Sorensen and Hargraves TEAC3 Presentations

Kirk, Great presentation. I never made the connection that the design of a LFTR makes it so almost all the neutrons get stopped inside the reactor (kind of the point in hindsight). Does this have any sort of impact on the reactor standoff distance requirements compared to a normal nuclear reactor? Just curious. It's too bad the secondary product streams are worth less than the energy--I had been calling LFTRs an "Alchemy Machine" that makes power as a byproduct... Oh wells, "powering the next thousand years" is cool enough marketing-wise. :-) ~Jon

Kirk, Great set of videos.

At the end of the first video there is a FLIBE promo video. Is this available online in pure form anywhere?

Thanks John.

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As always, enjoyed the videos- thanks, Kirk, and Gordon for putting them together. Enjoyed Flibe's first 'media video' as well;-)

I would like to see your presentation spend more time on the following aspect, as outlined on the Flibe website, “LFTR technology can also be used to reprocess and consume the remaining fissile material in spent nuclear fuel stockpiles around the world and to extract and resell many of the other valuable fission byproducts that are currently deemed hazardous waste in their current spent fuel rod form”. This is a major selling point, and I am not sure how it can be done, given that avoiding Pu239 production from U238 seems to be a major promotional feature. If you can prove LFTR can resolve the “nuclear waste” problem, this accomplishment alone would be worth producing a few dozen units, charging the government tens of billions to take the spent fuel off their hands (since statutorily they have the legal responsibility for it), and making a lot of cheap emission-free electricity in the process.

Some questions and thoughts on graphite (from a nuclear-ignorant Mechanical Engineer) arising from the above and the Sorensen@PROTOSPACE video on YouTube: What is the depth of e.g. graphite moderator required to slow neutrons sufficiently? Can that depth be provided by a slurry of graphite/carbon particles in salt? This could further enhance the negative void coefficient, increasing the ability to react to load and as a safety measure. Xenon, already harvested from the fuel salts, might be used as an emergency (neutreon) brake by draining the moderator and replacing it with the Xenon (potentially by the suction of the moderator running into a holding vessel). A liquid moderator in LFTR provides the potential for other tricks such as bubbling e.g. Helium through the fluid to enhance throttling response. By keeping a quantity of He bubbles constantly entrained in the slurry, it increases the "gain" of negative feedback in the reactor, especially at low loads. Using a Be-heavy salt as a moderator probably works in theory, but in practice, Beryllium is hard to get (expen$ive) and toxic. Would a LFTR reactor still work if the fuels remain in pipes which pass through the core filled with a moving moderator slurry? Could there still be a sufficient "blanket" of Thorium? I've read about two dozen documents from the PDF resources but I'm still in the dark about ... anybody got a pointer to a document that has relevant info but not either "graphite" nor "moderator" in the title?