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Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

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On the other hand I've found this critical look at MSR's/LFTRS that is not as encouraging: Part 8 The Molten Salt Reactor concept | daryanenergyblog

I wouldn't trust that source too much, I noticed several errors. He mentions Th-232 as a worrying fission byproduct with its half life of 14 billion years. First, Th-232 is the dominant thorium isotope and is the fuel itself, not a byproduct. Second, that just means that it's almost completely stable, it's essentially harmless. Of course it will produce more reactive substances as it decays, but at the same extremely slow rate.

Another mistake is that a LFTR will produce large amounts of radioactive waste. That depends entirely on the reactor design. You don't even need thorium to get high burnup, you just need a reactor design that can do it, high-burnup LFTRs and uranium fast breeder reactors that produce little waste are possible. Also, in a LFTR you don't need to remove all the byproducts in one pass through the waste processing facility, just enough to keep the reactor running.

I'm sure that inherently safe reactors that produce very little waste based on either U or Th can be built, but developing them will cost a huge amount of money and needs the political backing to see it through. Most of these reactor designs have been known for 45 years or so, yet we're still operating reactor designs that are 60 years old. In the west there is no will to build new and better nukes because the old ones mostly work, the public does not like nukes, and new designs cost a gigantic amount of money to implement. It looks like India will do it, maybe China too, possibly France. I hope they do, even todays nuclear reactors are much less hazardous than coal.
 
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I've been reading up rather extensively on nuclear power lately.While the LFTR is promising, it's at least twenty years from large scale implementation. The Integral Fast Reactor on the other hand is almost ready, but was cancelled for purely political reasons.

If any technology is going to save our asses at this point, it's the IFR (in combination with EVs).

This technology solves all the traditional cons of nuclear energy, and crucially it's been run and perfected for 30 years at Argonne before suddenly being cancelled just before proof of concept. GE has a design ready for building.

People and politicians must know about this.

See the following links for more:

Integral Fast Reactor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBR-II
Why Obama should meet Till BraveNewClimate

The last one is a long and very good letter to Obama's advisor trying to get a meeting between the US President and the leader of the Argonne project.
 
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Yes this is ready to be commercialised as PRISM by GE Hitachi.

S-PRISM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Agreed they need to build it ASAP. Getting rid of stockpiled waste from today's reactors is just one of the benefits.


I'd far rather the UK built this than another generation of Gen III reactors from the French and German suppliers. What a pity the political dithering means it's a few years behind where we need it to be. If the UK builds more Gen IIIs, the opportunity goes for another 40-60 years.
 
One of the most fascinating aspects of IFR to me is that it actually turns uranium into a renewable resource. 100% burnup (instead of 0.7% in an LWR) and the extreme energy content of the fuel means that even when extracted from seawater the fuel is still essentially free. Erosion will constantly replenish the uranium in the oceans for as long as the rain keeps falling.

Another link, Scientific American: http://www.nationalcenter.org/NuclearFastReactorsSA1205.pdf
 
While we do need more nuclear for base load they don't actually affect EV charging which is marginal load. As I understand it nuclear runs full steam, literally, and cannot ramp output significantly, unless the new designs address this in some manner.
 
While we do need more nuclear for base load they don't actually affect EV charging which is marginal load. As I understand it nuclear runs full steam, literally, and cannot ramp output significantly, unless the new designs address this in some manner.

I'm not thinking primarily about EVs now, but getting rid of coal, oil and gas altogether. That's what must be done.

Nuclear can in fact ramp, but nowhere near as quickly as gas turbines or hydro. In France, which is something like 75% nuclear, they do ramp their nuclear plants.

The primary reason for running nuclear plants as base load is that the fuel is very cheap but the plant itself is very expensive. Then you want to generate as much as possible to recover the investment, and keep generating as much as possible afterwards to make lots of money. A peak power plant on the other hand can have high fuel costs, but should not cost all that much to build, because it will only run for a few hours per day. Gas turbines are perfect for this use.

I don't belive the rhetoric that EVs consume marginal power. More on that here.
 
Base load is already running full out 24/7, that's why it's called base load, it never changes. Since base load is already fully utilized then additional base load plants would have to be brought on line, or existing plants upgraded. So yes if a large EV fleet charging at night becomes a regular load then I would think some of that would become base load, but I think we are a long way away from that point. I'd be interested to learn how nuclear plants can ramp, and to what degree, all the profiles I've seen for them show steady output.
 
I'd be interested to learn how nuclear plants can ramp, and to what degree, all the profiles I've seen for them show steady output.

Nuclear plants ramp by adding/removing fuel rods. Of course, if the nuclear plant is running at maximum capacity it can only ramp downwards, but presumably a new nuclear plant will be sized for future growth and will start off producing at less than 100% of capacity.
 
Nuclear plants ramp by adding/removing fuel rods. Of course, if the nuclear plant is running at maximum capacity it can only ramp downwards, but presumably a new nuclear plant will be sized for future growth and will start off producing at less than 100% of capacity.

There are different ways to change reactor output that vary between designs. All of them will produce more power when the primary coolant is cooler, so you get more power out by removing more heat - the reactor core will follow up by contracting, catching more neutrons, and accelerating the reaction. The size of this effect varies, and I don't know to what extent it is usable to adjust light water reactors, but this is listed as a plus for the IFR. You basically pour more steam onto the turbine, and the reactor will speed up accordingly.

Fuel is not moved around for ramping, in a light water reactor you have to shut it down and open the reactor vessel to move fuel around. Control rods are used to adjust the speed. These are made from a material that captures neutrons, so moving more of them into the core will slow the reaction down. There are extra powerful and quick emergency shutdown rods in addition to the control rods.
 
Base load is already running full out 24/7, that's why it's called base load, it never changes. Since base load is already fully utilized then additional base load plants would have to be brought on line, or existing plants upgraded.

I would be interested to know whether base load plants always run full out. I know that you can ramp coal plants, I've seen curves from German coal plants that can ramp from 20 to 100 percent in a couple of hours.

So yes if a large EV fleet charging at night becomes a regular load then I would think some of that would become base load, but I think we are a long way away from that point.

That may be true, though I hope not. On the other hand, what you or I do doesn't really matter except to our own conscience. It's the long term curve that makes a difference, so that is what should be used to judge whether EVs run on coal or not. Instantaneous marginal power isn't really interesting. How EVs affect electricity production over time is.

I'd be interested to learn how nuclear plants can ramp, and to what degree, all the profiles I've seen for them show steady output.

Nuclear Power in France | French Nuclear Energy, search for load-following. Not much info about how they do it *EDIT: Lots of info about how they do it, actually. Look further down the document.* France also has some hydro and a rather large transfer capacity to neighboring countries.
 
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Nuclear plants ramp by adding/removing fuel rods. Of course, if the nuclear plant is running at maximum capacity it can only ramp downwards, but presumably a new nuclear plant will be sized for future growth and will start off producing at less than 100% of capacity.

You can't ramp up and down on a daily basis by doing that - most reactors can't be refueled while they are running. You can use control rods to tweak power levels.