Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor

[Christopher Marlowe]

Why Hasn't CracksmokeRepublican Told Us About this?

The revolutionary Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) solves all of the major problems associated with nuclear power.  LFTRs transform thorium into fissionable uranium-233, which then produces heat through controlled nuclear fission.  LFTRs only require input of uranium or plutonium to kick-start the initial nuclear reaction, and as the fissionable material can come from either spent fuel rods or old nuclear warheads, LFTRs will inevitably be used as janitors to clean up nuclear waste.  Once started, the controlled nuclear reactions are self-perpetuating as long as the reactor is fed thorium.  LFTRs are highly fuel efficient and burn up 100% of the thorium fed them.  Light water reactors typically burn only about 3% of their loaded fuel, or about .7% of the fundamental raw uranium which must be enriched to become fissionable. As LFTR fuel is a molten liquid salt, it can be cleansed of impurities and refortified with thorium through elaborate plumbing even while the reactor maintains full power operation.  The cost savings of using a liquid fuel is like the difference between making soup vs. baking a wedding cake.  Soup is cheap, and you can change ingredients very easily.  The reactor works like a Crock-Pot; you keep the fuel cooking in the pot until it is over 99% burned, so LFTRs produce less than 1% of the long-lived radioactive waste of light water reactors, making Yucca Mountain waste storage unnecessary.

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Thorium is more abundant than tin, and the United States alone has enough rich thorium deposits to last for many thousands of years.  One pound of thorium can produce as much energy as 3 million pounds of coal.  A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor is up to 200 times more fuel efficient than a traditional Light Water Nuclear Reactor.  One 3.5" diameter ball of thorium, about the size of an extra large apple, can produce an amount of electricity equivalent to the yearly consumption of one average American for about 8,000. years.

http://thorium.50webs.com/

[youtube:319vlc06]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8[/youtube]319vlc06]

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Well..um... (cough) sorry about that C.M. I've been too focused on Pebble Bed Nuke technology... I'd say though the LFTR is probably cheaper to build and run overall...

http://pebblebedreactor.blogspot.com/20 ... 1970s.html

http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/

Three dimensional computer aided design technologies help designers lay out and test designs for products ranging from tiny heart stents to huge airliners. Above is another presentation of the conceptual PBR layout done by MIT researchers using such tools. Some of the Seabrook cost overruns were due to design errors, which caused piping runs to collide during construction. With today's 3D-CAD such expensive errors can be prevented.

Design technologies have improved phenomenally during the three decades since today's operating US nuclear plants were designed. Just consider information technology. The designers of today's nukes didn't have personal computers, nor Microsoft software, nor data base management. Nor was there email, optical fiber, the internet, nor search engines.

[Anonymous]

Yes I am aware of this technology, the reason it is not in use is they claim the waste is too dangrous to be handled. I suspect it is to keep the uranium price expensive. Burying nuclear waste is not necessary, it can be reused.

[abduLMaria]

CSR, do you have a background in physics etc. ?

if you know about nuclear reactor tech - please share !

yeah, i know i could look it up but, i like the way information was passed down in the olden days ... like 15 years ago - person to person   8-)



pebble bed ... Velly Intelesting !  


does TIU already have another thread on this ?

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

CSR, do you have a background in physics etc. ?

if you know about nuclear reactor tech - please share !

yeah, i know i could look it up but, i like the way information was passed down in the olden days ... like 15 years ago - person to person   8-)



pebble bed ... Velly Intelesting !  


does TIU already have another thread on this ?

Well abduLMaria,

I don't have an extensive scientific background--pretty much a poor layman's knowledge from a couple of college courses. I actually read pretty widely and came across this by chance.  --CSR

Looks like the Uranium balls have had graphite dust problems after some plants were first built a few years ago. The reactors work and are fairly safe by all standards but have not been commercially successful outside of a few labs.

I also had an interest in Fusor Technology a few years ago. A couple of people have attempted to make "table-top" designs.   Interesting that the history for it mirrors the stepped up efforts of Brits to get their nuke processing going in the early 1950s.

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Researchers in the UK planned a major assault on the stabilized pinch field, and started construction of ZETA in 1954. ZETA was by far the largest fusion device of its era, and equipped with all of the latest equipment. At the time, almost all fusion research was classified, so progress on ZETA was generally unknown outside the labs working on it. However, in 1956 the walls started to come down, and when they visited ZETA at Harwell, US researchers became aware that they were about to be trumped. A race broke out as teams on both sides of the Atlantic rushed to be the first to complete their stabilized pinch machines.

ZETA won the race, and by the summer of 1957 it was producing bursts of neutrons on every run. Although the scientists working on the device, and similar ones in the US and UK, were careful to point out that it was not proven, the results were nevertheless released with great fanfare as the first successful step on the path to commercial fusion energy. However, further study soon demonstrated that the measurements were misleading, and none of the machines were near fusion levels. Interest in pinch devices faded, although ZETA and its cousin Sceptre would serve for many years as experimental devices.

Tokamak

Although it remained relatively unknown for years, the Soviets used the pinch concept to develop the tokamak device. Unlike the stabilized pinch devices in the US and UK, the tokamak used considerably more energy in the stabilizing magnets, and much less in the plasma current. This reduced the instabilities due to the large currents in the plasma, and led to great improvements in stability. The results of their experiments were so good that other researchers were skeptical of them when they were first announced in full force in 1968. Members of the still-operational ZETA team were called in to verify the results. The tokamak has since gone on to become the most studied approach to controlled fusion.

Self-stability

While much of the fusion research world rushed to build new tokamaks, ZETA still had new concepts to offer up. In 1974 John Bryan Taylor was examining an odd result that had been seen many times in ZETA with no explanation; often when the machine was "turned off", the plasma would settle into a stable state he called "quiescence". Studying the problem, he developed the Taylor state concept, and from this came the reversed-field pinch concept. Research into these class of plasmas became a major effort in the 1980s and '90s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-pinch