Yesterday I posted on the issues that surround finding a good moderator. Today I’ll walk you through the math that will let you do the calculations yourself. At the end I’ll link a spreadsheet that already has the calculations done that you can download and monkey around with if you want. First of all, you […]
In the latest news from ORNL, the project to downblend and “dispose” of uranium-233 manufactured over the last 50 years appears to have hit another snag. Now the price tag is up to $380 million, and the timetable for disposition has been delayed to 2012. In one sense, I am very glad for that. 2012 […]
$48 million to remediate the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment? Not only does it sound like these guys are “milking” the job, but if this money was being spent on fluoride reactor DEVELOPMENT rather than “remediation”, the entire remediation task (which appears to consist of fluorinating the MSRE fuel) could probably be accommodated in the reactor development […]
I found a document (that can be purchased or read online) that talks about removing U-233 from the salts of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment, a liquid-fluoride reactor that was built at Oak Ridge National Lab and operated from 1965-1969. Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Alternatives for the Removal and Disposition of Molten Salt […]
One of the saddest things I had read recently was the decision by the DOE and ORNL to “downblend” and effectively destroy their small stockpile of uranium-233. This is so tragic because this U-233 represents the perfect “start charge” for a thorium-fueled liquid-fluoride reactor. If it was used as the initial fuel, the reactor would […]
How Much Thorium would it Take to Power the Whole World I have claimed on here that thorium, if efficiently utilized in a liquid-fluoride reactor, is an energy source of such magnitude that it is not difficult to conceive of an entire planet powered by thorium. The Calculation So let me lay out the calculations […]
When I learned that the entire National Defense Stockpile of thorium (3216 metric tonnes) was slated for burial in the Nevada desert, that was bad enough. But the destruction of our U233 really breaks my heart and hurts so much worse. Uranium-233 is the ideal fuel to start a liquid-fluoride reactor, and there is a […]
Another semi-recent story concerns the use of thorium as a “fuel” in typical, light-water reactors. I put “fuel” in quotations because the only way to truly utilize the thorium resources of the world is to follow the three-step process I have outlined. First, convert the thorium to protactinium-233, isolate the protactinium until it decays to […]
This weblog is intended to be a location for discussion and education about the value of thorium as a future energy source. Despite the fact that our world is desperately searching for new sources of energy, the value of thorium is not well-understood, even in the “nuclear engineering” community. The fundamental basis for considering nuclear […]