eledille
TMS 85 owner :)
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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