too good to be true" out of this reactor design. Many people claim "fail-safe" designs, but can they be conclusively proven? I'd be more interested in their work if they can substantiate their claims of utility and safety.

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