Pyrophoric (adj) -- Liable to ignite spontaneously on exposure to air.
Just in case you weren't entirely sure what that word meant either.
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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That sounds fun when combined with radioactivity.
highly corrosive and pyrophoric fuels and coolants that, following irradiation, will become highly radioactive
How true is this? Because a highly radioactive and highly corrosive material that like to catch fire spontaneously - well, that just doesn't sound like a good idea, yet obviously some people are considering it. What am I missing?
If you can work it properly, molten salt reactors are MUCH safer and more efficient, because the waste heat from fission products cannot cause a problem with something cooled through convection and conduction of a molten salt. You can't really have a destructive meltdown when the coolant doesn't care if the fuel melts. The problem is, most previous attempts ended up with the reactor catching on fire. Not a dangerous fire, exactly, but generally not the outcome you're looking for.
On the waste front, neutron activation of water produces tritium at worst, which you dispose of by putting it into a bigger body of water. Neutron activation of the molten salt coolant can be more difficult to dispose of, but it's not exactly a major problem.
If we could use the tritium that would be helpful, it's limited on earth and our only known source off world is in lunar regolith. Plus it's part of the fuel needed to begin a fusion reaction.
It's not a lot of it and isolating it is more trouble than it's worth. It's easier to just create a lithium channel that creates it when it's neutron activated. That or isolating it from a heavy water reactor, since that produces a whole lot more.
Tritium isn't scarce, in that we really can create it pretty easily. Lithium-6 is available to do so if needed. (https://isotope.com/en-us/lithium-6-metal-li-95-pct-llm--827--pk). It's jut not economical to produce for most purposes.
Edit: Also, it's not tritium in the regolith but He3, which is theorized as an aneutronic (thus much cleaner and not creating a bunch of neutron activation waste like tritium fusion would create) fusion fuel but nobody's really achieved fusion with it. Tritium would've decayed if it was in the regolith.
When you let tritium decay, it creates He3.
"Salt as a coolant is just superior to water, once you've got the engineering details hammered out," Smith told BI.
You're missing the "engineering details" I guess
Is that like the whole "magic occurs here" thing that I also never quite got?
Sounds like you get it now ;)
""engineering details" is usually code for "very expensive".
This is the best summary I could come up with:
To prevent the water from evaporating and keep it a liquid at such high temperatures requires a lot of pressure, which in turn costs additional technology, space, and money.
"You can utilize it at these high temperatures, and it doesn't boil," Nicholas V. Smith, project director of the molten chloride reactor experiment at the Idaho National Laboratory, told Business Insider.
The first molten salt reactor tested in the 1950s, for example, was small enough to fit on a plane whereas the portion of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in California that generates energy takes up 12 acres of land, according to Berkeley Engineering.
Kairos Power is the company that plans to build a test plant it calls Hermes, which will be cooled by molten fluoride salt in Oak Ridge, Tennessee by 2027.
Because molten salt reactors don't need those thick pressure vessels to keep water a liquid at high temperatures, there's more design flexibility, Smith said.
"I see molten salt reactors as being prolifically deployed in all areas," from remote locations to shipping vessels to large power plants, he added.
The original article contains 714 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
It will never be built, it will go the way of all nuclear "innovations" and die expensively.
What is it with my nation? If you are the last person to die with all the money, what have you actually won?
Read the article, the OP only quoted the part that talked about the downsides
It's about developing small, safe reactors
Ostensible reasons.* are different from reasons. Go deeper.
*Autocorrect cracks me up, sometimes
Why is this about nuclear and not solar thermal?
because they mix the fuel into the salt
As a billionaire, you can't fire all your workers without AI. And you can't have AI without lots of electricity. The planet and its people don't matter. Profits matter.