Energy From Thorium Discussion Forum

The main justification he mentioned for salt in tubes was no need for any moving parts (the impeller) in the fuel salt. The latest pictures also show no impellers in the coolant salt. I think these will be included to maximise reactor power but are not needed for reactor functioning. He also mentio...

Tritium production from BWR's are particularly low 10x lower than PWRs which in turn are much lower than CANDUs. Molten salt reactors with beryllium are about half of CANDUs and with lithium and beryllium about the same. Storage of tritium is normally done as a hydride. For a 1GWe power plant you ne...

The control room for an AP1000 is slated to have one operator and one supervisor. In the US, modified regs for SMRs are being recommended to allow one control room for multiple units. Unfortunately, the specific recommendations are not available to the general public unless you are willing to pay $1...

Can LFTR Save California? One problem we have today is Reactors cannot "Follow The Load". We have a local PWR running here in Minnesota "Prairie Island" and it runs at a constant output. We start and stop coal and natural gas to "Follow The Load". If California had a f...

For US response to Fukushima see http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/o ... ities.html

Too small a supply to be worth fussing over.

Nuclear might get some unintended positive press/public support from the drought: If the plant is used to produce clean water for the parched local community, it "should" get some positive support. How could even the most ardent left wing Berkeley environmentalist complain about this gift...

I'm not so sure it's IP fear, I think a large part of it that many of these strategies are simply orthogonal to one another. Terrestrial wants to build the simplest MSR they can with the least development. That's fine, but it misses many of the potential advantages of MSR, in my opinion, not the le...

A core damage quote of 1e-6 or 1e-8 really isn't any different since at this level the important issues are the ones that were not included. I rather doubt that the accident sequences that lead to TMI, Chernobyl, or Fukushima were on anybodies fault tree evaluation of core damage frequency.

You should search the ORNL docs - I've heard they did clean molten salt tests with 316 and the results were very good. But oxygen is precluded from most MSR designs and is considered a significant problem - so I wouldn't put any importance to open air results.

http://theenergycollective.com/willem-post/338781/high-renewable-energy-costs-damage-germanys-economy The Danes are using tax money to fund their wind program. Why is Germany not taking Denmark to court over this? I think the English, Czechs, etc. should whisper to the Danes that perhaps Denmark sh...

One reason not to include a water wash at the NPP site is that we really need the core to be extremely dry. So after the water wash one will have to go to some extremes to be sure to remove the water and any oxygen. I think this is best left for the recycling site. How about ammonia? http://en.wiki...

The noble metals will deposit on all surfaces and it is possible that we will want to clean them out periodically. A few possible reasons: 1) If they build up at just the cold end of the heat exchanger then maybe this causes concerns about clogging. Especially, if the plate out is clumpy and might b...

One reason not to include a water wash at the NPP site is that we really need the core to be extremely dry. So after the water wash one will have to go to some extremes to be sure to remove the water and any oxygen. I think this is best left for the recycling site.

The salt does not wet the graphite. Before washing with water typically a load of flush salt is used to "dilute" the residual salt. For example, suppose there were 14 liters of salt that remained after draining (whether due to sticking to the surface or local low spots that do not drain) i...